5 ms·

A bit tangential, but I have been playing the game "Pinball FX" a lot. I really like it (and especially its spin-off/expansion Pinball M), but it's surprisingly

A bit tangential, but I have been playing the game "Pinball FX" a lot. I really like it (and especially its spin-off/expansion Pinball M), but it's surprisingly taxing on my computer. I mentioned this to a friend, and he was kind of confused, understandably so, and said "...it's pinball...why is that taxing?" It's not a dumb question, we have had virtual pinball games since the Atari 2600 at least, and even pretty fun stuff on the Amiga and DOS like Pinball Dreams and Epic Pinball, so why would a modern pinball game make my relatively beefy laptop struggle playing it? The answer is because virtual pinball occupies a strange kind of space in the world of video games, in that they're trying to emulate something that is entirely dependent on extremely precise and subtle physics. It's not like you can really have too accurate of physics; the better the physics, the closer it is to a "real" pinball machine, and generally speaking the more fun the game is. As such, I think you could honestly make a pinball game that taxes any hardware. You'll never be able to have "perfect" physics (as in physics that completely and totally imitate reality), you can only get asymptotically close to "perfect", and the closer you are, the more taxing the computation will end up being. It just made me think, this applies to nearly anything. We all work with abstractions, but if dive into the details of something and recurse, it's not like it ever ends.

ranscendental50 2y ago
[dead]
suby 2y ago
I don't actually know, but I'd wager a lot that it's the graphics rather than the physics which causes the game to be slow. Generally the expensive thing in video games is rendering. Computing the next world state is generally relatively cheap, especially if we're talking about a confined area with a very small number of rigid bodies (the ball, flippers, bumpers). A pinball game like Pinball FX that's rendering a 3d world with lighting, it'd just be shocking to me if the physics were to blame for the performance.
- tombert 2y ago
  Yeah fair, it's tough to say; they're simulating a few non-obvious things too, like ball spin, but it's possible it's mostly graphics. I think my overall point still stands, but you might be right. ETA: I would like to point out that my dad was debating buying one of those virtual pinball tables, and so we played one at a mall, it was decidedly not fun. The physics were way too floaty, and didn't feel good at all. It looked like they were running it on some shitty Android and just mounted a big TV. That's why I thought that maybe it was the physics in PinballFX slowing things down.
  - sjs382 2y ago
    Have you seen the virtual pinball tables that emulate depth by tracking your head? It's a great effect
    - tombert 2y ago
      I have not, that sounds pretty cool. That might make the machines more fun, or at least feel more realistic. I think having something more or less like a rumble feature would do a lot too. Even if you just had a solenoid that thumps when hitting a bumper would make it feel a lot more realistic.
      - sjs382 2y ago
        This illustrates the concept pretty well. https://youtu.be/DoSLmAaRJ80?si=Mt94YNzBtLZzPDmh https://youtu.be/DoSLmAaRJ80?si=Mt94YNzBtLZzPDmh
    - Sophira 2y ago
      It sounds cool, but because you won't be getting different views from both eyes, I can imagine the brain is probably going to be fairly confused by it.
      - swiftcoder 2y ago
        There are tons of working examples of head-tracked 3D, and in practice it's good enough to satisfy most viewers (as long as you can deal with the obvious limitation: only one viewer at a time)
accrual 2y ago
Good story for getting a handle on the idea. It kind of reminded me of fractals and how we find some parallels between phenomena at every scale, e.g. galaxies and rotating water as it flows down your drain.
mrob 2y ago
Ball movement on a real pinball machine is three dimensional. The game is designed to keep the ball in contact with the playfield surface as much as possible, but in practice there are lots of imperfections and awkwardly shaped features that can make the ball bounce vertically if it hits them at the right angle. It can sometimes bounce violently enough to hit the glass. This is especially common when you have multiple balls in play. A 2D simulation isn't enough.
- tombert 2y ago
  Yeah, exactly my point. There’s always an infinite number of variables in a real pinball machine. Slight imperfections in the playfield surface making it not completely flat, slight imperfections in the shape of the ball so it’s not a perfect sphere, slight imperfections in the shape of the bumper. I could keep going, but I think there’s literally billions of potential variables that can modify the game. These might seem insignificant, and in some cases they are, but it’s a chaos theory thing; small imperfections multiplied across enough of a timescale become pretty significant, and that’s a large part of what makes real pinball so much fun. Of course there’s plenty of things we can do to approximate reality; adding a bit of randomness to the experience probably provides enough chaos to give us something more or less like reality in a lot of cases, but that is just an optimization hack.
quantum_state 2y ago
There is a limit of the tax on hardware set by the sensory resolutions of the game player since anything beyond is not perceivable.
- tombert 2y ago
  Is that actually true? That might be true on a small enough time step but there’s enough variation in every physical component of the machine that I think chaos theory would take over in a relatively short amount of time. The ball could fly across the machine in radically different ways even with seemingly the same inputs. Obviously there’s are ways of spoofing even that, just adding some randomness probably helps a lot.

ranscendental50 2y ago

[dead]

suby 2y ago

I don't actually know, but I'd wager a lot that it's the graphics rather than the physics which causes the game to be slow. Generally the expensive thing in video games is rendering. Computing the next world state is generally relatively cheap, especially if we're talking about a confined area with a very small number of rigid bodies (the ball, flippers, bumpers). A pinball game like Pinball FX that's rendering a 3d world with lighting, it'd just be shocking to me if the physics were to blame for the performance.

tombert 2y ago
Yeah fair, it's tough to say; they're simulating a few non-obvious things too, like ball spin, but it's possible it's mostly graphics. I think my overall point still stands, but you might be right. ETA: I would like to point out that my dad was debating buying one of those virtual pinball tables, and so we played one at a mall, it was decidedly not fun. The physics were way too floaty, and didn't feel good at all. It looked like they were running it on some shitty Android and just mounted a big TV. That's why I thought that maybe it was the physics in PinballFX slowing things down.
- sjs382 2y ago
  Have you seen the virtual pinball tables that emulate depth by tracking your head? It's a great effect
  - tombert 2y ago
    I have not, that sounds pretty cool. That might make the machines more fun, or at least feel more realistic. I think having something more or less like a rumble feature would do a lot too. Even if you just had a solenoid that thumps when hitting a bumper would make it feel a lot more realistic.
    - sjs382 2y ago
      This illustrates the concept pretty well. https://youtu.be/DoSLmAaRJ80?si=Mt94YNzBtLZzPDmh https://youtu.be/DoSLmAaRJ80?si=Mt94YNzBtLZzPDmh
  - Sophira 2y ago
    It sounds cool, but because you won't be getting different views from both eyes, I can imagine the brain is probably going to be fairly confused by it.
    - swiftcoder 2y ago
      There are tons of working examples of head-tracked 3D, and in practice it's good enough to satisfy most viewers (as long as you can deal with the obvious limitation: only one viewer at a time)

accrual 2y ago

Good story for getting a handle on the idea. It kind of reminded me of fractals and how we find some parallels between phenomena at every scale, e.g. galaxies and rotating water as it flows down your drain.

mrob 2y ago

Ball movement on a real pinball machine is three dimensional. The game is designed to keep the ball in contact with the playfield surface as much as possible, but in practice there are lots of imperfections and awkwardly shaped features that can make the ball bounce vertically if it hits them at the right angle. It can sometimes bounce violently enough to hit the glass. This is especially common when you have multiple balls in play. A 2D simulation isn't enough.

tombert 2y ago
Yeah, exactly my point. There’s always an infinite number of variables in a real pinball machine. Slight imperfections in the playfield surface making it not completely flat, slight imperfections in the shape of the ball so it’s not a perfect sphere, slight imperfections in the shape of the bumper. I could keep going, but I think there’s literally billions of potential variables that can modify the game. These might seem insignificant, and in some cases they are, but it’s a chaos theory thing; small imperfections multiplied across enough of a timescale become pretty significant, and that’s a large part of what makes real pinball so much fun. Of course there’s plenty of things we can do to approximate reality; adding a bit of randomness to the experience probably provides enough chaos to give us something more or less like reality in a lot of cases, but that is just an optimization hack.

quantum_state 2y ago

There is a limit of the tax on hardware set by the sensory resolutions of the game player since anything beyond is not perceivable.

tombert 2y ago
Is that actually true? That might be true on a small enough time step but there’s enough variation in every physical component of the machine that I think chaos theory would take over in a relatively short amount of time. The ball could fly across the machine in radically different ways even with seemingly the same inputs. Obviously there’s are ways of spoofing even that, just adding some randomness probably helps a lot.