Elite Pinball HD In Review! - Using CEV & farseer

#1 Bit of a teaser... how long do you really want to watch us play pinball when you could be playing yourself!?

#2 In our playtest, Chris Covington noted: "I got the best results when I ran the PhysicsSimulator.Update() method 10 times within a single Game.Update() to help with penetration and collision issues."

Can you (Chris) or someone else expand on how that's done? Where does the PhysicsSimulator object for the game get instantiated... do I need to do that myself... I'm currently on *vacation* so Chris H. (the 2nd half our our two man team) is manning the playtest, so I haven't had too much time to check into this, but any help would be greatly appreciated.

#3 That would just make your objects move twice as fast, or it did when i tried it. Also, running twice at (elapsed/2) seemed to also do little.

Are you experiencing tunneling? What objects specifically are tunneling into what other objects... can you post a little synopsis of the type of collision you are seeing?

#4 We are seeing the ball occasionally pass through the flippers or get stuck in a flipper. This will happen when both the ball and the flipper are in motion. When the ball gets stuck in a flipper (this always happens to the outside edge) you can flick the ball off of the flipper and usually back into play. It doesn't seem to be a huge problem, but it would be nice to able to clean it up before review.

#5 Same problem we were having. Maybe try changing the thickness of the flipper, that might help with something. Also you can change the number of grids. If its just the flipper and ball, you could actually just bounce the ball out using math, after every PhysicsUpdate, tick. Just check if the balls in there or not, if so, bounce it.

#6 Thats a good idea, then we can tell the ball to bounce out at a -Y velocity and hopefully stop the end user from getting screwed by the ball passing through the flipper to its death. Thanks Will!

#7 Try this in PhysicsSimulator.cs

public float AllowedPenetration = .00f;

let me know if that does anything.

#8 Alright, on PC I am seeing absolutely no penetration with this setting. I am still seeing some on xbox, possibly less. Definitely keeping it this way for the next playtest build.

#9 Thanks for the feedback Will and others that have play-tested the game. Just FYI we put it into review today catalog.create.msdn.com/en-US/GameDetails.aspx?catalogEntryId=cde10204-a22d-4fb3...