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Star Trek: The Next Generation (Williams 1993)

VPW mod tune-up of the existing Knorr/ClarkKent table rather than a ground-up build. Notable for documenting upper flipper correction limitations, rubber sleeve physics sizing standards, target bouncer exclusion zones near scoops, and the difficulty slider's hidden impact on physics tuning.

Build Story

This was a refinement project -- applying VPW physics, sound, and visual standards to an existing community table. Key contributors included clarkkent9917, sixtoe, fluffhead35, apophis79, and manners7344. The table's complex mechanism set (6 balls, multiple lock positions, mission scoop) made it a thorough test of nFozzy physics integration.

Table-Specific Details

Mechanisms & Hardware

  • 6-ball initialization: STTNG has multiple ball storage locations (main trough, left gun, right gun, left inlane lock). Balls are initialized directly in their correct starting positions via script -- 3 in main trough, 1 in each gun trough, 1 in left lock -- eliminating the ROM-driven loading sequence delay. See trough implementation patterns.
  • Start Mission scoop tuning: Three fixes combined to resolve excessive shot rejection: (1) removed the rubber post to the right of the scoop (the real machine has no post there), (2) slightly enlarged the scoop primitive and adjusted the ball guide, (3) removed target bouncer from the sleeves around the scoop -- the Z-kick was deflecting balls that should have entered.
  • Hidden dampening triggers: The original table contained invisible trigger objects that artificially slowed the ball in orbit loops to compensate for inaccurate physics. With nFozzy physics, these must be removed -- nFozzy handles deceleration through friction and gravity. Removing the hidden trigger immediately fixed the Picard Maneuver combo shot.

Physics & Gameplay

  • Upper flipper correction: The nFozzy flipper correction script adjusts the ball's X-axis velocity relative to the table, not relative to the flipper surface. For upper flippers at different angles, the correction pushes the ball in the wrong direction. Fix: disable correction on the upper flipper. This limitation is documented in the physics guide.
  • Rubber sleeve sizing: Standard rubber sleeve physics objects confirmed at 20x20x20 VP units, derived from toolkit blueprint measurements of actual machine sleeves. Oversized sleeves make the table harder than intended.
  • Difficulty slider: Default difficulty of 20 produces significantly different physics than the intended 50-56 range. Always set to ~56 before physics tuning. See difficulty slider behavior.
  • Inlane ball acceleration: Balls rolling down inlanes unnaturally accelerate due to accumulated angular momentum. Fix: Activeball.angmomz = 0 in the inlane switch _Hit sub, plus optionally Activeball.vely = Activeball.vely * 0.8.
  • Staged flipper wiring: Do NOT call flipper solenoid callbacks directly from KeyUp/KeyDown subs. VPinMAME handles routing through core.vbs -- calling directly creates conflicts where the upper flipper won't disable after game-over.

Art & Visuals

  • Environment image: Flupper's shinyenvironment3blur4 avoids glare issues from custom HDRIs. A cayley_interior HDRI had a ceiling lamp creating intense reflections in both desktop and VR.
  • Playfield mesh loop cuts: Long edges cause texture alignment drift. Adding loop cuts to subdivide long edges prevents cumulative drift, especially visible at scoop and kicker hole boundaries.

Known Issues

  • VR sideblades in cabinet mode: Tables with two sideblade sets show the wrong set when VR runs with cabinet mode enabled. Fix: use RenderingMode=2 check to force normal-sized sideblades in VR regardless of cabinet setting.
  • NFadeLm ordering: In the UpdateLamps function, multi-lamp subs (NFadeLm) must be placed before single-lamp subs (NFadeL), or the single-lamp version overwrites the multi-lamp result. Lamp 34 (kickback) was affected.

Techniques Developed Here

See Also