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Pinball 2000 style - Digital Pinball/Arcade hybrid project
Xiaou2:
This angle might be a bit extreme, but anyways, you get the idea. The weight of the mass, the length and spring tension of the leaf, the distance between the contacts (adjustable), and the angle of mount... all play a part in how sensitive the thing is.
Too much mass and the thing may take too much effort to get moving.
Too little mass = wont move at all
Too little of angle, might cause bounce back.
Too much, may make it too much effort to get the mass to make contact.
Spring too stiff / too loose, may cause either too much resistance, or be too little.
Contacts too close or too far apart.. same as above.
So yes, this is the same principle as the video, and is accurate to how a pinball is really supposed to be nudged.
And yes, a tilt bob is also required. The tilt bob is to make sure the player doesnt make too extreme a cabinet movement. Small vibrations dont do much to the tilt bob... but an extreme move will cause the weight to gain momentum... and thus hit the contact plate.
Sometimes you can get away with one steep sweeping motion... but the bob will take a moment to calm down to a stop.. so any further motion will cause it to go off.
A sweep motion is usually used as a cheat to slide the table to the side so that if the ball was going right down the center of the field, you would make the ball hit one of the flippers instead. (the PF slips, but weighted steel ball remains in the same vector path)
A nudge isnt enough to cause much ball vector change, but will work if the ball is touching something when you nudge, as you are transferring the energy directly from object to ball, which is 1000x more conductive than the slippery floor moving from under it slightly.
If you were not aware of this before, your playing on a real pin should improve vastly.
Especially on old EM machines, which are less steeply sloped. (slower ball travel = easier to effect balls vectors, and resulting in greater angular output possibilities)
edit: btw, I never really understood how to really play pinball till I got a real table for home. I knew the idea about what nudging was, but I still never really understood how to make it work properly to advantage. That along with understanding how spin effects the ball when it hits the flipper for example, really opened my eyes, and made the game so much more fair and enjoyable. It became a completely new experience.
drventure:
Nice. Hadn't seen a nudge sensor like that before.
I ended up using mercury switches, which seem to work pretty good, but I'm no pinball wizard, so there's that!
Dazz:
Not much work got done today like I had wanted due to bad storms. I really wanted the wings on the head to look like solid piece instead of 3 individual pieces. This was my first time to work with Bondo and I screwed up a couple places, but after a LOT of sanding it turned out pretty good. This should paint up nicely.
Hopefully I can sand the main cabinet and start painting. Unfortunately, I think we are supposed to have even more and larger storms tomorrow. :(
RandyT:
It's nice to see someone taking a different approach to the pinball design. Looks great so far!
I do have a comment about the nudge sensors, though. Those devices seem to me like an incorrect approach. Nudging a table is a primary interaction, whereas relying on the nudge to move a finicky sensor just right is turning the reaction into something that is secondary in nature...and not very reliable. Someone should probably also tell the gentleman in the video that "hitting" isn't the same as "nudging" :)
Most, if not all of the action applied to the table comes from the hands and wrists, so it seems like a really interesting approach to the nudge problem would be to create a stiff, but floating "grip bar" area, basically the size of the lockdown bar. To hold down the "bar", one could use an oversized hole in the center of the bar, with a couple of large fender washers and a slightly loose bolt held in place by a nylok. It would be held center by heavy duty foam rubber (vehicle weatherstripping?) on each edge, with a microswitch (or leaf) positioned so that movement of the bar in any direction triggers the nudge function. With proper positioning of the switches, an 8-way nudge capability would even be possible. This approach could be expanded to allow fine tuning of the force required, using springs, tensioning screws, etc...but just finding the right stiffness of rubber would get the job done.
Another advantage to doing it this way is the partial isolation it provides for the sensitive components in the table. You can still nudge without putting heavy vibration into the entire table.
RandyT
Xiaou2:
Re: Hit-Nudege (see around 38 seconds in)
(Video from a player whos won competitions in PAPA)
A nudge can be a tap/slap, or it can be more subdued as a push.
I dont think its necessarily a bad idea to make a moving bar.. its been done on at least
one video pinball game in the past. However, part of the challenge and feel of nudging, is moving the heavy machine.
Still, the sensor he built seemed a bit too stiff, requiring a bit too much effort to activate.
A weighted switch can be extremely sensitive if set up well.
The problem of course, is that theres no analog in a switch, so the game cant tell if you hit it with a light tap, or a really hard push.
I wonder if a weighted analog joystick wouldnt be a better option... which would give direction, speed and power.
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