I'd imagine that pinball is essentially 2D. Maybe some lanes and ramps would affect gravity, but I can imagine the few Z-direction adjustments aren't worth simulating everything in 3D.
replyThe ball often jumps off the playfield in real pinball. It's not unusual for it to jump high enough to hit the glass. You'll never get an accurate simulation if you simulate it in 2D.
replyWhen you already have accelerator fields (pretty likely for a pinball simulator) you can reuse them for ramps
replyI was writing my own 3D egnine at the start of the year. I eventually gave up and switch to Jolt in August.
replyIf you are already using Jolt, have you thought about switching to Godot to make it cross-platform?
replyI started with Godot, and swtich back to Pascal. It will be and is cross platform, but I am focusing on Linux, because that is what I use.
replyWith regards to Godot, while I like it, when using my own engine I can take a lot of shortcusts that Godot cannot. For example, I am able to save a lot of computational logic on reflections by making the requirements that reflections only world on right angled surfaces, which is fine for a pinball table. Also, I am able to cheap out with lighting using a my ouwn techniques for generating lighting maps in a shader, something that is hard to pull off with Godot.
This other game project of mine is written using Godot and C#: