More of my first table

This week I began to slowly design a table. The hardest part of designing a table is definitely the flow of the table. As a designer it's really up to only you as to how the table is played. This means deciding on destinations and targets the ball can reach and then on top of that making it physically possible for these targets and destinations to be reached. Here so far, is my first table I think I'll be adding lights and more ramps next. I've found that for beginners, Vertical Kickers make ramps much easier to go up since my experience lacks the vision I need to properly make normal ramps that will just take a ball traveling at a  fast enough velocity.

Right now, the table plays rather okay now. But I will soon be adding points to the drop targets on the sides and the leaf targets as well as beginning lanes.

A scripting note. In order to get the kickers to kick I had to write the following code

Sub Kicker1_Hit()
'Kicker Solenoid pulse
Kicker1.SolenoidPulse()
End Sub

This code told my program to create something to do when this kicker was hit by the ball and it's command was to pulse the solenoid. And then end the Program. Without any scripting the kickers do nothing on their own.

-Eric

My first table attempt

Here is my first attempt at a table! Personally, I really liked the game "Hurricane" a William's machine. I liked it very much because of it's ramps. I particularly liked how the game began with the pinball shooting up a ramp and starting above the actual play field. In y first table I have a simple lay out. It has a beginning ramp that has a gap in the middle. This gap is for skill shots. So that if you can apply just enough force to get through to gap but not past it you can land into the bumper and earl a lot of points. While it currently seems a little plain. I'll be working and hopefully finishing it by the end of this week! So far. I've only worked on the upper part of the the table. But I'm thinking of putting a special ramp in the bottom of the table and taking out a drain. But we'll see how that goes!

Ramps will be the subject of the next few posts, that an kickers and how I will be using them together.  Hopefully, with these tools I can make some good interesting ramps!

-Eric

Rubbers & Slingshots

One of the very first things you see when you start a new table is the layout. You will notice these iconic objects.

At the very center end of the table lies a drain, to the left and right of the drain, the flippers. These flippers will be the player's primary form of direct control over the pinball. Next to these flippers are their respective lanes. Depending on how you shoot the pinball and how it will return the the bottom end of the field these lanes may spell out life or death for your current ball! If the ball lands in the lane, your reflexes have a chance to return the ball back into the play field. But should it land in the outside lane then your ball is doomed to the drain!

As you can see there are the left inner/outer lanes and right inner/outer lanes

As you will notice, above the lanes are two slingshots these are two objects surrounded by rubbers that will repel the ball away when hit. 

I thought to myself that it would be rather useful to learn how to make a slingshot. So, I began to take it apart. The default slingshot is comprised of a rubber, a surface and approximately 4 or 5 pegs. In fact when making a rubber,you don't need to insert the pegs for any other reason besides blue-print/engineering purposes. In other-words, where your pegs are in your slingshot do not effect how it acts. At least, not in this program.

In order to create a slingshot, first select rubbers and then select "shape-able" Future Pinball will produce the following item below.

The number circles represent points that can be moved in order to create the desired shape. I will be creating a regular slingshot like the ones depicted above. You will notice that these points can be deleted as well as inserted into the shape-able rubber by selecting the points and right-clicking and selecting "insert new shape point" or by selecting "delete" to delete it. I have chosen to create a shape and then delete the extra points.

Here is an example.

After we have the desired shape, all you have to do is right click the point where you want the launching mechanism to be placed and select "Special attribute" and "slingshot".

This will create a launching mechanism that will propel the rubber in a desired direction and thus launch the ball in that direction as well. Notice the purple line that now surrounds the entire rubber shape. This indicates what the shape will transform into when it is engaged thus propelling the ball away in those directions.

After that you can add pegs and surfaces for decoration!

I will talk about pegs and surfaces in another post, but for now, here is my finished product!

One slingshot ready to bash pinballs back!

Start!

Hello out there!

My name is Eric Chham and I am a Sophomore at the University of Washington. I've been studying a lot of things, Math, Sciences, English, German and Music. But I've never learned much about something I've done almost every single day of my life since I turned ten years old. I've never taken the time to think about games. Video games, board games, card games, and arcade games. Most notably, pinball. The first game I ever played was virtual pinball on my aunt's computer back in the late 1990's. It came default on her windows brand new top-of-the-line Personal Computer. Every other game came on a floppy disk.

And so now, here I am twenty years later. Discovering virtual pinball again, I found a nifty free software called "Future Pinball" created by Christopher Leathley. It is a full 3D pinball simulator with physics! Unlike other free software, it seems as though Future Pinball doesn't have a lot of documentation. Instead of just waiting for someone else to document their discoveries of this program I decided to figure it out for myself. I will post what I find here so that anyone wishing to learn of this awesome program's many features can find some ideas! Like I'm trying to do for myself!

Thanks for reading!

-Eric