This might be the first time I reveal something about an upcoming title on this blog, but here it is – we are currently working on a pinball game. Not a classical pinball game, it has a pretty cool twist, but the basic mechanic is still very similar. As a physics programmer this sounded easy at first. Hey, it's just a sphere. What could possibly be easier to simulate?
I wouldn't call myself a pinball player, but I've always enjoyed it and spent a lot of time with the old Amiga games Pinball Dreams/Fantasies and even more with Slam Tilt. It's an interesting challenge to create a pinball simulation because it is quite the opposite of what physics programmers are usually facing – forget stacks of boxes, thousands of objects, streaming geometry and convex decomposition. With pinball it's all about detail and accuracy. We are not aiming for maximum realism in this game, but I think realism is a good place to start and then tweak the parameters to fit the gameplay.
Let's go over the pinball components. There is the ball, not much to say. It's a perfect, solid sphere. The table is a glossy, very slippery, polished surface, similar to the floor in a bowling alley. We also have a lot of curved geometry, ramps and various obstacles. The last component are the flippers. This might be the hardest part to get right. They are built with a double-coiled solenoid actuating a hinged, plastic flipper covered with high friction rubber. The main coil causes the initial strong pull, and at the end of the stroke it switches to just using the outer layer, holding the flipper up without overheating.
This particular setup seems to be important to give pinball it's signature characteristics and enables a lot of advanced playing techniques that simply wouldn't work with a different setup, for example the live catch, drop catch and tip pass.
Since the ball is solid steel it has a fairly high moment of inertia. The glossy table causes the ball to mostly slide across the surface, but when touching high-friction rubber on a flipper, it has to start rotating. In physical terms this translates linear momentum into angular momentum, causing the ball to drop a lot of speed. This gives the player control, being able to capture the ball using the flippers. The reverse is of course also true, if the ball is rotating heavily and touching a flipper, it will translate angular momentum into linear momentum.
Curved geometry is important in order to alter the direction of motion of the ball without loosing too much momentum. This is a bit of a headache in physics, since we're used to model most things using convex polyhedra, and now suddenly everything is concave! On the up-side collision detection will not be a performance bottleneck with a single sphere, so we can easily use detailed triangle meshes for everything, but on the down-side no matter how many triangles we use, they still aren't curved – they're flat!
Another thing in pinball is the speed. The ball can easily travel at 6 m/s, which translates to more than three times the diameter per frame at 60 FPS. Fortunately, this can easily be solved using substepping, as performance is not an issue.
I'm only starting to explore this world and I will post more details as I dive deeper into each specific part.
I wouldn't call myself a pinball player, but I've always enjoyed it and spent a lot of time with the old Amiga games Pinball Dreams/Fantasies and even more with Slam Tilt. It's an interesting challenge to create a pinball simulation because it is quite the opposite of what physics programmers are usually facing – forget stacks of boxes, thousands of objects, streaming geometry and convex decomposition. With pinball it's all about detail and accuracy. We are not aiming for maximum realism in this game, but I think realism is a good place to start and then tweak the parameters to fit the gameplay.
Let's go over the pinball components. There is the ball, not much to say. It's a perfect, solid sphere. The table is a glossy, very slippery, polished surface, similar to the floor in a bowling alley. We also have a lot of curved geometry, ramps and various obstacles. The last component are the flippers. This might be the hardest part to get right. They are built with a double-coiled solenoid actuating a hinged, plastic flipper covered with high friction rubber. The main coil causes the initial strong pull, and at the end of the stroke it switches to just using the outer layer, holding the flipper up without overheating.
This particular setup seems to be important to give pinball it's signature characteristics and enables a lot of advanced playing techniques that simply wouldn't work with a different setup, for example the live catch, drop catch and tip pass.
Since the ball is solid steel it has a fairly high moment of inertia. The glossy table causes the ball to mostly slide across the surface, but when touching high-friction rubber on a flipper, it has to start rotating. In physical terms this translates linear momentum into angular momentum, causing the ball to drop a lot of speed. This gives the player control, being able to capture the ball using the flippers. The reverse is of course also true, if the ball is rotating heavily and touching a flipper, it will translate angular momentum into linear momentum.
Curved geometry is important in order to alter the direction of motion of the ball without loosing too much momentum. This is a bit of a headache in physics, since we're used to model most things using convex polyhedra, and now suddenly everything is concave! On the up-side collision detection will not be a performance bottleneck with a single sphere, so we can easily use detailed triangle meshes for everything, but on the down-side no matter how many triangles we use, they still aren't curved – they're flat!
Another thing in pinball is the speed. The ball can easily travel at 6 m/s, which translates to more than three times the diameter per frame at 60 FPS. Fortunately, this can easily be solved using substepping, as performance is not an issue.
I'm only starting to explore this world and I will post more details as I dive deeper into each specific part.
