linojon Posted June 17, 2025 Posted June 17, 2025 I poked around the VPE code about 18 months ago and made some minor contributions. I grew frustrated because even as an experienced Unity developer the code was above me! I'll plan to get the current version and take a fresh look. Love you guys!
freezy Posted June 29, 2025 Author Posted June 29, 2025 Okay, so this took longer than expected. The problem when creating those color variations is that sometimes, you'd want the same color, like for this bumper: On the other hand, for assets where the color variations are on top of each other, you'd want to avoid the same color: So, I think I got this working now. In edit mode you can basically define which objects shouldn't or should match, and the asset browser will the generate combinations accordingly. Here's a short clip: assetbrowser.mp4 Anyways, happy to have this working. Next thing is the moving the remaining assets to the new library, then I'll be back on T2 😅
freezy Posted June 30, 2025 Author Posted June 30, 2025 Works here - @Dazz is this a known problem? Maybe try another browser?
letic Posted July 15, 2025 Posted July 15, 2025 Video doesn't work on Firefox or Chrome on Linux. Had to copy the URL and open with VLC to make it work...
letic Posted July 15, 2025 Posted July 15, 2025 Same with this one I get the following error in FF : These are the only 2 videos from @freezy that don't work in my browser. I could play all the other ones even one that was posted after the above (cannon video in T2).
foofoorabbit Posted July 16, 2025 Posted July 16, 2025 17 hours ago, letic said: Same with this one I get the following error in FF : These are the only 2 videos from @freezy that don't work in my browser. I could play all the other ones even one that was posted after the above (cannon video in T2). I think it's because most of @freezy's videos were YouTube Short links, with the exception of those two which were embedded videos... the videos did work for me in a chromium-based browser on macOS (Chrome, Arc). But they don't in other browsers like Safari or Firefox.
EarBiteR Posted July 16, 2025 Posted July 16, 2025 Ive had no problems viewing any videos here running linuxmint/firefox. If I DO have problems with youtube complaining about add blockers or not working then I just paste the link into Freetube and it shows it just fine 🙂 Since the above link is an mp4 from VPU you could just save it and watch it using your favorite viewer. I use VLC.
christianco Posted September 22, 2025 Posted September 22, 2025 Really excited about this project. Hoping to see it become the standard in the future. Is that too much to ask though?
coiken Posted September 24, 2025 Posted September 24, 2025 Cabinet owner since a month now and playing around with everything available... I believe VPE is the essentially next step in evolution we desperately need if we want to make our VPX tables even more realistic looking. For example: yesterday I was trying to make the Cirqus Voltaire table more realistic looking. Things I had in mind was replacing the playfield DMD with a mirror -> not possible then I thought, let's play a little video there -> not possible... ok, let's get the lighting better, only partially possible with use of re-shade. Now the amazing thing is, all these things I was trying to do, they'll all be possible with this awesome VPE once it is finished! Looking so forward to this! I'm so extremely grateful for the work you are doing on this Freezy, thank you, 1000x THANKS YOU! ps: Any news you could already share on how the progress is going and what to expect next?
Thalamus Posted September 24, 2025 Posted September 24, 2025 Some of the things you mention, I think will be possible in upcoming 10.8.x - but, yes, we are all keeping eyes open towards this project.
foofoorabbit Posted September 24, 2025 Posted September 24, 2025 (edited) 5 hours ago, coiken said: Cabinet owner since a month now and playing around with everything available... I believe VPE is the essentially next step in evolution we desperately need if we want to make our VPX tables even more realistic looking. For example: yesterday I was trying to make the Cirqus Voltaire table more realistic looking. Things I had in mind was replacing the playfield DMD with a mirror -> not possible then I thought, let's play a little video there -> not possible... ok, let's get the lighting better, only partially possible with use of re-shade. Now the amazing thing is, all these things I was trying to do, they'll all be possible with this awesome VPE once it is finished! Looking so forward to this! I'm so extremely grateful for the work you are doing on this Freezy, thank you, 1000x THANKS YOU! ps: Any news you could already share on how the progress is going and what to expect next? The most exciting is that the content creators won't have to bake the lighting into their textures... all things equal, this would result in some vastly smaller files, and speeds up table creation. Not to mention that now the table will look right from any angle. I haven't tried VR VPX but I'm pretty sure those baked textures do not look right if you're viewing the table from an unexpected angle. For the most part, the lighting is baked as though you were viewing the table from the player's position. And @freezy has already demonstrated that you can change the ambient light and it will affect the look of the table... some of his videos of the T2 table are in a darker blueish light room, and a couple other videos have a warmer yellowish light. Edited September 24, 2025 by foofoorabbit
freezy Posted October 1, 2025 Author Posted October 1, 2025 Hey, thanks for the kind words! I'm crazy busy at the moment (work, family, music, and dmdext also needs some love), but just a quick heads-up: I've started looking into reducing input latency. @vbousquet recently added some new APIs to PinMAME that basically enable real-time simulation (already implemented in VPX), meaning inputs can be polled multiple times per frame and fed into PinMAME and the physics engine without waiting for the frame to finish rendering. I've already done some refactoring, and it looks promising. I'll keep you guys posted as soon as I got something working!
Gravy Posted October 2, 2025 Posted October 2, 2025 On 9/25/2025 at 3:58 AM, foofoorabbit said: The most exciting is that the content creators won't have to bake the lighting into their textures... all things equal, this would result in some vastly smaller files, and speeds up table creation. Not to mention that now the table will look right from any angle. I haven't tried VR VPX but I'm pretty sure those baked textures do not look right if you're viewing the table from an unexpected angle. For the most part, the lighting is baked as though you were viewing the table from the player's position. And @freezy has already demonstrated that you can change the ambient light and it will affect the look of the table... some of his videos of the T2 table are in a darker blueish light room, and a couple other videos have a warmer yellowish light. Yes you are correct in saying that VPX baked lighting does not look correct in VR when viewing from outside the usual player area. This is particularly noticeable with baked reflections which have no stereo depth and simply appear to be painted onto the surface. For the most part though it is convincing enough for the time being.
Ethertrace Posted January 11 Posted January 11 Thanks for the updates and all the work you're doing, @freezy. What a monumental project! I'm a relative newcomer to the hobby, so many of the technical details are beyond me, but the work you've shared so far speaks for itself. Really excited to see all these efforts come to fruition. Is one of the goals of the project to be able to run on Linux? VPX is pretty much the only thing keeping me using Windows these days and I'd love to be able to cut the tether completely.
EarBiteR Posted January 11 Posted January 11 Ethertrace, just dl the standalone version of VPX thats native for linux - https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball/tree/master/standalone The 10.8.0 release is current and 10.8.1 is beta but it has bgfx which will replace GL and you can get them https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball/actions/workflows/vpinball.yml
BostonBuckeye Posted January 22 Posted January 22 Freezy, thank you very much for the newest update for dmd-extensions. The new Serum color dmd cROMc files look great using your ext. Hope you are having a great New Year and hoping this is the year you are able to release VPE for the community. Looking forward to a 2026 update on VPE soon.
aecii Posted January 27 Posted January 27 Freezy, Thank you soooo much for putting work into this. Been lurking and reading for a bit. I'm very excited about this project and appreciate what you are doing here. I'm already familiar with blender3d and some unity for VR (022.3.22f1) but not enough to dev beyond the boundries of vrc sdk (yet.) Im sure glad someone is working pinball stuff and unity. This is very exciting for me. I love these games and the tech handy work behind it. ~ aecii
freezy Posted April 10 Author Posted April 10 Hey guys, Quite a lot has changed over the past few weeks. As you might know, VPX recently switched to a new threading model where it fetches input signals much more frequently and feeds them directly into PinMAME, vastly improving input lag. VPE is now on par with that, meaning input polling is detached from the main thread, where it could previously only run once per frame. Physics now also runs on its own dedicated thread, which means it can react to user inputs and PinMAME, which also has its own thread, in real time. Basically, if the user hits the flipper button, the input is picked up immediately by PinMAME, which triggers the coil. That movement is then simulated by the physics thread, all while the current game engine frame is still being rendered. Previously, there were multiple sync points on the main thread, so an input would come in, wait for the current frame to finish rendering, pick it up, hand it over to PinMAME, and then the resulting coil event would have to wait until the next frame to reach the physics system responsible for actually moving the flipper. Now, all of that runs in parallel, and the main thread simply synchronizes once per frame by pulling in the relevant data for rendering. So, that’s pretty cool. If you’re interested in the technical details, check out the PR here or the brand-new developer section in the docs. I’ve also been thinking a lot about future integrations, like analog nudging, and of course the other tools such as DOF and B2S. Before I start working on the player app that will integrate all that, I want to make a bit more progress on the T2 build. Next up is dynamic GI. So brace yourselves, you might be getting more regular updates in the future. Cheers!
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