Arcade Games Props for A20--Now With Pinball!

[Cranberry Monster]

After some gentle nudging from other players, I've decided to share these props we've been using in our virtual man cave for a while now.

This mod introduces craftable versions of 27 classic video games to decorate your base, as well as a change machine. The parts can be scavenged in the world, purchased from traders, or even bought from your own change machine, which will also buy unwanted goods from you.

 

 

Each cabinet stands just under 2 meters tall, and all of them have animated screen with the same "attract mode" you'd see in an arcade. Games where the attract mode also has sound will have a helper block so you can choose between a muted version or the noisy one, but even the noisy games have sound that rolls off at a distance of 5 meters. There are also 5 different "ruined" arcade game models and a placeholder for spawning derelict cabs in your own buildings.

 

 

Screens, marquees, and coin slots all glow at night, too, so you can enjoy your games machines even in period-accurate mood lighting.

 

 

 

I'd like to thank the great community of modders and players here, from which I've learned a ton, as well as the generous souls over at 3D Warehouse for kindly providing these excellent models. They did most of the heavy lifting here.

 

Download the mod from my Dropbox here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/r5tjy2eolup4svo/videogame_cabinets_A20.zip?dl=0

 

Watch for a new arcade POI or two from Deverezieaux that incorporate these models.

 

The link above has been updated for the latest version, which includes 12 pinball machine models with animated playfields and sound (well, 10 of them have sound). As with the video games, there are muted versions of all of them as well. Sound rolls off at 3 meters for the pinball machines.

 

 

The pinball machines have illuminated backglasses, playfields, and coin slots.

 

 

And the backglasses can occasionally be found in-world, replacing the paintings you find in POIs. Smash them to pick them up, at which point you can either display them in your home or use them to craft a pinball machine.

 

 

Just a word of caution: there may be some issues with these on dedicated servers, which seem to take issue with the Unity video player in a20. xyth gives a solution for this in the thread for his TV and movie screen mod, and that involves editing the startdedicated.bat file. Here's the pertinent info from that thread:

 

Quote

 

Dedi   Experimental - read carefully

For some reason, the dedicated servers default startup file named startdedicated.bat has a Unity startup parameter -nographics .   -nographics means dont load various shaders and the video decoding files needed to render video.  So your job is to edit that file before starting up the dedi.

 

On about line 69 of that file you will see this line:         start %GAMENAME% -logfile "%LOGFILE%" -quit -batchmode -nographics -configfile=serverconfig.xml -dedicated

 

Change it to:     start %GAMENAME% -logfile "%LOGFILE%" -quit -batchmode  -configfile=serverconfig.xml -dedicated

 

Failure to do this properly will crash your dedi hard and fast.

 

 

Now, go get your game on!

Edited July 28, 2022 by Cranberry Monster
Updated to include pinball machines (see edit history)

[vonerich]

These are great. Thanks so much!

[zztong]

Just out of curiosity, are there versions that don't have power, don't glow, perhaps have broken screens or broken glass? I mean, if I were building a base as a player, yeh I'd love to referb/craft an old machine into a working thing. (Or the appearance of a working thing.) But as a POI creator, the Navezgane theme isn't generally a functional place. Can I make Pac-Man flicker like a light? Turn it off, etc?

 

I guess while I'm thinking of it, how many triangles/polygons are these things? You mentioned in another thread you thought it was a large download. Is that from the mesh, images, or maybe I don't know enough to ask a good question.

Edited September 7, 2022 by zztong (see edit history)

[bdubyah]

Looks like about ~150mb for this mod, which seems a little high to me, but there are 40 or so cabinets being added.

 

Cranberry, what settings did you use for the textures in Unity? Like 2k, 1k? Also, if you aren't aware, if you use RGBA Crunched DXT5 for the texture compression you can save a ton of file size while barely losing any quality.

[Cranberry Monster]

3 hours ago, zztong said:

Just out of curiosity, are there versions that don't have power, don't glow, perhaps have broken screens or broken glass? I mean, if I were building a base as a player, yeh I'd love to referb/craft an old machine into a working thing. (Or the appearance of a working thing.) But as a POI creator, the Navezgane theme isn't generally a functional place. Can I make Pac-Man flicker like a light? Turn it off, etc?

 

I guess while I'm thinking of it, how many triangles/polygons are these things? You mentioned in another thread you thought it was a large download. Is that from the mesh, images, or maybe I don't know enough to ask a good question.

 

We're absolutely on the same page as far as functional items in the Navezgane world go. Players aren't intended to encounter working machines, so I put in a half dozen broken cabinets they can scrap for parts. There's also a placeholder block to put in POIs that will spawn one of those broken cabs at random. For multiplayer worlds I play with friends, I'll scatter some broken machines in logical places--movie theaters, convenience stores, arcades, bus and train stations. Pinball machines I haven't done a broken model for, but I put framed backglass pieces in to occasionally replace the vanilla paintings. You break it to pick it up, and can either put a now glowing version on your wall, or use it to craft a working pinball machine.

 

The broken models are pretty lightweight. If the CP were to take a page from the player made NPCs, I could easily see a dependency where there was a pack that added just the six broken cabinets and placeholder for POI "flavor," with the cabinets scrapping to vanilla resources, then a second that added the PCB drop and the ability to craft the functioning machines.

 

Not sure on polygon counts for the models off hand, as they came from Sketchup (see the mod info for more details on who made what). They are far from optimized--Sketchup makes everything doublesided and doesn't seem to mind having a half dozen materials on the same piece, plus the textures aren't generally in powers of two, so they gain nothing from Unity compression. But the bloat almost totally comes from the MP4 clips that put in game play footage for the attract mode, plus the audio files that allow the sound to roll off. 

[Cranberry Monster]

3 hours ago, bdubyah said:

Looks like about ~150mb for this mod, which seems a little high to me, but there are 40 or so cabinets being added.

 

Cranberry, what settings did you use for the textures in Unity? Like 2k, 1k? Also, if you aren't aware, if you use RGBA Crunched DXT5 for the texture compression you can save a ton of file size while barely losing any quality.

 

bdubyah, thanks for your interest.

 

The models came from SketchUp, from a few different artists, and the texturing was done with loads of JPGs in non-power of 2 sizes--which throws Unity texture compression out the window. The textures I did add were mostly transparent PNGs in powers of 2 for bezels or marquees. But the killer in terms of file size is the MP4s that Unity video player uses for the attract mode game play. There's a 3-5 min clip for each in H264 MPEG-4 AVC, plus audio as a separate file for machines that needed it because I couldn't find any other way to make sound roll off on the video player. There's probably some room for better compression on the video, but Unity is very finicky about the format--I accidentally used a MPEG-4 (Mp4v) on one of the cabinets and it would crash the game the second I placed it despite working in the Unity editor.

 

And thanks for the tip on DXT5--I wasn't aware of that, but will try it on other stuff moving forward, as textures seem to be the main source of bloat.

[bdubyah]

Yeah, I ran into that with A20. They removed some shaders that video files used. Me and Xyth both had that dedi issue. As my video clip was just white static for an old monitor, I just took several still screens of the static and made an animation out of it. Not sure if that would work in your case though.

[zztong]

I downloaded the modlet with the intent of kicking the tires, so to speak. And here's some random thoughts that you may consider as feedback, but honestly I'm just rolling things around in my head in an unsettled kind of way.

 

It took me some playing around and stuff to eventually conclude the modlet includes things for two audiences: Players and Prefabers. At first I thought that was weird, but slowly came around. Its an interesting change in perspective to think about a modlet of fancy blocks instead of a modlet of POIs and then how they might work and play together.

 

Players:

• There's loot that players can use to make working arcade or pinball game.
• There's Final "working" versions of blocks for players to put into bases, with lights, sounds, animations.
• I know as a player I'd put stuff like this in my base, possibly with noise and animation. No game balance issue and they're fun and cool.
• Players can deal with their own self-inflicted performance issues. (Let's put all these animations and noises in our horde base!)

Prefabbers:

• I would definitely scatter damaged / destroyed arcade blocks around various POIs, like 1-2 in a laundromat, etc.
• Some prefabbers would make arcade POIs and fill the place with those blocks.
• The "helper" to place randomize damaged / destroyed arcade blocks is fantastic. A definite prefabber win.
• Would I ever place a noiseless working arcade or pinball machine? Sure. Not often, but yes. A working pinball machine in a Trader sounds quite apropos.
• A "helper" for a random noiseless arcade and another helper for a random noiseless pinball would be awesome.
• I'm not sure I'd place a machine that made noise or had an animation in a POI mostly because of trying to balance potential performance issues. I can't speak to everyone. It would certainly be funny to hear the "haunted house" pinball machine rockin' out somewhere... distant... in a creepy house POI. (Man, I used to love playing that machine.)

Prefabber Feedback:

• None of the blocks reported their "Vertices" and "Triangles. That is, the POI "verts" and "tris" counts don't go up when I add these blocks to a POI. This means if I use them I cannot really tell how "heavy" my POI is. It wouldn't matter for a small POI, but putting on large projects you have to watch those counts. I'm confused why those seem to be 0 for your blocks.
• If I place a working arcade or pinball machine, it can be picked up by a player. That isn't what I'd expect. I expect them to have to disassemble it for parts. That feature makes sense for a player-placed block. I know some overhaul mods allow players to pickup all sorts of things, but Vanilla doesn't.
• I couldn't find destroyed pinball machines or a helper for them. They would be handy. Do they exist?
• At first, I couldn't find any pinball machines. This is because I didn't know all the block names. I assumed at first that "arcade_" was the prefix for the entire modlet, but that assumption was wrong. No category in the Prefab Editor seemed to show them all, so I had to know the block names to find them. If they all had a common prefix, like "cranmon_" or "cm_" or something, but even just "arcade_" and "pinball_" work too. I forget how to find the token machine. heh

I'm wondering what your intent / goal is. Are you wanted people like me to bring your blocks into my modlet where I can customize various settings, or are you looking to distribute your modlet and then my modlet could choose to be dependent on yours? I'm kind of partial to the latter. That way you can make updates to your modlet and I don't have to be involved, unless old blocks were changing to new sizes or new names.

 

Again, I'm just trying to think threw things. I don't know if there's already some established pattern or if my thoughts are flawed in some way.

Edited September 9, 2022 by zztong (see edit history)

[zztong]

I'm playing with it a bit more today.

• I cannot find "arcade_changemachine" in the Prefab Editor. It doesn't come up by name.
• I don't see any junk pinball machines in the XML.
• Related to something I mentioned in the previous post, there are often player versions of objects and POI versions of objects. I could see there being POI versions of the non-destroyed cabinets and pinball games, but would have no sound or animations and could not be picked up via the "E" key. They would have to be wrenched like the junk ones. For instance, a "Bedroll (POI)" vs a "Bedroll" ... so we know which is safe to use in a POI... can't be just grabbed like a player version could.

[7DaySonney]

This is so cool! Thanks for your hard work on these.

[Cranberry Monster]

5 hours ago, zztong said:

I'm playing with it a bit more today.

• I cannot find "arcade_changemachine" in the Prefab Editor. It doesn't come up by name.
• I don't see any junk pinball machines in the XML.
• Related to something I mentioned in the previous post, there are often player versions of objects and POI versions of objects. I could see there being POI versions of the non-destroyed cabinets and pinball games, but would have no sound or animations and could not be picked up via the "E" key. They would have to be wrenched like the junk ones. For instance, a "Bedroll (POI)" vs a "Bedroll" ... so we know which is safe to use in a POI... can't be just grabbed like a player version could.

 

First off, thanks for all the thoughtful feedback, @zztong. This mod was never going to be released into the wild until a couple of players with similar interests asked for it, so naming conventions and gameplay need some tweaking.

 

The change machine I have apparently tagged as a Dev block, despite the fact that it's player-craftable in game. So you need to toggle Dev blocks on to see it in the editor. The people I play with like to sell things at all hours, so the change machine is set to buy, as well as selling the occasional related part. This is probably OP for a lot of players, and I definitely need to add a "broken" version of the machine that works like the Broken Vending Machine, with a chance of Dukes or Old Cash being inside. It might also give me a chance to use the audio clip I included but couldn't get to function on the vending machine version.

 

The junked versions of the video games are named "junkcab_1," "junkcab_1b," etc--there are multiple version that drop different PCBs when scrapped. The placeholder is called "JunkArcadeCabRandomHelper". There are no junked version of the pinball games yet.

 

The reason the working machines can be picked up is because I have no experience making working electrical blocks such as could be picked up in your LCB area. That was the way I wanted to go, making it a Switch and having  the sound toggle off and on that way, but it's something I still haven't learned to do. Maybe some day. I love your idea of a working version that can't be picked up.

 

Would definitely like to do randomly placed version of the working machines, both video and pinball. I'd probably have to leave the Elvira one out, as it goes up into a third block, whereas all the others fit in the same 2-block-high area.

 

I'm not sure what the deal is with vertices/poly counts on the models. They were downloaded from SketchUp as Collada files (dae), for what that's worth. I do know from testing that you run into issues with too many audio clips playing in a given chunk before the geometry of the machines becomes an issue. I've been playing on a potato of a computer and haven't noticed any real problem with them. Looking at the original models on SketchUp, video games seem to run anywhere from 1k to 4.5k polys, and the pinball machines are generally around 1.5k.

 

I'll let you know when I have a version of the code incorporating your suggestions ready so you can take it for a test drive (and hopefully a junk pinball game or two, as well). Thanks again for the insights from the POI-making side of the game.

[zztong]

8 hours ago, Cranberry Monster said:

The change machine I have apparently tagged as a Dev block, despite the fact that it's player-craftable in game. So you need to toggle Dev blocks on to see it in the editor.

 

Oh, so it is. You'd think I'd know to look there.

 

8 hours ago, Cranberry Monster said:

The people I play with like to sell things at all hours, so the change machine is set to buy, as well as selling the occasional related part. This is probably OP for a lot of players, and I definitely need to add a "broken" version of the machine that works like the Broken Vending Machine, with a chance of Dukes or Old Cash being inside. It might also give me a chance to use the audio clip I included but couldn't get to function on the vending machine version.

 

Yes, that would be appealing.

 

I do think the arcade "mini-game" offered is both compelling and harmless. I mean, maybe the price of selling a working game to the trader is high, or low, and gets tweaked as time goes on, but in the grand scheme of things, good clean fun.

 

The change machine buying and selling is weird to me, but that means nothing. The change machine buying and selling as if it were a vendor might not be desirable to players. Then I run into a weird spot. If I make my modlet depend on this modlet, and folks don't care for the bundling to the point of not being interested in installing, then I'm not satisfying a need anymore. At what point does a mod cross some line? I don't know. Trial and error, gather feedback. So currently, I'd press on and listen. If only modlets had a way to offer configuration options to the players. (Maybe they do, or will.) Otherwise, we start to end up with parts of XML to comment, or uncomment.

 

With my test POI loaded, I'm seeing the following being written to my log files time and time again:

 

AudioSampleProvider buffer overflow. 1024 sample frames discarded.

 

I suspect it is because the test POI has every one of your blocks placed sitting next to each other. I'm guessing if I stand close to too many noise makers that this happens.

 

I found these in log files too, but I don't know the circumstances of what I was doing at the time. I'm only showing a few, but in the log file there appears to be one for each object.

 

2022-09-09T17:03:38 1893.037 ERR Mesh 'defender' not readable in GO: /Chunks/Chunk_1,-2/_BlockEntities/ROArcade_Defender_prefab
2022-09-09T17:03:38 1893.037 ERR Mesh 'defender' not readable in GO: /Chunks/Chunk_1,-2/_BlockEntities/SArcade_Defender_prefab
2022-09-09T17:03:38 1893.037 ERR Mesh 'group_84' not readable in GO: /Chunks/Chunk_1,-1/_BlockEntities/SArcade_DragLair2_prefab
2022-09-09T17:03:38 1893.037 ERR Mesh 'tempest' not readable in GO: /Chunks/Chunk_1,-1/_BlockEntities/Arcade_Tempest_prefab
2022-09-09T17:03:38 1893.037 ERR Mesh 'model' not readable in GO: /Chunks/Chunk_1,-1/_BlockEntities/SArcade_Warrior_prefab
2022-09-09T17:03:38 1893.037 ERR Mesh 'crystal' not readable in GO: /Chunks/Chunk_1,-1/_BlockEntities/Arcade_Cry_Castle_prefab
2022-09-09T17:03:38 1893.037 ERR Mesh 'starhawk' not readable in GO: /Chunks/Chunk_1,-1/_BlockEntities/SArcade_Starhawk_prefab
2022-09-09T17:03:38 1893.037 ERR Mesh 'starcast' not readable in GO: /Chunks/Chunk_1,-1/_BlockEntities/ROArcade_Star_Castle_prefab

 

 

[Cranberry Monster]

On 9/10/2022 at 9:34 PM, zztong said:

 

The change machine buying and selling is weird to me, but that means nothing. The change machine buying and selling as if it were a vendor might not be desirable to players. Then I run into a weird spot. If I make my modlet depend on this modlet, and folks don't care for the bundling to the point of not being interested in installing, then I'm not satisfying a need anymore. At what point does a mod cross some line? I don't know. Trial and error, gather feedback. So currently, I'd press on and listen. If only modlets had a way to offer configuration options to the players. (Maybe they do, or will.) Otherwise, we start to end up with parts of XML to comment, or uncomment.

 

Thanks again for the insights. The change machine buying from players would be viewed by OP as many, I'm sure, and in light of your comments, I'm thinking setting that as off by default would probably be wisest.

 

While pondering this modlet, its size, and customization options, it occurred to me that a series of modlets with dependencies might be the best way to handle customization. For example, 0_Cran_Arcade_POI mod adds the 5 junk arcade cabinets, 3 junk pinball machines, and a junk change machine for placement in POIs. They would scrap to vanilla parts and add new craftables. The file size would be about 13 Mb, possibly less with some optimization on textures and such (I made the junk pinballs and change machine this weekend and 13 Mb was the size of the Unity3d file for those 9 models together).

1_Cran_Arcade_Craftables would add PCBs and pinball backglasses to the world and allow players to craft working video games, pinball machines, and (possibly) a change machine that sold arcade related parts but didn't buy anything (similar to vanilla vending machines), with a file size of the current 150 Mb-ish download.

2_Cran_Arcade_Change_Machine would be xml only, and allow those who wanted to toggle on the "buy from players" function of the change machine.

I'm not sure how modlet managers currently work, as I manual load mods, but I can picture something like choosing 0_Cran_Arcade then allows you to choose 1_Cran_Arcade, which lets you choose 2_Cran_Arcade. Just spit-balling here.

 

As far as audio goes, there's definitely a limit to how many clips can play at once. One of the reasons the machines can be picked up is because we had to grab them before the red moon because we couldn't hear our guns firing. Having silenced versions and roll off on the audio seems to have fixed that problem, but then, we don't usually have more than a dozen machines placed at a time.

 

As for the mesh errors, I can't check them at the moment as I'm at work and don't have access to my Unity projects, but looking at the names there, that looks like it's calling the highest level of the model in each container--ROArcade_Defender_prefab is the version of Defender with Roll Off sound, and inside that GameObject, defender is probably the highest level of the model (where the box collider and tags are). I'll try to take a look at them in Unity when I get home.

Edited September 11, 2022 by Cranberry Monster
fixed a few typos (see edit history)

[zztong]

13 hours ago, Cranberry Monster said:

While pondering this modlet, its size, and customization options, it occurred to me that a series of modlets with dependencies might be the best way to handle customization.

 

That's an interesting idea. If I built POIs with 0_Cran_Arcade and somebody installed 1_Cran_Arcade, would salvaging from a 0_Cran_Arcade junker be able to cough up PCBs, monitors, glass, cabinets, etc? That is, can the 1_Cran_Arcade modlet be made to modify the XML of the 0_Cran_Arcade modlet? (I've never tried to have a modlet modify the XML of another modlet. Loading order would matter. I guess that's why the numbers.

 

13 hours ago, Cranberry Monster said:

As far as audio goes, there's definitely a limit to how many clips can play at once. One of the reasons the machines can be picked up is because we had to grab them before the red moon because we couldn't hear our guns firing.

 

LOL. That reminds me of the "Haunted House" pinball machine in real life. The local arcade had the volume on that one set pretty loud. When you got the multi-ball part of the game going, the orchestration really rocked out and everyone in the place knew somebody was playing. "Yeh, yeh Zombies, whatever. I'm about to score a free game."

[Cranberry Monster]

10 hours ago, zztong said:

 

That's an interesting idea. If I built POIs with 0_Cran_Arcade and somebody installed 1_Cran_Arcade, would salvaging from a 0_Cran_Arcade junker be able to cough up PCBs, monitors, glass, cabinets, etc? That is, can the 1_Cran_Arcade modlet be made to modify the XML of the 0_Cran_Arcade modlet? (I've never tried to have a modlet modify the XML of another modlet. Loading order would matter. I guess that's why the numbers.

 

 

Yes, if you're sure of the loading order, you can have later mods add to or modify earlier ones. In the case of PCB drops from salvaging a junk arcade cabinet, you'd just add a little extra code to the definition in blocks.xml so there's a chance of a PCB dropping. Likewise, a line or two of xml lets you turn on the ability to sell to a vending machine like the change machine (vending machines are traders with the "buy" option set to false).

 

I'm going to experiment with the textures on one of current arcade machine models and see if changing the textures to powers of 2 gives an appreciable saving in file size (apparently Unity can't compress oddly-sized textures).

[zztong]

20 minutes ago, Cranberry Monster said:

I'm going to experiment with the textures on one of current arcade machine models and see if changing the textures to powers of 2 gives an appreciable saving in file size (apparently Unity can't compress oddly-sized textures).

 

I'm a total newb with these meshy 3D-objecty things. Killerbunny264 was just telling me about how it saves a bunch to put everything in one AssetBundle. I've yet to make an AssetBundle, but I think (hope) to be getting close.

[Stoneson]

love this mod man. 

[Cranberry Monster]

1 hour ago, Stoneson said:

love this mod man. 

Glad to hear it. I'll be updating it for A21 as soon as I get a chance, adding some classic wedgehead pinball games and optimizing textures, sound, and geometry for (hopefully) a smaller download and better performance.

[Stoneson]

any chance to build minigames in? can we actually play pinball or pacman on an emulator or sth?  

[Stoneson]

bro when can we expect an update for a21?

cheers

[vonerich]

On 6/13/2023 at 4:57 PM, Cranberry Monster said:

Glad to hear it. I'll be updating it for A21 as soon as I get a chance, adding some classic wedgehead pinball games and optimizing textures, sound, and geometry for (hopefully) a smaller download and better performance.

Loved this mod in A20. Any update on what you are adding for A21?

[Cranberry Monster]

On 8/20/2023 at 10:09 AM, vonerich said:

Loved this mod in A20. Any update on what you are adding for A21?

As I mentioned, I have 3-4 wedgehead pinball machines (El Dorado, Abra Cadabra, and Jacks Open for sure), plus the awesome D&D pinball machine complete with dragon-themed topper. There will also be 3-4 wrecked pinball machine models to scrap for parts, plus a junked version of the change machine.

 

If I can figure out how to do electrical blocks correctly, I'll probably make the working arcade machines as switches, which would allow people to hook them into a power grid, switch them off and on, and other fun stuff. It would also allow me to (in good conscience) remove the battery requirement from the recipe for each if you have to worry about wiring them into a grid.

 

Almost done with a major commitment that'd been eating into my modding time (not marriage, another one), so watch this space for news and updates on the A21 version.

[vonerich]

On 8/20/2023 at 9:13 PM, Cranberry Monster said:

As I mentioned, I have 3-4 wedgehead pinball machines (El Dorado, Abra Cadabra, and Jacks Open for sure), plus the awesome D&D pinball machine complete with dragon-themed topper. There will also be 3-4 wrecked pinball machine models to scrap for parts, plus a junked version of the change machine.

 

If I can figure out how to do electrical blocks correctly, I'll probably make the working arcade machines as switches, which would allow people to hook them into a power grid, switch them off and on, and other fun stuff. It would also allow me to (in good conscience) remove the battery requirement from the recipe for each if you have to worry about wiring them into a grid.

 

Almost done with a major commitment that'd been eating into my modding time (not marriage, another one), so watch this space for news and updates on the A21 version.

Thanks for the update. Really looking forward to more of your work.

[Skullfracture]

Any update on A21?