Unity is one of the leading game engines. It has previously been dominating the mobile game segment, but in recent years has caught up a lot in terms visual fidelity for high-end platforms.
Unity is free for non-commercial projects. VPE provides Unity support in a
separate DLL, called VisualPinball.Unity.
Currently this part of VPE is about importing the meshes, textures and
materials correctly. You can either do a full import, meaning Unity will
generate its own assets for an imported table, a quick import which only loads
it into memory, or drag a .vpx file into Unity directly.
It currently uses the built-in renderer, but will also be compatible with Unity's High Definition Render Pipeline
This repository acts as a Unity Package. That means you can import it into your Unity project as a package. In order to do that:
- Open Package Manager (Window / Package Manager)
- Click on the "plus" button on the top left
- Choose Add package from disk
- Navigate where you cloned this repo and select
package.json
You'll then have a Visual Pinball menu in the Unity editor where you can
import .vpx files. You'll be also able to drag and drop .vpx files into
your asset folder and Unity will create the table model directly.
Unity allows extending its editor. This would allow us to use Unity as a table
editor, given VPE is able to write .vpx files. While the Unity editor is not
a modelling tool, it has excellent integration with existing tools like
Blender, so would facilitate the workflow for table authors a lot.
Since the VPX file format acts like a virtual file system, it would be possible
to save additional assets such as custom materials or shaders to the .vpx
file without breaking backwards compatibility.
This would allow table authors to provide tables that run in Visual Pinball and at the same time make use of Unity's more advanced shaders.