Jump to content

All my products and services are free. All my costs are met by donations I receive from my users. If you enjoy using any of my products, please donate to support me. Thank you for your support. Tom Speirs

Patreon

freezy

VPDB Moderator
  • Posts

    50
  • Joined

  • Days Won

    5

Posts posted by freezy

  1. Yes, there was a DB corruption and I currently just don't have the time to fix it. At some point, I'll revive this project, but given it hasn't gotten much traction, it's not on my immediate TODO. I might repurpose it once VPE comes out.

    • Like 1
  2. Well, this is the web, PinballX isn't ;)

    Maybe bake a GLTF viewer into PinballX, given the data is available. Not sure how it would work with the controls though.

    Yes, Popeye is the one of the table with issues. The problem is that in general there is a lot of z-fighting going on due to meshes posed on top of each. One solution is to basically pick one randomly, that worked for all tables but Popeye. It's actually a hard problem because you first need to identify which faces overlap, and then which one to prioritize. Both are hard problems, because the can only overlap partially, and then there isn't really a heuristic which one is supposed to go on top.

    Anyway, I might be able to solve this at least for the playfield mesh, because I can do more educated guesses about which to render.

  3. Hey guys,

    I was working on analyzing VPX files in a more efficient way, and while going through the primitive meshes I thought hey why not export them to something readable by the browser?The first prototype was quick, but getting all the remaining table elements as well (ramps, surfaces, triggers, spinners, flippers, lights, and many more) finally took more time than I thought.

    Then I had to work to get the 100+MB VPX data down to something under 10MB preferably so it wouldn't take ages to load. Thanks to PNG crushing and Draco compression, the model files are now under 10MB in average.

    Finally, the 3D model needed to be displayed in the browser, preferably with somewhat dynamic lighting, textures and proper materials. Three.js is one of the best frameworks for doing exactly that, and now, when browsing a release on VPDB, you have another "3D View" button below the download button where you can explore the table in 3D.

    mb-browser.thumb.jpg.e2097d48aa6aaa79a2ae12f50b3b3d03.jpg

    It's pretty awesome because it allows you to appreciate the author's attention to detail and explore parts of the table you usually don't see. You can also play with the lights and toggle every type of playfield element.

    There are a few more things to do in my mind like bake shadow maps into the model, play with environment maps, and who knows, maybe one day we can hook this up to a ROM simulator. ;)

    Enjoy!

    • Like 1
    • Thanks 1
  4. Oh, so the message was displayed in VPDB Agent? That's expected, since the token API changed a bit and I haven't updated Agent yet. I can update the Agent code, but I fear it won't do much because I've ripped out the real-time API on server-side recently in order to redo it properly.

    If you like to contribute that would be awesome of course, I have a Slack project set up if you want to chat.

    Cheers!

  5. Hey, thanks for posting. I was actually debugging the shit out of that while you were surfing and getting spammed by the crash reporter ;)

    There was a bug when setting the password after logging with OAuth. Basically it updated the session with an empty object resulting in 401s. That should be fixed now however. If you hover over the VPDB logo, does it say "VPDB 8f95a62"?

    When you're saying "below the API key", do you mean under profile when creating? Or listing? A description how to reproduce would be appreciated.

    Cheers!

    PS: VPDB Agent is currently on hold and probably miserably failing due to some late API changes. I'm currently on another project but  I will eventually get back to it and make it work in full glory :)

  6. And for the record, I didn't email anything to anyone. Everything on dmdext is public, everyone can follow issues and test builds. The issue in question can be found here. GitHub sends out email notifications about issues to subscribed users, so maybe that was @hrl53's confusion.

  7. There is already a client-side app in the works that will basically manage all your table needs through VPDB. You can get more details here. Note that it's work in progress at the moment and there are some structural changes needed before anyone should play around with it. To your questions:

    Check the documentation out here. Backglasses are the same as releases, they are game-specific, so you link them to a game. Same for ROMs. Table images and videos are release-specific and are linked to the release they were taken from. Currently permissions only allow to deal everybody with their own stuff, i.e. table shots must be provided by the table author.

    Given there are only the very basic media types available at VPDB, this will probably change in the future.

    Some documentation about the binary endpoints can be found here.

    Orientation also accepts "any" for VPX files.

    While the above mentioned app won't be solving all your media issues when released, it's kind of the next logical step to me. Having a tool that manages table life cycle correctly is pretty complicated and once that works, I don't see why media wouldn't be taken care of as well.

     

×
×
  • Create New...