Lifting Gates

Photo © 2022 by bord

Some Gottlieb and Bally games use gates that can be activated and deactivated. It does that by connecting a stem to the wire that lifts it up so the ball can pass through in both directions. The stem is attached to a relay. When the relay is turned on, the one-way gate becomes a two-way gate.

VPE provides a component that you can add to your existing gate. By doing that, it creates a new coil device that you can then map in the Coil Manager.

Setup

In order to add the lifting gate feature to a gate, select the game object of the gate and click on Add Component in the inspector. Select it by searching or navigating to Visual Pinball -> Mechs -> Gate Lifter.

Lifting Angle

How many degrees the wire rotates up to the deactivated position. About 15° should work well for most geometry.

Animation Speed

How fast the gate rotates from and into the decativated position. Higher is faster. 0.1 seems a reasonable value.

Usage

Adding the gate lifter component adds a coil input to the gate, i.e. you can map it to any of the gamelogic engine's coil outputs through the Coil Manager.

Note

If you're working on an EM game or an original game with Visual Scripting, don't forget to add the new coil to the coil definitions.