Elvira and the Party Monsters for VP / Pinmame
Table recreation by Highrise & JPSalas 2006/7

Well guys, here she is, I hope she was worth the wait. Strictly speaking, this is the first 'built from scratch' table I have ever worked on, since my previous effort, Scared Stiff, was an overhaul of a previous table.

As most will know, Scared Stiff is the sequel to EATP, but in terms of our own work, Elvira is our sequel to Scared Stiff. When we were working on that table, we came up with a whole load of ideas, in particular JP's animation system and my own work with overall lighting, and this was something that we wanted to expand on. What I wanted to aim for (and I dragged JP along with me in this) was a system that brought more of the full lighting effects of a table into VP than had ever been done before. To do this, I wanted full playfield and backglass lamps and G.I. I wanted the table to look like it was built in Future Pinball, maybe even better than that. But I wasn't looking to show off, I just wanted to see just how far VP could be pushed in this regard. What I didn't realise is just how hard it would be to get all of that to work without requiring a megacomputer.

That said, I think we managed most of what we set out to do, and if you do have a top end PC, and a monitor that can display at 1600 x 1200, you will be in for a real treat, with lighting effects that whilst not perfect, have perhaps not been seen in VP before, at least not to this degree. I remember reading somewhere about how full table G.I effects were the last thing left that had not been fully realised in VP. We've come pretty close to getting that here, The top right corner in particular, is easily the most complex piece of composite reel work I've ever undertaken.

What I really hope is that we have managed to capture the spirit of the table. Much of this is dependent on the lighting effects, and I think that in bringing them out to this level, the table is all the more fun for it. Dennis Nordman, the designer, pioneered the idea of using the lighting on the table to draw the eye of the player to different parts of it when different things were triggered. I hope in this respect we were able to come close to the original vision.

When you first run the table, all effects are ON. You will be able to disable them in the menu. If you do not have a fast computer, of the 2.5Ghz range with at least half a gig of RAM, you will experience slowdown with all options on. Don't panic though - we wanted to make sure that it was not limited to high end computers. Even if you have a humble 1Ghz PC, you will find that EATPM runs fine, provided you switch off the menu options. In terms of improving performance, the first thing you should do is turn of the backglass lighting. It's very heavy on the processor, and is basically just eye candy - the E-L-V-I-R-A lights and Barbecue Bonus lights will still work if you do this.

If you still find it lags, try turning of the playfield G.I. After that, the fading lights or the LED display system. Another thing to try is playing the game in 'witching hour' mode, since this disables quite a lot of the reels.

Some technical notes:

One of the big things with this table was developing a full table lighting system. There is practically nowhere on the table or backglass that is not affected by light in some way. To do this, we used a hybrid of overlays and traditional playfield work. By working on a master image at 1600 x 1200, I was able to move fairly easily between the two, and make them work together. A good number of the reels are made by screen grabbing the VP render, then creating the reels over the top of the grabs, converting them to image maps and putting them back in. In this way, the joins are barely visible, and use of transparency, which invariably results in jagged edges and problems with some graphics cards, can be avoided. The biggest feature in Elvira that makes most of the tricks possible is the extensive use of composite reels however. By making all the reels in the 1600 x 1200 image divisible by 8 in height and width, we were able to place the images with much greater accuracy, by simple reading of the size and co-ordinates in photoshop, and dividing by 1.6. This effectively meant that by using two or even three reels for certain object, we were not so limited to the rectangular shape. In addition, by using lighting offsets, we were able to put multiple lighting effects into the same reels. The bumpers at the bottom are a good example of this. They use two reels so that they don't interfere with other effects nearby, and have offset values to allow for both G.I and flashers. In addition, we added a couple of extra frames to allow a more realistic looking kick. 

Initially, we tried to use a full playfield drop wall for the G.I effects, but it was too slow. Realising that large, darker areas of the table would be relatively unaffected by the G.I anway, we split the playfield into zones of colour, and made drop walls of these instead. In addition, we created targets around these areas, so that the ball would change colour slightly according to the area it was in, giving some semblance of reflection.

We also looked at doing full fading on the G.I lights, which is why we ended up with two separate playfields, light and dark. Rather than waste the work, we decided instead to give the player the option of which playfield they wanted to play on. This is NOT a feature that will ever likely appear again, as the work involved was far more than anticipated - we had to create double sets of many reels. That said, the effects are probably just about worth it.

Some other stuff for authors:

The wire ramp on the left was created by building it in future pinball and then putting it into photoshop and then adjusting it accordingly.

The plastic ramp uses semi-transparent tiling effects that we were planning on using in Scared Stiff but did not bother much with it in the end as the ball spends little time under the ramps. In Elvira, the ball spends a good deal of time under the plastic ramps in the top right corner, so we used the tiling to create the feeling of the ball being under the ramp. By creating a set of checkerboard tiles in squares and triangles, it is quite easy to fill any area with this transparent effect, which looks quite good once reels go over the top of it.