Games Open Source Pinball Simulator (DOTS)

As you might know, there is a rather large community of virtual pinball enthusiasts. Many of us have built physical cabinets that look like real machines, but instead of a playfield they contain a TV screen, as well as a monitor for the backglass and the dot matrix display. A lot have built real flashers and solenoids into the cabinet that synchronize with the gameplay, to get a more authentic feeling while playing. Here is mine!

Besides the commercial games like PinballFX3 and Pinball Arcade, there is Future Pinball, a free but closed source sim, as well as Visual Pinball, which is open source.

Visual Pinball dates from the early 2000s, and while still fantastically maintained, it's becoming difficult to keep up with the hardware and what modern render pipelines can do. Another pain point is its editor, which has a very steep learning curve, and finally, the VBScript engine used to script the games is a turn-off for many creators.

So a few months ago, we've started porting Visual Pinball to Unity. We've ported the file format, the game mechanisms, editor support, and most importantly, Visual Pinball's physics engine, which is by many considered the best in the business.

It's still far from being playable, but I thought some of you might be interested in following its progress. The source code is available at GitHub, we've started to write documentation, and if you're interested in what the virtual pinheads have to say, check this thread.

Lastly, a few screenshots!







Cheers!

 

This is an exciting project and the Unity engine is ideal for it. For one creating a pinball table is as easy as using Unity and for the other the graphics are portable to various platforms and moreover it can make use of the benefits of the various Render Pipelines. Especially the HDRP graphics are already excellent and will grow as HDRP and DXR grow. And I can't wait to see what comes with VR towards us.

The Visual Pinball community is huge and consists of very talented and motivated members. I see a bright future for this project! Especially for it being free and Open Source

 

Yeah, for me it's the first gamedev project, and so far it has been an awesome ride. Hats off to Unity and also to the many helpful people here at the forum!

 

I thought I'd import two tables, simply put them into a scene as they are and fly around manually with the camera in realtime.

Credit for the ambient scene to Unity for their awesome Auto Showroom.

 

Time flies

The project is still very active, we recently added basic MPF support, which is awesome for original games.

 

Working on lighting, here a first play test!

 

I'm not an expert on raytracing, but I just had to try






All credit to the dev team and the table authors.

 

I'm going to be the unpopular guy here pointing out that GPL licensing isn't compatible with Unity. GPL would require you to have things from Unity's side to have GPL compatible licensing - which clashes with Unity's own licensing.

 

We've had this discussion already.

 

edit: <removed pointless debate as I'm not trying to get into some internet argument here>

Also It's not like you'd really get into legal trouble for breaking the licensing terms for projects like this, it just shows a bad form. Anyway, not trying to hijack this thread for this, just wanted to note that in case you weren't aware of the potential issue as I didn't notice it had been discussed in past. Carry on

 

No worries and no hijacking, this is about the project and your comment fully falls into that topic.

This is a community project. We want it to be free and open source, but we don't want companies using our work for commercial games without contributing back. The GPL3 assures that.

 

Hi, @phreezie

i use the latest packages in Unity 2021.2.0f1

and i can play the T2 table (Terminator 2 VR (Williams 1991) g5k v1.11.vpx) in the editor.
Key 5, 1, ball is spawned, Return to go, STRG left and STRG right works.
The table is playing nicely in the Editor.

Only changed the manual plunger to sw78 (Screenshot Wire Manager)




In the Build
Return to go, STRG left and STRG right
are not working.
KEy 5, 1, are working but no ball is spawned.

Does anyone has sonme idea what to do?
I use the normal windows intel-64 build.

This is the Build error message.
Scene catalog has not been loaded....

 

@keeponshading I've sent you a PM!

 

Little update, one table, two lighting conditions:

 

Under playfield mini playfields can be possible now.

 

TWIP published an article I co-authored about how we (re-)create digital pinball tables.

https://www.thisweekinpinball.com/a-peek-into-the-digital-creator-community/