VPX Recreation FSS VPX MOD's and where to find them.

[arconovum]

So here is xenon almost completed. Just the backglass lights to finish up. This table was a real headache, 3 days to get it to this, I had to use every trick in the book. The images show Day lit and unlit , and Night lit and unlit. New playfield, new backglass(obvious), new bumper caps, side rails, and a whole lot of minor fixes that have nothing to do with FSS. It has nFozzy/Roth physics partly implemented, I will also finish that up(I don't know about you guys but I see that a lot of that, physics partly done, or attempted but improperly done).

 

[arconovum]

So I added a twist to the nFozzy physics, and check out the dome mirror, it has the light reflecting off of them too! everything is in the details I guess... lol.

 

[Gravy]

@arconovum
Wow, these updates are looking incredible, thankyou for your efforts and also for ensuring that Morttis' tables made it back online.
I also wanted to mention that I've been experimenting with running a few of your FSS tables on my Quest 2 natively using the android apk version of VPX. Naturally they don't run in full VR mode (wouldn't that be great one day), but its quite a nice way to play in the headset on a virtual big screen and the framerate is pretty good, I connected my Xbox controller up to the Quest via bluetooth for control as otherwise its a bit fiddly trying to use the Quest controllers. There are a few quirks here and there but certainly very playable, even with the virtual screen maxed out to full size the framerate is still around 30fps for most tables I tried.

 

[arconovum]

@Gravy so basically you are playing with a VR headset but a form of full screen desktop mode like watching a movie?

Anyway I will be uploading all the new tables I have , because now I'm hitting the FSS rev 2.5 batch and this is slowing me down, so I will post what I have, and continue with the updates. And that is 52 updated and 8 new , and then I need to update most of these tables again with nfozzy physics.

Just be warned: do not ever save these tables in VP 10.7+ or 10.8+ , or they will most likely stop to function properly as FSS. The xenon table I had to roll it back from VP 10.8 to 10.6.2 because some flasher related bugs. You can play them in 10.7 , and some in 10.8 but you cannot edit them.
Yep that is right the bug only occurs when editing not playing ... totally weird!

 

[Gravy]

@Gravy so basically you are playing with a VR headset but a form of full screen desktop mode like watching a movie?

Yep, that's fairly much it. It's a floating window in portrait orientation. At full size it's like watching an 8" tall screen from 6" away at a guess. There are some quirks getting it to resize from the standard apk size window to maximum though, you need to load a table, then resize the window at which point the window content will look a little screwy, then minimise the window and reopen it and if the resize works then the pinball table will be at full size. Switching between tables is also a little quirky as need to select the one you want then close the app and restart it and if I remember correctly it doesn't remember the previous window size so need to go through the resizing steps again. The default window size is not too bad though and framerate is faster than full size. The android app has a webserver facility inbuilt so you can add new tables to the Quest via a server webpage.

 

[arconovum]

Could some guys test this webpage, FSS-PINBALL website pre-update nothing is available. Things to look for: probably only compatible with firefox, the image popups will not show up until site is fully downloaded, the popup images will bank left/right above/below cursor position, the popup images take about 1 second to switch over, so fast mouse cursor movement will not show proper image , anything else you notice I guess.

EDIT: The version / update or new / nfozzy physics icons should appear in upper left and right corners of each table image.

 

[xenonph]

Could some guys test this webpage, FSS-PINBALL website pre-update nothing is available. Things to look for: probably only compatible with firefox, the image popups will not show up until site is fully downloaded, the popup images will bank left/right above/below cursor position, the popup images take about 1 second to switch over, so fast mouse cursor movement will not show proper image , anything else you notice I guess.

EDIT: The version / update or new / nfozzy physics icons should appear in upper left and right corners of each table image.

Working here.
Looks great!
I am using Firefox.

 

[Gravy]

Could some guys test this webpage, FSS-PINBALL website pre-update nothing is available. Things to look for: probably only compatible with firefox, the image popups will not show up until site is fully downloaded, the popup images will bank left/right above/below cursor position, the popup images take about 1 second to switch over, so fast mouse cursor movement will not show proper image , anything else you notice I guess.

EDIT: The version / update or new / nfozzy physics icons should appear in upper left and right corners of each table image.

I had a look on Chrome and there are a few things that are a bit clunky. The site news reel has a huge vertical space of blackness when it first loads until the text scrolls it's way up to the top of the space. You are probably better off having this as a user scrollable space rather than autoscroll and have it start at the top of the space.

The new icons appear correctly at the top left and right of the tables.
The popup images sometimes flicker rapidly depending on where the mouse is when you rollover. I'd probably make them pop up only on mouseclick rather than rollover.
If the whole site needs to load before the images display then that's going to be an issue for people on slow connections.
The new images of your updated tables look incredible, cant wait to check a few out and thankyou again.
Edit: I just tried the site again on Firefox, the news scroller works a bit better than chrome but the images for the site are not appearing after almost 5 minutes wait. I'll wait a little longer and see if they pop up eventually. 50mbit connection here.

 

[arconovum]

Unfortunately the site reel is dependant on site loading, so it does not start to scroll until the site is fully loaded, and since the site has a lot of images, well everything takes time. I will be shrinking the images of the main page, and the mouseover images will load dynamically on hover, so this should help. I may replace the mousehover with a popup image of 'click to see larger image' instead. but I will try the image resizing first. thanks for you help guys its very useful.

 

[arconovum]

So here are 9 gameplay videos showing off what to expect in the new releases of my FSS mods. One video showing off my FSS Rig. and one more explaining how to use the Day and Night feature of FSS. Just look in the new videos section at the end of the webpage in the test webpage FSS-PINBALL website pre-update

[EDIT] oh yeah xenon is not available because I need to re-record it as I have done some obvious changes.

 

[xenonph]

So here are 9 gameplay videos showing off what to expect in the new releases of my FSS mods. One video showing off my FSS Rig. and one more explaining how to use the Day and Night feature of FSS. Just look in the new videos section at the end of the webpage in the test webpage FSS-PINBALL website pre-update

[EDIT] oh yeah xenon is not available because I need to re-record it as I have done some obvious changes.

No mercy on the ball draining between flippers on Monster Bash video! lol
Videos look great!!

 

[arconovum]

No mercy on the ball draining between flippers on Monster Bash video! lol
Videos look great!!

Those dang nFozzy Physics are a killer!

 

[xenonph]

Those dang nFozzy Physics are a killer!

If you weren't recording, it probably would have never happened! lol

 

[arconovum]

everything is up!

[EDIT] If you want to know more about the Day and Night aspect , and how to use it, just watch my YT video

 

[arconovum]

So I have been working on this table. But this table unfortunately has never been made properly dating as far back as 2017. With every new release or mod I am always hoping someone is going to pick up on this and fix it, but it has never happened! and the problem with this table is it does not look right at all in Desktop view, nor in VR, and so it is impossible to play this table properly, because elements are completely in the wrong place. So I ran a test hack on this to see if all elements would still work, if correctly placed in their proper position, sky taxi, all ramps, and the spinout. Fortunately for me they do, so now, I will edit the primitives to permanently fix this issue. The image is of my hack with most play element in their proper place! (chop... chop... as they say!)

 

[arconovum]

Here is Taxi in Nightmode , even with it being a hack it is quite a great table, Bord did a killer job with the nFozzy Physics!
Now for the part that I said I would never do again, 3D graphics modeling! yuck! I quit 3D when softimage XSI was canned by autopuke!

 

[arconovum]

@Gravy for me 'Stretch Ball with table' enabled, gives me this result: and this for me is fine, ball is more than round enough. the ball is 15mm x 13-14mm

 

[Gravy]

Yeah, it's close to round but breaks the illusion a little, I guess everyone has individual tolerances when it comes to stuff like this. Here's a perfect circle for comparison. The ball squish can be corrected with an X scale POV adjustment to narrow the table a little but not sure if that causes any other visual issues.
It's possible that your 16:10 monitor makes things look a little different, but I'm not sure on that. You are doing amazing work so thankyou as always.

 

[arconovum]

@Gravy So I decided to load up a bunch of non-FSS tables in desktop and I must say that ball shape varies per-table, and I was only able to find 1 that was almost near round. Only diff I noticed is mine are wider on FSS vs longer in Desktop. So in FSS they are phat balls , and on DT are tall balls!

 

[Gravy]

@Gravy So I decided to load up a bunch of non-FSS tables in desktop and I must say that ball shape varies per-table, and I was only able to find 1 that was almost near round. Only diff I noticed is mine are wider on FSS vs longer in Desktop. So in FSS they are phat balls , and on DT are tall balls!

Hmmm... interesting indeed. In my testing just then, this would happen if you are running your 16:10 screen at a non native resolution. VPX will still run at the resolution you tell it to but will compress/stretch either the vertical or horizontal axis depending on what resolution you have selected, for instance if you were to attempt to run 1920x1080 when your native screen resolution is actually 1920x1200, this would result in balls appearing vertical egg shaped in desktop mode, it may also make the ball appear a little more circular in FSS mode with regards to how you personally perceive your FSS tables.
Below is a quick test I did of a random table in desktop mode on my 16:9 screen (Evel Knievel). I had ball set to do not stretch. There is some slight distortion at the far right and far left sides of the table when ball is closest to camera, and also in the drain but in the main playfield area the ball is pretty much a perfect circle.

 

[arconovum]

No image , but interesting non the less without it.

 

[Gravy]

No image , but interesting non the less without it.

Hmmm, weird, not sure why as I can see it embedded on my PC.
I'll try again below as a thumbnail.
Also, I notice that your videos on youtube are seemingly captured in a resolution that is pretty close to 16:9 aspect and not 16:10 (or portrait orientation to be exact), which may be another indicator your screen resolution is not set to native and incorrect ratio. (note that the green outline is added in an image editor and is a perfect circle.)

 

[arconovum]

I notice that your videos on youtube are seemingly captured in a resolution that is pretty close to 16:9 aspect and not 16:10 (or portrait orientation to be exact), which may be another indicator your screen resolution is not set to native and incorrect ratio.

Well that has more to do with the immense headache to convert a video from horizontal to vertical, recorded in OBS, rotated in ffmpeg, then edited in kdenlive. That is when you get the bars on each side of the video in conversion from 16:10 to 16:9. So I would not use those videos as a basis for anything but simply viewing them.

 

[arconovum]

So Taxi is almost complete, The debate is do I bother to deal with the screws/posts that are missing due to the poor construction of this table. Otherwise it's done.
I have already redone the playfield, and completely reconstructed everything, ramps, wire rails, plastics, spinout, relocated inserts, all the ramp playfield mechanics, changed sol/light backglass flash patterns, still not perfect but better . And obviously all the FSS stuff. I have too say , I was wrong and it was a real hoot to play in Softimage | XSI again, man what a beautiful piece of software.

 

[Gravy]

So Taxi is almost complete, The debate is do I bother to deal with the screws/posts that are missing due to the poor construction of this table. Otherwise it's done.
I have already redone the playfield, and completely reconstructed everything, ramps, wire rails, plastics, spinout, relocated inserts, all the ramp playfield mechanics, changed sol/light backglass flash patterns, still not perfect but better . And obviously all the FSS stuff. I have too say , I was wrong and it was a real hoot to play in Softimage | XSI again, man what a beautiful piece of software.

View attachment 40685

Are you capturing this from your 16:10 screen? If I upscale the image to 1920 on the longest side, the short side becomes 1080 when preserving the ratio. So, its likely a 16:9 ratio image.
Can you check your graphics setting in VPX to see what resolution you are running at please, it might explain the mystery of the distorted balls (sounds like a name for some weird porno I know).
Table looks awesome by the way.