VisualPinball.Engine VS vpinball

If there are any pinhead game devs out there, we're still working on the next generation of Visual Pinball, called VPE[1].

However, given the current drama around Unity, we're currently looking into Godot to evaluate how much effort it would take to port, and how Godot will support our needs.

[1] https://github.com/freezy/VisualPinball.Engine

Pinball on computers is thriving too.

Visual Pinball X ("VPX", see https://www.vpforums.org/index.php?app=downloads&showcat=51) runs community authored recreated tables with ROMs dumped from the hardware. The physics engine has good performance and authenticity.

Another project, Visual Pinball Engine, ported the C++-based physics engine to Unity (https://github.com/freezy/VisualPinball.Engine) through its DOTS & "HPC#" (C# with manual memory management extensions) approach. Unity adoption means you can play high fidelity tables right in your browser (https://appmana.com/watch/pinball).

Then there's commercial platforms like Pinball FX and people building VPX rendering in VR.

It's maybe the biggest simulation scene I know of. The community fills many niches. Rigs of Rods & Beam.ng for the idea, "Microsoft Flight Simulator, but for cars." XMage & Spellsource for "Magic the Gathering or Hearthstone but you write your own cards." Unreal Engine for Fortnite is a big entry for the open world community authored content dominated by Minecraft, with submarine stuff like Facepunch's S&box (think Garry's Mod 2.0) coming up.

No it's just a modernising of the engine and gfx for modern machines. a lot of the VPX devs and table makers are actively helping create VPE as it's an open source project on github. https://github.com/freezy/VisualPinball.Engine

We're developing this: https://github.com/freezy/VisualPinball.Engine/

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.

Quick video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CfZImFl1ME

[1] https://github.com/freezy/VisualPinball.Engine

We've been working on an open source pinball framework for Unity for a while now, in case you're interested: https://github.com/freezy/VisualPinball.Engine

Documentation: https://docs.visualpinball.org/ Repository: https://github.com/freezy/VisualPinball.Engine Screenshots: https://github.com/freezy/VisualPinball.Engine/wiki/Unity-Screenshots

> A clever person posted an experimental build of VPX for the M1 Apple hardware — as a kind of science project. But there are a lot of external processes and frameworks that would also require porting to give you the whole VPX experience.

This isn't so much the case anymore. Thanks to some stellar work by jsm174, you can download a prebuilt binary from github actions for either Mac or Linux. Android and IOS versions are floating around as well. What started off in the "standalone" branch was recently merged into the mainline 10.8.1 version of Visual Pinball. A good number of the "external processes and frameworks" have already been ported over (DMD (Dot Matrix Display) support, anaglyph support) with more in progress (e.g. PUP (Multimedia) Packs). Linux / Mac support is OpenGL for now but work is underway to port vpinball to the BGFX cross platform rendering library (used by MAME for one) that will open the door to Vulkan and Metal.

https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball/actions

The approach taken to make all this happen is outlined here: https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball/blob/standalone/standal...

You already helped me along with this issue https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball/issues/1251

Visual Pinball X [1] is a free modern pinball simulator. It also supports VR, and comes pretty close to feeling like the real thing (sans realistic bumping).

There are hundreds of VPX format tables available online including original works, replicas of physical tables and replicas of existing digital tables. I've played dozens of hours of Stern's Tron Legacy both on a physical table and in Visual Pinball X, and I prefer VPX over the real thing.

There's also a high quality remake of 3D Space Cadet [2] available. Playing that one in VR feels like stepping into a PC in the 90s.

[1] https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball

Yes, we're targeting all the desktop platforms, i.e. Windows, Linux and macOS.

But thanks to recent efforts, VPX also runs on Linux now! It's on the standalone branch[1], under actions you can download a build.

[1] https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball/tree/standalone

Check out Visual Pinball or Visual Pinball Engine for Macs/Linux.

In my home arcade room, next to the custom 27" RGB CRT-based arcade cabinet running Bigbox, there's a virtual pinball cabinet with a large portrait mode flat screen for the playfield (and two more LCDs for the backglass and score display). I also play some vertical mode (aka Tate) arcade games on the VPin cab because I'm into Japanese shmups and they really need a portrait monitor to shine. I also have several physical pinball machines.These two forums will get you started: https://www.vpforums.org/ http://vpuniverse.com/.

go here. make account: https://www.vpforums.org/

So the biggest tip that I found going through the forum was to find all the "Rom" files for the real tables. That was the biggest issue. I saw a comment https://www.vpforums.org/ that changed everything for me. I was directed to this link: https://archive.org/details/vpinmame that features all the ROM files (mods please remove link if it's against terms). You can also find this page by googling "Archive.org pinball Roms". The file is over 12G, but with that in place in the proper folder in my system, that really changed everything because now 95% of all of those tables that did not work before, now work.