Search the Community

I wrote this over on /r/virtualpinball on Reddit a few days ago, but just to make sure it shows up when people search for it in the future, I figured it'd be a good idea to mirror here! I've been messing around with the 10.8.1 betas of Visual Pinball X lately (mostly in preparation of updating my setup guide), and I LOVE the new embedded-plugin system a lot. However, this new system comes at the cost of removing the older (hacky!) method of essentially screen-sharing a B2Server window to use as a texture to display in VR. Since 10.8.1 is still in beta and table authors aren't quite ready to update for it yet, I figured out how to edit older VR tables (e.g. Ext2k's EM conversions) to get them to work in 10.8.1; it's not a difficult process at all, it turns out. So here's how to do it: Open the table you want to patch in Visual Pinball's table editor. (There's a cross-platform editor for those on non-Windows OSes but I haven't used it much, so I'm ignoring it for this post, but the workflow should be roughly the same) For the sake of this guide, I'm going to assume the table is a 10.8 table that already has VR support. Add a new Flasher (that's the icon with the lightning bolt in a circle). In the Properties window on the right, under "Visuals", change the "Mode" to "External Renderer". A "Render Style" dropdown will appear when you've set the Mode; the default value of "Backglass" should be fine most of the time, but you might need to switch it to "Score View" depending on the table (Baby Pac-Man required me to do this to get the game's DMD to show up, for example). Click and move around the Flasher's four control points until it's about the same proportions as the backglass and roughly the right size. A pro tip is to Shift-select two points (e.g. the two points on the right) and then use the arrow keys to move them on exactly one axis, repeat with the two points on the bottom; doing it like that ensures the backglass isn't distorted. You might need to fiddle with this a bit to get it the right size. Open the Live Editor (Table -> Live Table Editor, or just press F7). Depending on how the table is scripted, you might need to manually make the VR elements visible; the fastest way to do this is to locate and click on these elements in the Scene Parts list, then turn on "Visible" in the properties on the right. You only really need to enable the backbox and original backglass mesh (usually labelled something like "VR_Cabinet" and "VR_Backglass"). Click on the new Flasher (I typically leave it in the middle of the playfield at first to make it easier to select). Press G to move it into the right place. You can rotate the backglass by either pressing R and trying to click on one of the three axis-aligned color rings (the red one, to be exact), or just manually edit the rotation values in the properties panel on the right; I usually do the latter because it's easier to get it correct. Once that's dialed in, click the two floppy disk icons next to the Position and Rotation properties. This will copy the values to the main editor. You can now close the Live Editor. If need be, go back and tweak the size of the Flasher if you didn't get it quite right the first time. I usually have to go back and forth a few times to get it right, so don't sweat it! Save the table in Visual Pinball's editor. (File -> Save). I'm sure there's ways to streamline this a little bit, but that's what works for me and once you get it down it's not hard at all! Incidentally, this exact same workflow ALSO applies to patching any tables that use PUP Packs. In the case of Total Nuclear Annihilation, the Flasher was already there and I just had to change its mode from DMD to External Renderer.