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Beat the Clock (Bally 1985)

First-time toolkit table build by apophis79 with extensive Blender debugging. Notable for uncovering the toolkit lightmap influence pruning bug on dark playfields and for implementing DOF-driven addressable LED clock effects on the cabinet backwall.

Build Story

Built between March 2023 and January 2024, primarily by apophis79 with support from flux5009, benji084, bord1947, and tomate80. As a first toolkit build, the project surfaced several toolkit bugs including influence map UV alignment issues and lightmap pruning on dark playfield areas. These findings led to fixes in the toolkit itself.

Table-Specific Details

Mechanisms & Hardware

  • DOF addressable LED clock: A countdown clock on the cabinet backwall uses addressable LEDs that mirror the table's clock inserts. Configuration uses SHP (Shape) commands for number display (SHPNumber0-5, SHPColon) in the DOF Config Tool's "PF Back Effects MX" entries. Clock values mapped from table lamp states (L9-L44) to positioned number shapes on the LED matrix.

Art & Visuals

  • Dark playfield areas caused insert lightmaps to be pruned by the toolkit's influence threshold (0.01). The near-black playfield produced near-zero influence values. Solved by lifting minimum black to #111111 and adding gamma/noise to dark areas.
  • A toolkit influence map UV alignment bug was discovered where composite influence maps were misaligned with visibility maps. The fix involved correcting UV coordinates during the stacking/filtering step. Reported to and fixed by the toolkit team.

Known Issues

  • Blender batch renders can crash on certain mesh configurations -- disabling "Optimize Mesh" for the problematic mesh resolves this.
  • Decals placed exactly at surface level may render in Blender but appear buried in VPX -- cheat Z position slightly higher.

Techniques Developed Here

See Also