The quality of the visuals and the precision of the physics are impressively good (and I have real pinball machines next to it to compare). I have a virtual pinball cabinet with a dedicated PC driving the playfield screen and I love it. The open source "Visual Pinball" engine is pretty amazing and also constantly improving with an active community of artists and devs releasing new 3D pinball tables nearly every week for free. All content is provided on this site for free to all registered members." Our primary focus is on Digital Pinball formats including Visual Pinball, Future Pinball, and many more pinball simulators. "VPUniverse is a site dedicated to digital pinball simulations and anything pinball in general. "Simulates pinball table physics and renders the table with DirectX or OpenGL" Its a pinball emulator and people make tables for it. I can't attest to the quality.Įdit: apparently there is kinda like "MAME" for pinball. There are little virtual desktop units, some people have taken old pinball machines and retrofitted them. I've heard about this but never played on. It shares similarities with both but is its own distinct thing that's different and (IHMO) quite enjoyable.Ĭalled "vitrual pinball" where the playfield has been replaced with a screen. When played on a high-end, perfectly-tuned table, virtual pinball is like a cross between a pinball game and a video game. Playing a virtual pinball vs a physical pinball is simply a different kind of experience. I was impressed enough to set up a virtual pinball table of my own and now that I have extensive experience with both - I like playing them both. It also had a 6-axis accelerometer allowing me to 'nudge' the table to influence the trajectory of the ball just like I do on one of the real pinball tables I own. Then I actually tried a really good virtual pinball cabinet running recent, high-quality open source tables at 120fps 4K HDR with haptic feedback transducers providing positional tactile feedback to the point where I could close my eyes and feel the virtual ball rolling across the table from side to side. I even tried a little virtual pinball unit at some discount warehouse club and it sucked. I can understand that point of view and used to think the same. All these people need to eat and pay rent in order for the game to exist, and it's a hard sell to get people to pay $40+ for a pinball game when the platonic ideal has existed from the 90s. A modern AAA game has artists specialized down to making materials that other artists can then put onto geometry. A 3D game is significantly more complex than a 2D game. Adding more 3D gimmicks or raytracing BS does not improve the core pinball experience (and is more likely to detract, truth be told).Ģ) The market for a "high-fidelity PC pinball" game is not large enough to justify development costs. The fact that a ball is a sphere means that it can be rendered as a circle, and the fact a pinball machine can be rendered entirely without the need for 3D processing means that you can build a large degree of fidelity into that physical simulation. The reason PC pinball games emerged early is because the physics of a solid, heavy sphere of uniform density are pretty well known from classical mechanics. You could turn a dial and see what it would be like to play pinball on the moon! I hope someone sees this and makes it!ġ) PC Pinball games have basically been done to the platonic ideal, unless you're intent on recreating something in like VR which would truly change the experience. Imagine bumping the machine hard to cheat? Or being able to smash the glass with a hammer and then put objects in the case and see what happens to them while you play? Could also be an amazing physics education thing if you could see real-time free-body diagrams overlaid on the ball that you could freeze in time and study showing all the forces acting on it. I know I'd love to see it just because it would be such a great showcase for the power of modern machines, especially the integration of super realistic physics. Why do you think that is? Would it really be so hard to do? Wouldn't that be popular? I'm certainly no expert on the subject, but after doing a quick search on Steam, I don't see anything like that on the market. You could probably end up with something that truly looks and feels like the real thing. Then it occured to me that modern GPUs like the nVidia 4090 would be incredible for simulating a pinball machine with insane fidelity using RTX ray tracing and the optimized physics simulator (PhysX) they have. I recall games like Full Tilt! Pinball and the 3D pinball game included in Windows were pretty popular and good showcases for the speed and quality of computer graphics back in the 90s.
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