Custom PC Case Missed this portion of talk…
- custom fight stick for Street Fighter
- initially thought he’d punch buttons through an LCD - not a good idea!
- ended up using LED strips from Adafruit
- used Sketchup for designing enclosures
- Arduino Mega for LED controller initially
- knew NOTHING about electronics at the onset, had to start from scratch right down to getting an intro to electronics book
- as a Java developer, found working in C on the Arduino to be very challenging
- eventually switched to using a Raspberry Pi and programming in Python - BiblioPixel - opensource LED control library in Python
- Brook Fighting PCB used to interface the controller with the console
Summary
- bringing old and new tech together in new forms
- using physical interfaces to interact with virtual tools
- Unreal Engine 4 - thought he’d be able to get something that looked like the trailers…vastly underestimated the size of the teams that go into creating the 3D artwork seen
- used Sketchup again to model the pinball game
- used plugin to export FBX files using Blender to scale the Sketchup files to work in Unreal
- in Unreal, used Blueprint, node based gui interface for programming the pinball game, which was more than enough to meet the projects needs without getting into C++ development
- repurposed old bookshelf into pinball cabinet
- hooked up Oculus Rift so that you could have a great virtual pinball experience for a lot less than a real cabinet but better experience than flat screen virtual cabinets
- choose Unreal bit probably should have gone with Unity