If I had thought to design that area differently (to soak up ball velocity instead of bouncing it straight back out), that would be different now. The VUK in the upper left is so bloody impossible to hit that I am basically writing it out of the game rules. That said, I wish VP's saucer kickers behaved more realistically. While the 3D features might have been nice to have for UT's design, I feel like VP gave me the advantage that I had to think more carefully about what I was designing and how everything was going to fit together. One of the biggest issues that I had was that FP's more realistic graphics and components give you a false sense of confidence that something can be built as designed. Some of them have some nice ideas that I might reuse in the future, but the bulk of them would be either impossible to build, overly expensive to build in a way that works, or impossible to play properly because the layout depended on FP's wonky flipper physics. I still have an archive of old FP tables I designed years ago. You just hit the nail on the head right there. I can answer this - it's partly the first two, but also that the default FP physics are bobbins - there are too many elements that don't behave in a realistic way.

We built up a fair library of unused designs between us this way. Anything that after some tweaking flipped well in both versions, we could be pretty sure we had the best of both worlds and it ought to translate well to a potential whitewood.

It still isn't perfect of course - VP's physics timer runs on cycles that are long enough to eventually predict, and it doesn't allow for skips and air balls unless things go seriously haywire.Īt Heighway, when myself and SlamTilt would come up with intriguing ideas, or wanted to prove a concept, what would happen is one of us would build us something flippable in one engine, and the other would present it in the other engine - me in VP, him in FP with his own settings. I still use VP 9.9 as a design tool, with my own set of accurately-built custom objects, and custom physics routines in the script. I'm curious, why would you say designing the game in Future Pinball was a mistake? Do the measurements of objects in FP not translate to real life properly, or was it because FP allows you to leave out elements that with be crucial IRL? I've got some designs I made in FP that I think I'd enjoy building IRL if I ever find the time and resources, but I'm curious how much of a challenge that would be with them being FP blueprints.

Undertale snowman piece