Archive: 4 posts

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I am creating an intricate remake of a classic pinball machine (by classic, I mean from the 90's, so it has a lot of logic built into it). So far, I am just in the 'creating the look and feel of the table' phase. I am just creating objects, tweaking their bounce, testing with pinball, etc. I haven't gotten to the more detailed logic parts for multiball, strobe multiball, extra balls, ball saved... theres so much. It's gonna take me some time, but I am excited about it. No other pinball machine I've seen has tried going this far in LBP1/2. Pinball for a better tomorrow is absolutely superb in its creation, but missing some parts in my opinion (I DO love the added touches like different camera angles, music selection, etc). So, step one in my process is figuring out whether or not I can have 1, 2, 3, or 4 players play the game. I know in Pinball for a better tomorrow, if you play with more than one player, all players can control the flippers, which is another nice added touch, but got annoying to me when my son kept moving the flipper out of the way of the ball and I'd lose it. But then we played Space Pool (one of the story mode's vs levels). When it was my turn to play, the other players waited and watched. How can I recreate that for a pinball game? Like in real pinball, when it's not your turn, you can either watch, or go do whatever you want til its your turn again. So if 4 players have 3 balls, player 1 gets his first ball, player 2 gets his first ball, player 3 gets his first ball... etc. And even harder to wrap my head around is saving where each player is at when they lose their ball... but that may come later. I'm still just trying to figure out if and how I could do this. If I can, it would be the ultimate pinball machine in LBP2. Anyone wanna help? I also want a helper to recreate the original soundtrack for the machine. I avoided making this in LBP1 cuz I knew it would only be possible in LBP2, so I've been waiting. Now it can be done, I'm just not sure how to do it all... ps. The actual pinball game is Attack from Mars! And there is a lot of logic involved in the real gameplay. There are sidegames to play on the LED display, like UFO's coming down from the sky, and you use your flippers to control where the gun fires. There's one I remember about aiming your missile launcher (?) and using the pinaball to go up a ramp to aim it, then shoot the pinball into the center of the UFO to destroy it. There are random bonuses if you hit a certain ramp at a certain time, like strobe mutilball, extra ball lit, 1 million points, etc... so much fun, cuz there's a start and finish. You start by defending countries on earth and end by attacking Mars and becoming Ruler of the Universe! lol, it's so much fun... I'd love to recreate it. pps. The whole logic part scares me, especially after I looked at all the logic pics on the 'post your logic pics' forum. Wow. I just wanted to create a simple pinball machine. Heh. Is it possible? I know it IS possible, but... have I taken on too much? Wanna help? PSN: tooled

2011-03-07 05:17:00 Author: tooled Posts: 8

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Sure it's possible. I don't know how you would do it for varying numbers of players, but multiple players is fairly straightforward. Let's say 4 players. Make a selector with 4 outputs, and make 4 controllinators; one for each player to sit in. Then make 4 microchips, and place on them the remotely controlled controllinators for each player to grant them controll of the pinball game in turn. Obviously they will all use the same camera, so no reason to mess with that. Now, you can use the selector to also choose which score to add to and all that. The only real issue would be scaling it for 1,2,3,4 players.

2011-03-07 06:40:00 Author: tdarb Posts: 689

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The only real issue would be scaling it for 1,2,3,4 players. Thank you for your reply. I suppose that is my issue so far. Not the only issue so far. But at least the first. Thanks for your help. That does give me a starting point; just wondering about the logic beyond that. Would I need to re-code for 2 players, 3 players, or 4 players? Should I do a menu and base my logic on that? Does an extra ball (or 2 or more) screw it all up? I appreciate any input at this point, as I am just starting to figure out the logic of it all. I know what I want it to do...

2011-03-07 07:02:00 Author: tooled Posts: 8

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The main issue with multi-player is if it has to save the state of the playfield for each player. If it doesn't, it wouldn't be too difficult, but if it does it can be really tricky. If you need to save the state I would recommend having the states stored in a microchip inside the controllinator of each player. This chip would only be active when it is that players turn and would send and receive tags to the devices on the play field. It would be a lot to keep track of, but a good design layout and tidy labels for your tags will help a lot. As an example, lets say you have a bank of three targets. You could call it bank A and label the targets 1-3, "target A1, target A2, target A3". Have 2 different colored keys, one for sending data from the play-field and one for sending from the player, they can both share the same tag labels. So a player hits "target A1", it activates the green tag which the tag sensor on the players chip recieves, it then sets the state (using a toggle/selector/counter whatever works) and sends that signal on a blue "target A1" tag which the play-field picks up and uses to show the targets state. When that players turn ends, their chip is turned off and those signals will not be sent anymore and the board returns to normal but the state of all their data is still saved and will become active again when their chip is enabled again. Scoring can be done on the players chip, or on the play-field but it would be harder on the play-field since you would have to build in logic to turn off scoring while switching players. You also would need to transfer the player ID to all the score givers on the playfield, this would be easier if kept in the players controllinator, but also add more complexity to the chip. It would be easier to keep track of the logic of each item on the play-field if it was all on the play-field as long as you come up with a clean way to transfer the player ID to the score givers. You could do this by putting a controllinator tied to each player in it's own microchip, output the active state of each controllinator/microchip to an OR gate, then use a selector tied to the active state of the microchips your controllinators are in. The selector would be tied to the active player (sent via tags). The result from the OR gate would be the active players ID, the whole setup can be saved in it's own chip for easy re-use. Wire its result through an AND gate along with a trigger and wire that to your score giver and you should be good to go. A project like this is all about clean, reusable components.

2011-03-07 23:06:00 Author: Osprey71 Posts: 93

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