Table Announcement: Monopoly by PD/BBB

[volumetric]

Tried to install this table and I got a line 44 and then a line 61 error.

I think i found a solution to this problem, on my system, if im running ad aware, the table will not load giving the above message, as soon as ad aware is disabled, all is good (and the table seems more than playable on modest hardware). So check what you're running in the background, it may not just be ad aware that causes the problem.

[mandelbloom]

Runs decent for me on a GTS 450 athlon X2 3.6. On occasion the ball will jump. As I understand it this uses flash which is a known hog I wonder if a new version of flash would help?

[Guest Noah Fentz]

I'm building an 'Extreme' version of a cab this month. If this baby doesn't run this table smooth, I don't know what will ...

# Intel Core i7-960 Bloomfield 3.2GHz LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor

# Dual EVGA GeForce GTX 460 (Fermi) Superclocked EE 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Cards

[oooPLAYER1ooo]

Bill is there any chance if flashvp was compiled using newest flash you could use gpu features ?

I have been working with flash again and the difference is huge on my info terminal projects

[jdsabin1]

I'm building an 'Extreme' version of a cab this month. If this baby doesn't run this table smooth, I don't know what will ...

# Intel Core i7-960 Bloomfield 3.2GHz LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor

# Dual EVGA GeForce GTX 460 (Fermi) Superclocked EE 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Cards

I have a:

# AMD Phenom II X4 970 Black Edition 3.5GHz 4 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket Quad-Core (OC'd to 3.8GHz)

# (single) EVGA GeForce GTX 460 (Fermi) Superclocked EE 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card (2nd video card for the DMD is a GeForce 8400 GS)

And I still cannot get the game to play like it should. The ball is just too 'jittery', for lack of better terminology. There are times when it seems to just go too fast or hiccup and just kills the gameplay experience.

It's a shame too as I can't think of a VP table out there right now that looks as good as this one does.

[mandelbloom]

I am running an AMD Phenom X2 (overclocked to 3.85GHZ) with a GTS 450 and if I turn UVP off this table plays smooth as silk! With UVP on it has a little tiny bit if jitter but playable. UVP doesnt do much for it so if you are using it just remove it.

[jdsabin1]

I am running an AMD Phenom X2 (overclocked to 3.85GHZ) with a GTS 450 and if I turn UVP off this table plays smooth as silk! With UVP on it has a little tiny bit if jitter but playable. UVP doesnt do much for it so if you are using it just remove it.

Great to know and will do!

[jdsabin1]

I am running an AMD Phenom X2 (overclocked to 3.85GHZ) with a GTS 450 and if I turn UVP off this table plays smooth as silk! With UVP on it has a little tiny bit if jitter but playable. UVP doesnt do much for it so if you are using it just remove it.

Well I did that but this table is anything but 'smoth as silk' still. I even put in my GTS 450 as my secondary card so now I have my playfield running off my GTX 460 and the backbox and DMD running off the GTS 450 (both at 16 bit color).

I have tweaked the files as much as I can. I'd say it's 80% but the ball still 'jumps' around and seems to 'disappear' at times.

I also noticed the sound gets 'stuttery' and there is no sound on the two lower left and right bumpers.

[mandelbloom]

Hmm are you running the latest version of this Table? there were some options such as setting Yield Time = 0 that seemed to help some. I will say this the ball used on this table almost looks a little clear but there is no jumping at all for me. It is quite fast though sometimes my eyes lose track of it I actually find the pinball that JPSalas uses on most of his tables to be the most eye pleasing. Sound never breaks up at all for me.

[jdsabin1]

Hmm are you running the latest version of this Table? there were some options such as setting Yield Time = 0 that seemed to help some. I will say this the ball used on this table almost looks a little clear but there is no jumping at all for me. It is quite fast though sometimes my eyes lose track of it I actually find the pinball that JPSalas uses on most of his tables to be the most eye pleasing. Sound never breaks up at all for me.

Maybe the actual ball being 'clear' is what is throwing me off perhaps. I am going to mess with the slope and a few other things to try and make this play better.

Out of curiosity - do you use affinity or anyhing?

[mandelbloom]

Actually setting affinity for VPIN made monopoly play terrible! I did set UltraVP to my second core but for this table wouldn't matter.

[mandelbloom]

Here is a video of monopoly playing on my cab. Its not so great I had to hold my iphone with my chin and chest to get it haha. But to me it plays fine, though the ball does move pretty fast

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4st3DRlLo14&hd=1

[YOUTUBE HD]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4st3DRlLo14&hd=1[/YOUTUBE HD]

[jdsabin1]

Thanks for posting that video. What video card are you using, what drivers and what OS if you don't mind me asking.

Also, what settings do you have in the script itself?

There has to be a problem with something with my setup, I just can't figure out what that might be.

[mandelbloom]

I didnt really mess with the script. My setup is a GTS450 slightly overlocked, AMD Phenom X2 @ 3.85ghz(OC), 4GB ram, 30 gig SSD, I am running at full 1080P 32 bit color on the playfield. I can send you my script but I followed the instructions on page 2 or 3 of this post about deleting a couple files and I think my yield time was already = 0. Oh and I am running windows XP page file turned off, latest version of flash, VP 9.1.2. , latest nvidia drivers. Think thats about it

[jdsabin1]

I wonder if Windows 7 vs XP has anything to do with it. My PC specs are more than adequate.

[mandelbloom]

I think it might...Blitz is running windows 7 on almost identical hardware as me and he noticed a little ball stutter until he went to a GTX 460.

[SRoode]

Thanks BBB for such a beautiful table. The only thing I had to change was to increase the FVP Timer. It's runs nice and smooth on my system (Windows 7 64 bit, Sandybridge Core i3-2100 Dual Core @ 3.1 GHz, Main Playfield Graphics Card GTX570, Backglass/DMD Graphics Card 8800GT)

Really excellent work!

[IgnusFast]

Wow, this is a strange one. I finally hacked all the Flash stuff out of this table just to test it - and it's the freaking table that's causing the slowdown issues. At least on my machine. Any time the ball is in the lower 1/2 of the playfield, it's just completely unplayable. STRANGE.

[jcat]

Amazing table - absolutely love it! I was getting that timer error message, as well. I temporarily disabled my AVG Anti-Virus program in msconfig, and sure enough, Monopoly worked just fine & smooth too!

I'm fairly new to the VP/FP scene, and I just wanted to check make sure it's normal for transparent ramps in VP9 to use a very fine b/w texture to simulate transparency, or is that suppose to be solid?

[IgnusFast]

Older tables used pixel chroma keying (pixel color set to transparent) to simulate transparency, so it looked like a fine sieve.

Some tables have recently been rewritten to take advantage of the fact that the latest version(s) support true alpha transparency.

[jcat]

Older tables used pixel chroma keying (pixel color set to transparent) to simulate transparency, so it looked like a fine sieve.

Some tables have recently been rewritten to take advantage of the fact that the latest version(s) support true alpha transparency.

Thanks - so now I'm concerned, whether or not the ramps in Monopoly use true transparency, because that's not what I see. The ramps on my screen look like your description of the simulated transparency (fine sieve). If it was designed that way, no problem, but if it's suppose to be showing true transparency, then there is something wrong on my end.

[IgnusFast]

Nope; Monopoly pre-dates the alpha transparency stuff. It uses the simulated tranparency combined with Flash player stuff for the flashers.

[Zablon]

There was a current topic over at VP about trying to get someone to redo Monopoly, and I posted this there, but figured it wouldn't hurt to post it here as well:

So, I did some experimenting with Monopoly and this is what I found.

In Win7-64bit - quad core (gtx460/gtx450) @ 4.0ghz it runs a bit choppy and stuttery the entire game. Using prefinity - I divided up the tasks putting FVP in on it's own cpu. No change in the way it acted, however no CPU went over 50% usage.

At some point, I tabbed out to do something and noticed something odd. FVP stays on top of everything! I max'd a window and FVP pics were still on top. I tabbed back to the actual table, and the FVP pictures were gone from the screen and were hidden. You could still see the actual ramps from the VP table. I started a game. It ran flawlessly. No stutters at all. I watched the CPU usage and FVP was still running, it just wasn't visible on screen. I closed out of VP and was able to reproduce this affect. This leads me to believe the real issue here is VP fighting for some sort of layer priorities with FVP. I don't know enough about VP to say for sure why this is, but I even changed the ramps from acrylic to alpha and was able to play stutter free. So assuming this is true, then shouldn't someone be able to take the "parts" that are displayed in FVP and import them into the actual VP table, then of course using alpha ramps as well? I am not sure what all FVP is actually doing in the game. It seems like it was used for some high quality textures and ramps...but did it have any table scripting as well?

Seems this would be easier than re making the entire table, the table is great as is.

If needed I will post a video of this later. I think someone who knows more about VP than me should try this.

[dokworm]

That sounds intriguing, I've been wondering why Monopoly is such a beast to run.

[mjfisher]

Hi guys,

Hope I'm putting this in the right place. I'm almost finished on my 3 monitor cab build which is running a GTX 560 and GTX 260 (for DMD). I tried Windows XP initially and had some weird issues with Data East and Stern games and the latest drivers (GTX 560s appear to only able to use later 27x.xx drivers).

I called it a day and decided to try Windows 7 64 bit hearing that some people had good results and my pc is pretty beefy. Everything worked "okay" in most instances but the Monopoly table in particular ran terrible. After following the various guides, trying different sound drivers, throwing XP compatibility on every .exe I could find, I decided to focus on the NVIDIA driver config and I now have Monopoly (and the other 20-odd tables so far) all running smoothly. I was wondering if anyone else was interested in trying these config on their NVIDIA based Win7 x64 systems and seeing if it helps them. Before these changes I had severe stutter in Monopoly - in Multi-ball the balls almost vanished half the time on the screen..

Here's what I did:

Using the latest NVIDIA non-Beta drivers (I think 275.33) I went into the NVIDIA control panel and selected Manage 3D settings and set everything as follows:

Multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration - Compatibility Mode

Power Management mode - Prefer Maximum Performance

Threaded Optimisation - Off

Vertical Sync - Off

Tried again (running Monopoly at whatever defaults it was on, Flashers running etc and it still stuttered.

The final thing I did was go into Control Panel, go into Themes and select the Windows 7 Aero Theme (then set the backdrops to Black Solid colour again).

Tried Monopoly again and it's now running smooth as silk. (Brilliant game by the way and looks beautiful).

Would be interested in seeing if this works for anyone else. I haven't made any other adjustments to Windows 7 - haven't uninstalled any standard programs, stopped indexing or other services etc. This is a purely standard install (plus it's Ultimate so has a bunch of other garbage installed I don't need at the moment) but it's running brilliantly so I'm not going to fiddle with it much at the moment.

Hope this helps others out there - I couldn't believe the difference in performance by changing just a few settings.

Thanks all..