An engine for creating and re-creating pinball machines, virtually.
VPE is a toolkit with the goal of making it easy to create pinball machines digitally. It uses Unity's High Definition Render Pipeline and comes with extensive editor tooling that aims to provide all the features needed for such a task. VPE can read Visual Pinball's file format and uses Visual Pinball's physics code for the simulation during gameplay.
For a more detailed overview, header over to the website. It's also where all the new features get documented.
The project started in late 2019 and is still actively being developed. We're part of the virtual pinball community and as such, this project is a community effort. The following is a list of relevant posts that document the progress of VPE so far.
- Feburary 2020 - First public post with VPX import working
- Feburary 2020 - It's alive!
- March 2020 - PinMAME is working
- May 2020 - Physics game loop ported over from Visual Pinball
- June 2020 - More physics
- August 2020 - Most editor tools ported from VPX
- October 2020 - Physics are complete, documentation site, scripting, MPF
- October 2020 - Materials, rendering
- November 2020 - Rendering
- December 2020 - More rendering
- March 2021 - Game logic
- April 2021 - Segment display shader
- June 2021 - Retrospect and the future
- September 2021 - Prefabs, data, wiring, export and more
- December 2021 - Insert lights rendering
- December 2021 - Visual Scripting POC
- January 2022 - It runs on an iPad!
- February 2022 - Lighting
- July 2022 - Visual Scripting, Physics, Asset Library, Tutorials, VR/AR, the future
- December 2022 - Asset library, world space, score motors
During that time, we've also written a guest article at thisweekinpinball.com about our community..
The "core" of VPE (i.e. the VisualPinball.Engine project) is a pure C# port
of the original Visual Pinball. It has no dependencies to any proprietary third
parties, and provides the data layer.
This repository is part of a number of packages. It is what we're referring to as the main package, which also includes the core project.
We've put them in a Wiki. :)
Special thanks go to JetBrains for their awesome IDE and support of the Open Source Community!