Jackpot
A thoroughly rigged casino, for Resolume
What it does
Two FFGL plugins for Resolume Arena and Avenue: SW Jackpot, a source, and SW Jackpot Over, which does the same over your clip. You get a one-armed bandit, a roulette wheel, the money wheel, a craps table and the lottery drum, and a shower of chips and coins when somebody wins. Press Play and the game plays out with proper physics, then comes to rest on a random result, or the one you set, at exactly Spin Time or on the next beat or bar.
The trick is that every casino game has a symmetry the physics can't see. The 37 frets on a roulette rotor are all identical, so the numbered ring can be turned by whole pockets without changing anything about how the ball moves. Same with the money wheel's 54 pegs. A die can be drawn rotated, and lottery balls are all alike until somebody paints numbers on them. So each game is simulated honestly ahead of time, and then the paint gets moved so the right number ends up in the right place. The motion you see is exactly what the physics did. Only the numbers have moved, and you never see them do it.
The slot machine doesn't even need the trick. The stops are the result, laid out on a virtual reel the way every machine has done it since Telnaes's 1984 patent, so a seven sails past just above or below the line twelve times for every time it actually lands. Just like the real ones, the swines. The reels blur from the shutter rather than a filter and bounce into their detents. The roulette ball rides the banked track until it's too slow to, drops, clips a diamond, rattles across the frets of the rotor going the other way and settles. The money wheel slows peg by peg on its leather clapper, the craps dice bounce off the pyramid wall and the table remembers the point, the lottery's air jet blows the balls up the glass until the tube opens, and the chips and coins tumble, bounce and whirr flat like Euler's disk.
- Five games and a shower: slots on 3 or 5 reels, European and American roulette, the money wheel, craps with the point and the puck, a lottery drum of 10 to 75 balls
- Results that read against your bet: Random (weighted as the real game), Win, Jackpot, Near Miss, Lose or a Fixed number, all through the same mechanism
- Lands at exactly Spin Time (1 to 20 s) or on the next beat or bar of the host's transport
- A slot machine with a virtual reel, honest near misses, shutter motion blur and reel bounce, paying from the left with a credit meter
- Ray-traced 3D roulette, craps and lottery with a light angle and tilt; chips and coins as rigid discs that tumble, bounce and settle
- A source with a transparent, felt or dark backdrop, and an effect that plays it over the clip with Mix; the effect can put the clip on the reels
- Universal macOS bundle and a Windows x64 DLL
Where it stands
v0.1.1, and early days. v0.1.1 answers the first report off a real rig: every piece the shower throws now fades about 12 s later, so the pile clears itself and the shower keeps falling however long it runs (watched in Arena 7.27.1 on Windows), and Play sits at the top of the panel, where collapsing the Game group can't hide it. Where Play ends up hasn't been looked at in Resolume yet. I've loaded v0.1.0 into Resolume Arena 7.27.1 on macOS: both plugins register, the source paid out the slot machine's jackpot and landed roulette on 7 red when asked, at Spin Time, and Arena's log had nothing to complain about. I haven't tried the Over effect, the other games, Land On against Arena's transport or a saved composition there yet. On Windows, a build loads, registers and renders in Arena 7.27.1 on software rendering (no GPU), every control is as declared and it passed all 17 of the fleet's checks. Every control that can change the picture without a game playing did (25 on the source, 27 on the effect), but no game was actually played there. Everything else is measured by an offline harness driving the real plugin code: every roulette number on both wheels lands in the right pocket, read off the picture, and turning the rotor by whole pockets leaves the ball's path bit-identical. The ball leaves the track within 0.5% of where the physics says it should, the slot's near misses match the virtual reel's table over 400,000 pulls, every game is at rest exactly at Spin Time and still moving a frame before, and the coins behave like Euler's disk to within 6%. It catches 21 deliberately wrong models and ten one-character sabotages of its own code, and all 46 controls do something. The physics is checked against the laws it should obey, not against filmed casino kit. There's a user guide, but no presets, browser demo or OpenFX port yet. Try it in your own rig before you trust it in a show.
Watch it running
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