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Visual Pinball: Build Your Own Pinball Machine Interview with Visual Pinball?s co-developer Randy Davis
DGD: Visual Pinball allows you to design in 2D but how is it able to render the table to display as 3D?

RD: VP has the concept of 3D internally; I made the decision to make the editor 2D to draw more people in. I was afraid (and still am) that if a new user opened the editor and saw the standard 3D modeler view with top/side/front windows and a bunch of lines going everywhere, they would freak and never create a table. Thus the much simplified view of walls and everything that you get today. A lot of people have written saying they want better support for custom 3D things. That would be neat; it will depend on the direction VP goes in.

At first, the physics were all 2D, and there were no ramps (even though it still rendered 3D). Then, late in development, I realized that I couldn?t just gloss over ramps like I had wanted to, so I rewrote a bunch of things to support 3D physics. It was a big pain but in the end it worked out better than I thought. I download tables with ramps on them and always have to mentally cross my fingers when the ball is on one, but really there haven?t been a lot of issues.

DGD: Will you consider making Visual Pinball available for other platforms if possible and why?

RD: This is not part of my current plan. To make this happen, I would have to have access to those platforms, and those platforms would have to support a built-in method of automation scripting compatible with Windows? OLE. I don?t see that happening real soon.



DGD: What is your future plans for Visual Pinball?
RD: My future plan is to find enough time to work on it again. I?ve been slacking off lately because I?ve been very busy with other things in my life. There are a few almost-ready features though; I just need to finish things off for the next release.

DGD: What?s your favorite pinball game of all-time and why?

RD: I actually haven?t played a lot of the games people mention as being their favorite on the forums. Being from a small city in Alaska means I didn?t have a lot of access to the latest culture. High Speed and PinBot are up there because many good times were spent hanging out around those. Medival Madness was really creative although I only played it a couple times.

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