I think the easiest way to create a pinball game is to use simple 2D geometric primitives matching your bitmaps. E.g. circles, curves and straight edges, with special case logic for features such as sinkholes, ramps and magnetic devices. With gravity, mass, friction and perhaps rotation you can create a pretty good pinball simulation.

But some pinball games (e.g. the one recently done based on Quake) and games like Sonic go a bit further: like first person shooters they''re using a mix of 2D and 3D. 2D where they can simplify things to 2D, and/or where they want to limit motion to just two degrees of freedom. But otherwise 3D, e,g, for working out the path of a projectile.

The detail of how this is done will depend on the game type and situation. Sonic is particularly difficult as the characters move in various ways, and I suspect this involves a lot of special case coding for each of the ways (e.g.) Sonic moves, sometimes like any FPS, sometimes flying, sometimes racing sort of like Wipeout.

Pinball, like simple games such as Pong, relies a lot on the concept of momentum, as well as its conservation. Momentum is primarily important in collision detection, however, and since in real life pinball games are tilted, the only other major factor is gravity to pull the ball back down.

Basically, if you want to accurately simulate pinball, you would need to add in the mass of the ball to be able to correctly calculate the ball''s momentum.


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Commander M