Shameless plug, we're working on a next-gen pinball simulator called Visual Pinball Engine[1]. It's free and open source, using Unity, and will eventually support importing FP's table format.
It's still WIP, but we've put a lot of focus on tooling, so anyone can easily create tables.
This is awesome! Do you know if any of these simulators emulate wear and tear on the table? I feel like the lack of variability in the table is why they've all felt like playing in the uncanny valley to me.
Thanks! :) What we're doing is adding adjustable randomness to the collision resolvers, which results in more or less control over where the ball goes. You can also adjust many parameters of the flipper bats, e.g. you could make the coil less strong, which would be the case for many worn machines. Finally, as you can see in the Volley video, texturing is a big part of adding visual wear, and it makes the whole thing a lot less uncanny.
Yes, definitely. I did some tests with my headset, and while a few usability and performance issues need to be resolved, it looks incredible, specially the reflections.
I'd love to play some of the Sid and Marty Krofft psychedelically themed pinball machine designs featured on this episode of the Donnie and Marie Show:
Donny & Marie Osmond - Pinball Machine Finale W/ Shabba-Doo, Robert Hegyes, Ruth Buzzi, Lorne Greene
Sid and Marty Krofft (of HR Pufnstuf fame) designed the spectacular sets and costumes. I love Donny and Marie's cover of George Clinton's "We Want The Funk", Shabba-Doo's funky hat and break dancing, Robert Hegyes (aka Juan Epstein from Welcome Back Kotter) and his smooth dance moves, Ruth Buzzi (of Laugh-In fame) shakin' her balls, and Lorne Green (of Bonanza nad Battlestar Galactica) gesticulating his giant creepy hands. TILT!!!
It's amazing to me how virtual and real pinball are really not comparable at all in terms of enjoyment (at least for me personally). I still don't really understand why.
Virtual pinball has a tiny fraction of the physical behavior of real machines. There are tons of subtleties that are still beyond the scope of what anyone has implemented virtually.
Balls have all sorts of behavior that goes beyond the typical X-Y coordinates implemented virtually. They spin and slide across the playfield with all sorts of varying degrees and forces. Their motion is very 3d even on a 2d playfield - a moving ball can have a spin axis aligned anywhere on its sphere, and spin at any rate compared to its horizontal motion, and recognizing and handling that is very much a component of advanced play.
Flippers and kickers also have immense subtleties to their behavior. One that no simulation yet gets right is the softness of the rubber on the flipper - balls sink into that rubber by a fraction of a millimeter, and rebound in different ways based on that. Besides that, there are tons of details about how the flipper accelerates and decelerates on a time scale of milliseconds, that an experienced player can feel on a real machine.
Timing also matters. Flipper inputs on a computer are almost always constrained for input timing resolution by the host hardware and OS platforms, typically to a 1/60 second frame rate. Real machines respond hard real time instantly, in under 1 ms. This matters quite a bit too for the degree of control you have over the game.
And of course there's nudging a machine, which has infinite degrees of freedom for direction and intensity (push, slide, shove, slap) that can't be replicated by any virtual controller.
Don't forget the haptic feedback that has not been replicated by any controller yet. The thwock that travels from push button to flipper hit is such a specific sensation that even describing it textually is difficult.
Virtual machines may be infinitely move variable and compact than any physical table, but nothing beats the real thing.
It's not a surprise to me. True depth of field, 3D sound, pulling the pin, the mechanical "clack" of the flippers and physically holding the machine all play into the experience.
Have yet to build a virtual-pinball cabinet (but it's on my short list). Flipper clack, holding the machine will be there. Depth of field will not. We'll see how enjoyable it is.
I'm thinking one day I'll probably buy a real pinball machine for my office. Though looking at one site they are pretty expensive ($5k - $20k depending on the model), though I'm sure you could find one for under $5k which is starting to enter the realm of "maybe my wife won't kill me".
Pins are fun to own but the pricing has gotten inflated since 2019. If you get into your local pin community you can likely still find machines for $2k-$4k though they may need a little work to bring up to top level. The pricing varies widely based on the condition and popularity of the particular machine. Fortunately, the pinball collector community is large so there's good availability of information and parts to maintain and restore machines.
You can start down the rabbit hole at www.pinside.com
>It's amazing to me how virtual and real pinball are really not comparable at all in terms of enjoyment (at least for me personally). I still don't really understand why.
Have you tried it in VR? With free head movement, and proper 3D sound simulation, the physics feel a lot more real.
It's still missing good haptics. I think the PS5 DualSense force-feedback controllers and trigger might be able to give you the feeling of the ball rolling around different places, but I don't see anyone trying to make this work in virtual pinball yet.
I wish there were more VIDEO pinball games that don’t pretend to be a real table, just a 2D overhead view with awesome graphics and music like the old Pinball Dreams/Fantasies series by Digital Illusions from the Amiga days.
I grew up on Tristan. Astonishingly they ported to iOS at some point... and I have no recollection of it looking this janky! To me it was the coolest thing ever on a Mac IIsi.
Tristan is still my favourite pinball game to this day. I remember my dad playing it on whatever old Mac he had back then and I got to try it every once in a while. I like the simplicity of its design and I come back to playing it on my iPhone whenever I get bored.
It’s amazing you can still download the original apps on http://www.littlewingpinball.com and there is so much background information on there. I also love Crystal Caliburn II, which they ported on iOS too.
"Yoku's Island Express" is worth checking out. It takes it one step further and doesn't even pretend to be a pinball game, but a platformer with pinball mechanics. I guess there were Sonic the Hedgehog games that did this a while ago, but this is the most recent game, as far as I know. It's a very satisfying sensory experience.
I want to see more pinball "metroidvania" games! there's lots of neat game design ideas inherent to pinball that I believe are often overlooked these days.
Kirby’s Pinball Land [1] is one of my favorite pinball games for this exact reason. 2D camera angle. Each table is divided into a set of full-screen partitions. I’ve never understood the appeal of 3D tables from bad camera angles.
I enjoy both 2D and 3D pinballs but your YouTube link reminds me of "Revenge of the gator" [1] on Game Boy which was one of my favorite game at the time.
Why is this on hackernews right now? It's an old program, closed source, hasn't been updated in ages, and the author abandoned it long ago because he doesn't like people using it to recreate tables. This seems like a shameless plug indeed.
Wonder how the developer is doing, its excellent software and I hope whatever they are doing is going well for them, its interesting the last update is over a decade ago, but the site is still online and domain registered.
There was an amazing table about killing zombies (called Dead Hunters) that used to work on this, but doesn't any more :(
The music, sound FX, and the table itself rivaled the quality of the professionally-made pinball games I've played, but I think it was amateur effort by Blindmankind
I had to navigate up to the bare prop file page and it worked then, it’s something I’ve seen with LinkedIn before. Just for anyone else who hits this issue on other linkedIn profiles and needs to know the workaround.
I just got Perthed, he's a local from where I live, and I swear I recognise a more recent photo like I may have seen him at a tech event some time in the last half decade or so.
It's still WIP, but we've put a lot of focus on tooling, so anyone can easily create tables.
Quick video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CfZImFl1ME
[1] https://github.com/freezy/VisualPinball.Engine