I spent last week installing a 120Gb SSD and setting up the windows 7 from scratch. I had some free time after reinstalling all the applications so I dived into Adobe Configurator and updated my utility panels to CS5:
For download head over to the My Photoshop Panels – CS5 manual.
Here is a short video showing the current state of the pinball proto:
In the upcoming weeks I’ll add special effects and a dot matrix display, finish the environment and come up with some sort of a “story” so it’s not just random gameplay.
The code side of things has seen great progress in the last two weeks: now the GVMachine controllers can access mouse axes so I was able to set up mallet based controls for the pinball table:
Linking the mouse input to the mallet and tweaking the values for a good look&feel took about an hour, most of which I spent playtesting. Again, no code was written for the pinball table specifically, only generalized building blocks which were assembled on the map.
The next task we are facing is performance capture: recording the property changes of given actors and replaying them when needed. It will work something like a video editor where you place video clips one after the other to produce a movie. Only here the clips contain actor(s) which do stuff in the scene, independently from other actors and from the camera.
For example I could play for a while on this pinball table and record what the ball and the flippers do. Then put them on “auto pilot” so they keep repeating that captured performance every time I start the map. As a next step I play as an ant running around avoiding the steel ball, collecting bread crumbles stuck behind drop targets (or something). The actions of the ant are recorded and then replayed too. As the third step I take control of the camera: fly around, jump to predefined locations, zoom, pan and generally do what a cameraman does to produce an effective footage. Again, everything is recorded and replayed, so at the end I have a full story, rendered in realtime.
Practically anything can be changed at anytime: art assets can be replaced, lighting adjusted, timings tweaked, performances re-captured, etc. When everything is sound then the final video can be rendered using Unreal’s inbuilt tools which produce footage at arbitrary resolutions and frame rates.
The table is coming together:
Most features are working (slingshots, drop targets, etc) but there are a few things which are not even modeled yet so I should get back to work.
My first prototype project to be made with Gavit is about exploring variations of the classic pinball mechanics. Thanks to the relative simplicity of the moving components on the table it’s also been a good testcase for debugging Gavit’s machine and control systems.
The first iteration of the pinball table was just a bunch of random stuff thrown together:
The focus was on laying the foundation of the most basic functions such as machine setup, ball movement, scaling and so on.
