New WIP Pirates of the Caribbean pup-pack

[echodun]

1 hour ago, kcirrick said:

Pup-pack link

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14qRTOhx7MtEmWBVK-wqyAjMg5fZ8W7Kv/view?usp=sharing

I tried this on VPX 64-bit and 32-bit and I tried all options (I have a playfield, backglass and realdmd).  All I get is maybe the first video and then no triggers after that.  Go figure.

[kcirrick]

4 hours ago, echodun said:

I tried this on VPX 64-bit and 32-bit and I tried all options (I have a playfield, backglass and realdmd).  All I get is maybe the first video and then no triggers after that.  Go figure.

 

No triggers? When I was advised the pack was crashing in 64bit I was able to duplicate and resolve the issue, but so far I’ve been unable to replicate this no video triggers issue. I recall Cliffy had a similar issue a while back, but I think it was because of the way I set up the screens. That’s been corrected. It sounds like yours is a two screen setup with a real DMD. Not likely the problem, but if you’re comfortable doing so I would suggest loading the pup-pack into the editor and change the first line in the screens tab to off. It sounds like you don’t have any place to display this screen. Of course, the backglass is screen three and all the videos are directed there. By chance do you have a custom pinupplayer.ini? A long shot but verify the ExactColorMatch.txt file is still in the pupcapture folder. No reason it should be gone, but it’s required to be there for the pup captures to trigger videos correctly. Something to try out of curiosity is to load the pup-pack into the editor, start the pack and then try firing off some triggers to see if they work. I’ll continue to work trying to duplicate the issue.

 

I do appreciate the heads up regarding the issue.

[echodun]

2 hours ago, kcirrick said:

 

No triggers? When I was advised the pack was crashing in 64bit I was able to duplicate and resolve the issue, but so far I’ve been unable to replicate this no video triggers issue. I recall Cliffy had a similar issue a while back, but I think it was because of the way I set up the screens. That’s been corrected. It sounds like yours is a two screen setup with a real DMD. Not likely the problem, but if you’re comfortable doing so I would suggest loading the pup-pack into the editor and change the first line in the screens tab to off. It sounds like you don’t have any place to display this screen. Of course, the backglass is screen three and all the videos are directed there. By chance do you have a custom pinupplayer.ini? A long shot but verify the ExactColorMatch.txt file is still in the pupcapture folder. No reason it should be gone, but it’s required to be there for the pup captures to trigger videos correctly. Something to try out of curiosity is to load the pup-pack into the editor, start the pack and then try firing off some triggers to see if they work. I’ll continue to work trying to duplicate the issue.

 

I do appreciate the heads up regarding the issue.

Brilliant.  Turned the first line (Topper) to off and everything works great!  Who knew it was that easy.  Love it thus far.  Great job!

[kcirrick]

4 hours ago, echodun said:

Brilliant.  Turned the first line (Topper) to off and everything works great!  Who knew it was that easy.  Love it thus far.  Great job!

Great! and Thanks!  I didn't think it would be that easy either.  (It's been an ongoing learning experience and I now know just a little bit more than when I started this project back in September.)  Thanks for letting me know it was resolved.  I was going to post my pinupplayer.ini for you to stick in the pup-pack's root to see if that helped.

 

I'll go ahead and add two screen real DMD options (with and without the call outs) with that line turned off.  It will be a little more work, but while I'm at it I might as well go ahead and include options for two screen no DMD too. 

Edited April 16 by kcirrick
typo

[Cliffy]

Looks and works great @kcirrick thanks for putting in so much work. Now I will say the desktop option does not work right. The screens are tiny and all sit to the left of the table and it completely ignored my pinupplayer.ini.

For desktop I ended up using option 2, 3 screen ocean with callouts and it works wonderfully. This pack has a LOT going on with all 3 screens having callouts or videos appropriate to the action. Very nicely done again, thanks!

My pinupplayer.ini attached for desktop users. Just copy into the potc600_as pup folder.

PinUpPlayer.ini

[kcirrick]

Thanks for the kudos Cliffy and for the pinupplayer.ini.  I'll include that right away.

[LTek]

On 4/15/2024 at 2:18 AM, kcirrick said:

I’m uploading the pup-pack. It’s huge so I need to trim out the stuff that’s not being used – sounds and videos. I’ve got to clean up the playlist too and get rid of unused folders. I’m still tweaking volumes a bit. Some too loud and some too soft. They seem the same to my ear when I create them, but when playing the game the differences can be drastic.

 

The thing is taking two hours to upload so I’ll post the link in the morning, but after I get all the unused stuff cleaned out I’ll upload again and provide a new link.

dont manually mess with volumes... just normalize the audio. 

PuP-Optimize.zip

[kcirrick]

6 hours ago, Cliffy said:

....the desktop option does not work right. The screens are tiny and all sit to the left of the table and it completely ignored my pinupplayer.ini.

For desktop I ended up using option 2, 3 screen ocean with callouts...

 

I was going to go ahead and submit the pup-pack for approval tonight, but I am completely puzzled and will have to dig a bit to see what's going on.

All the options work good on my machine as is with the pinupsystem default pinupplayer.ini in the pinupsystem root.  I slapped your ini file into the potc_600as folder and ran option 6 desktop mode and believe it or not all the screens were tiny and on the left.  I reread your post and saw that you used option 2 so I tried that.  The screens were only slightly larger and still to the left.  I'm not sure where to go from here.  I'm going to compare your pinupplayer.ini to my default ini to see the differences.  Just another delay.  I'll submit it when I figure this one out. 

 

I'm doing no more changes or additions.  (I'll continue to work on unused/unfinished triggers for a future update.)  I did run Nailbuster's sound normalizer and it helped a great deal.  I still had to adjust sound on five or six things, but better than trying to manually normalize over a hundred different files.

 

 

 

[kcirrick]

4 hours ago, LTek said:

dont manually mess with volumes... just normalize the audio. 

PuP-Optimize.zip 21.58 MB · 1 download

Funny you shared that.  I just discovered it and used it and it helped a great deal!  I definitely appreciate you sharing it though.

Cliffy had some issues with desktop mode.  He ironed them out, but his fix actually gives me the exact issue he fixed on his system. - if that makes any sense.  Upload pending figuring this one out.

[Cliffy]

45 minutes ago, kcirrick said:

 

are you also putting the usePuPDriver.ini in the pup folder?

usePuPDriver.ini

[kcirrick]

The what???   I'm not familiar with usePupDriver.ini, but let me give it a shot.

[kcirrick]

My ignorance haunts me.  It's almost always the simplest answer.  Looks like the desktop options not working correctly go back to when I first started and had all the screens configured wrong.  I know I reconfigured the DT, but I see I did it wrong again.  A product of my trying to make my machine run properly in both cabinet and desktop modes without having to move any screens around.  Stupid....  I had the topper - screen 0 - and the backglass - screen 2 - both located to screen 3 - the playfield - and sized accordingly.  Of course that wouldn't work for anyone else.   I'm reconfiguring so the topper screen actually goes to the topper screen and the backglass screen goes to the backglass screen.  So it should work for any DT setup.  (In theory.)  At least I just need to correct the desktop options and don't have to mess with the cabinet options.  Relocating and fine tuning five different screens plus the alpha on the backglass is kind of a pita, but then - I'm done.

[kcirrick]

A light just came on and it occurred to me that this is why I  was getting ugly artifacts with the animated ocean and map backgrounds and why the backglass and Aztec coins were fighting each other for dominance.  Now I can go back to the original alpha screen and add those animations back in.  Also, since I've gone through a pretty steep learning curve, if I find another table I want to do a pup-pack for then I expect it to be much easier.

[PIPAllah]

9 hours ago, kcirrick said:

Also, since I've gone through a pretty steep learning curve, if I find another table I want to do a pup-pack for then I expect it to be much easier.

Peace,

 

That's how it works.

[kcirrick]

I am uploading for approval right now. Fingers crossed.  The link to download from my google drive is no longer valid.

[LTek]

still not posted

 

[kcirrick]

Unfortunately, some last minute fixes didn't take so I'm gonna have to upload again...

 

 

[LTek]

33 minutes ago, kcirrick said:

Unfortunately, some last minute fixes didn't take so I'm gonna have to upload again...

cool, LMK when the fixes are in... I'd love to play it tomorrow when i have some time 

[kcirrick]

Uploading now.  Fingers AND toes crossed.

[LTek]

I played a a few rounds last night. I need to test today with some older PuPs since I'm seeing lag I dont remember before but I immediately noticed it 100% of the time on this one.  I turned on perfmon; was running 90fps or lower 100% of the time.  All my tables run 120-144fps with frame pacing (RTX2060S). Just curious if you have seen lag with the PuP? Only time I've seen PuPs cause lag is when 3+ videos are playing. If you run videos hidden, it can cause lag since the CPU runs all of them full fps even if not in view. 

[kcirrick]

I have seen very occasional lag when it gets busy with a multiball, but not all the time and not too bad.  I have Defender, anti virus and such turned off, but I notice Windows, Dell and about a thousand things like to run in the background and want to update, send analytics and such at will and usually at the most inopportune times.  I turned off what I could, but I now just disconnect from the internet when I don't need it and don't experience the lag.  But you're describing a completely different issue.

 

As far as videos running in the background, I suppose that would really only be the main backglass, Jack Sparrow and Davy Jones and none of those are doing much.  I did have to configure the video and graphics settings in VPX pretty minimal otherwise I had lag.  I've spent countless  hours trying to find the best settings.  I'll check to see what fps it runs at for me and compare to other packs.  Some of those videos are pretty large.  I wonder if I compressed them down to a smaller size if it would help.  A real PITA to do and probably something I should have done from the start, but I had no idea how big it would all be in the end.  In my naivety, in the beginning I just figured "stick videos in there and they'll play" and I didn't consider limitations.  All the videos on the backglass are 1920x1080 30fps.  I ran them through Nailbuster's normalizer after creating them of course.  As far as multiple videos playing at once goes, I've played a few other games with pup-packs with multiple screens with no problems, but I suppose on mine with a video running on most of the screens if not all of them at once - the backglass, the ocean or map animation around the backglass, explosions going off on the coins, an animation on the topper and one on the DMD screen - it could be a bit intensive, but it's hard to eliminate things now.  I really don't want to do that and I really don't want to lower resolution either.  Whatever I do, with so many videos to manage it will be a big job - except - I may have been editing add videos after I did the normalize and failed to normalize those new videos.  I just did a normalize on on all the 1920x1080 videos.  Maybe that will help?  I can share a zip of those normalized videos if you think it will help.

 

Something I could never get to work correctly was during the kraken battle I had tenticals rising up out of the playfield.  Talk about lag.  It looked pretty cool, but it just killed the machine causing tremendous lag so I gave up on it.

 

I'm going to pull some videos from other pup-packs for comparison.  Probably something I should have done long ago, but I thought I was following specs if I recall Nailbuster's docs.

 

Thanks for letting me know.  I want this thing to be right!

[LTek]

after a lot more testing your PuP is the same load as the prior PuP... around 100 FPS on average.  Tried to figure out why... changed the largest images, playfield, textures, etc to WEBP (reduced overall size by 30%) and tried to mess with the timers. Nothing changed the FPS. There are a ton of Primatives so I suspect its that since the scripting is very basic and there is not much of it. I did fix some badly done lights and settings - it looks 100x better now imo. 

 

Doing the Kracken I think it would be cool... If you want to do that we can figure out the FPS issue and release a minor mod.

[kcirrick]

54 minutes ago, LTek said:

after a lot more testing your PuP is the same load as the prior PuP... around 100 FPS on average.  Tried to figure out why... changed the largest images, playfield, textures, etc to WEBP (reduced overall size by 30%) and tried to mess with the timers. Nothing changed the FPS. There are a ton of Primatives so I suspect its that since the scripting is very basic and there is not much of it. I did fix some badly done lights and settings - it looks 100x better now imo. 

 

Doing the Kracken I think it would be cool... If you want to do that we can figure out the FPS issue and release a minor mod.

 

I havn't gotten around to checking the fps yet.  Thanks for the reminder.  I compressed all my backglass videos and normalized them.  It made the pup-pack slightly smaller, but didn't help prevent any lag.  I really haven't done much with videos lately.  Mostly messing with Screens and Trigger so I'm not sure where it's coming from now.  Perhaps there really is just too much going on for this old table causing lag?  I'm not going to give up on it though.  Seems most people tend to like the pup-pack and I want it to run as smooth as possible.

 

In tackling that lag, I'm going to experiment with just turning screens off to see if it has any affect. I was wondering if it is all the animations and videos playing causing some lag or if it might be the number of screens.  I thought I might experiment with making the entire backglass a single screen except for where the videos play and just locate the various coin and text animations accordingly set for ForcePop.  I guess technically there are six screens on the backglass.  If I reduced it to two screens maybe that would help. A side benefit is there will be more screens made available that can be used as MusicOnly to organize the verbal callouts better - but I won't go there yet.  Enough to do already.

 

Regarding the tentical thing.  I was playing with two things.  Tenticals rising up out of the playfield while fighting the kraken and at the end of the game some giant tenticals coming in from the sides of the table, breaking it in half and dropping it into the ocean.  I realized the second one wouldn't work because there is no way of knowing which table people are using, but if it can be done without lag the tenticals coming out of the table would be an eye catcher.  I was using Screen 16 when I was playing with this.  I had it set to ForcePop and looking at an old screens.pup file it looks like I had the CustomPos as 3,35,15,60,60. Here are a couple of MP4's that I was using.  Bear in mind they're pretty crude.

tenticals.zip

[LTek]

# of screens doesnt in the config (PUP files) should not matter ... what matters is how many are running simultaneously since they each spawn a separate VLC instance. The version of VLC popper uses is very old and resource intensive.

I suggest <= 4 separate videos running at one time, no matter how many physical displays... 2 on backglass + 2 on DMD, 2 backblass, 1 FullDMD, 1 topper, etc. Plus IMO is just distracting anyway.

 

separately, I dont understand why you have so many screens?

... music...  Unless you are playing more than one audio track at a time? Even then, I suspect you'd only need 2 ?

... video ... You only need a 'screen' per separate video display location (physical or virtual). For example, my Tron PuP (to be released with full table next week) has 3 main screens + 3 Topper (all optional)

 

• Backglass Overlay - alpha border on BG
• Backglass main - what the triggered videos play on
• FullDMD video
• Toppers (optional)
  • Dedicated physical Topper - optional
  • virtual 'inset' Toppers for backglass (mainly for 2 screen setups) : high and low on screen

 

I thought you were talking about doing a Kracken Primative coming out of the playfield 😉
The Kracken idea is fun, I watched the videos. You could do the on-playfield PuP video/screen -or- break the video into frames and sequence it in the table script (using alpha channel images). The latter would make it work even without PuP Pack running. You could also have a tentacle or two swipe across the playfield based on any given trigger... that would be cool IMO. Especially if you timed it with an associate/appropriate call-out.

[kcirrick]

I initially had so many screens simply because I was learning and didn't know any better.  Now I know I could do it with less screens, but I'm in so deep I've been trying to work with what I've got.  In a future update I think I can bring the number of screens on the backglass down to two.  I like your tentacle ideas.  I'm not sure how do to it, but once the existing minor issues are resolved I plan on tackling it.  I'll reduce the number of screens and try to start adding tentacles.

 

Regarding the lag/jitter:

I was doing some experimenting last night trying to eliminate lag. Maybe it was my hopeful imagination, but I think we’re getting somewhere. I turned off Screen 0, Davy Jones, and it didn’t affect it. I turned off all screens except the main backglass videos and saw improvement. I turned on all the screens except for the FOY map and got some lag during normal game play. Just a single ball bouncing around suddenly doing a stop motion imitation for about five seconds or so. Nothing heavy duty like a multi-ball happening. I ended up narrowing it down to the Aztec coins. Those animations seemed to be causing occasional jitter. I re rendered the explosion animations and it was much better – until the pup-pack crashed. LOL! The only change being replacing the BOOM.MP4 file. I ran it through Nailbuster’s normalizer and no more crashing. (I still haven’t figured out what it is about my videos that cause the pup-pack to crash.  Must be some setting in DaVinci Resolve.) I increased the VPX video and graphics options from low end to high end PC with little to no degradation in play. While working on this I got a notification of a comment. It was panasony sharing a new BOOM.MP4, along with all the pirate MP4’s that pop over the Aztec coins, saying they will eliminate the black squares some people are seeing. I’ve been unable to deal with that issue because I’ve been unable to replicate it. So I took panasony’s files, ran them through the normalizer, plugged them in and, (was it my imagination or just luck?), no lag - even with VPX video and graphics and options still set to high end. So check me on this and try the panasony files. Maybe I was tired last night. I’ll do more testing this morning, but is it possible that panasony’s fix for the black squares inadvertently addressed the lag issue as well? Here are his files. I normalized them.  (Hopefully, that didn't reintroduce the black square issue.)

boom.zip