Setting the Point of View (PoV) in VPX

Introduction

You can adjust how the pinball playfield is displayed on your monitor by tweaking various parameters in Visual Pinball (VPX). There are two main reasons why you would want to do this:

You have downloaded a new table and the settings that it shipped with don't quite match your preferences
You have a pinball cabinet and so want to adjust the settings away from the default desktop mode settings that most tables ship with

This latter point is particularly true if (like me) you have your cabinet set up in portrait mode rather than landscape mode. 99% of all tables are 'shipped' with the point of view set to landscape mode, so have to be rotated 90° to display properly for a portrait-mode setup.

One basic concept to understand is the difference between the table, and the camera. The table can be tilted, stretched and moved around independently of the camera. The camera itself can also be controlled. The interplay between these two elements can often be complex and a tweak to one area may then require an adjustment to another. Thus the whole process of finding an 'ideal' PoV is iterative and ultimately subjective. It's also worth bearing in mind that most adjustments to PoV will change the apparent geometry of the flippers, ramps and playfield, which will affect your ability to perform different shots. This means that every time you adjust PoV you will find that your ability to time different shots may need to be re-trained.

One other piece of terminology: Desktop pinball = pinball played on a PC on a desktop monitor, most frequently in landscape orientation. Cabinet pinball = pinball played in a dedicated cabinet, with two or more monitors or TV screens.

Understanding rotation and aspect ratio

Aspect ratio, in the sense that we need here, is the ratio of the two sides of a rectangular object. Computer monitors are rectangular objects, as are pinball machines. However, there is a problem: monitors are typically used in landscape orientation, that is, they are longer left-right than they are up-down. However, pinball machines are portrait-oriented objects: they are taller/deeper (depending on your perspective) than they are wide. Thus a desktop PC user with a landscape oriented monitor will want the pinball machine to display vertically, which results in a narrow pinball machine in the middle of the screen and lots of emptiness on either side.

A better way to play pinball on a desktop PC is to use a monitor that can be rotated to portrait mode. In this way, the aspect ratio of the monitor is much closer to the aspect ratio of the pinball machine. Portrait-oriented desktop pinball can be achieved in one of two ways:

Adjust your screen to display in portrait mode through Windows settings (Display settings->Display orientation: Portrait). This is my preferred way because the rest of Windows still displays in a usable way (the start bar is at the bottom, menus are at the top and text is displayed the right way up). The disadvantage is that once your pinball session is over and you want to rotate the monitor back to landscape, you have to edit the Display orientation again.
Adjust VP to rotate the table by 90° (or 270°, depending on which way you rotated your monitor) and leave Windows itself in Landscape orientation. This avoids the faff of changing the display orientation (so that once you've finished playing pinball, you just rotate the screen back to landscape). However everything outside of the pinball game itself will be rotated by 90° and so regular interaction with Windows is much more awkward. In particular, use of a mouse becomes very challenging.

Cabinet pinball users can also chose either of the two methods to ensure that their tables' aspect ratios properly match the cabinet. Method a) [changing display orientation] will be more generally convenient because in a cabinet you will still need to drop out of pinball every now and then to adjust settings and with this method you will still be able to interact with windows without having to tilt your head by 90° to read anything however it is not fully-compatible with Pinup Popper, which is one of the most popular frontends. If you're using PinballX or PinballY, however, this method should work fine. Note, that if you chose the (in my opinion far more logical) portrait mode, then 99% of your fellow pinball users are using a different setup from you (and will quite aggressively defend their way of doing things too!).

PoV Parameters

VPX provides six different parameters to adjust the Point-of-View. The first way to edit these is in VPX itself when in table edit mode. Click on the Backglass settings, then in the right of the window in the Properties section you should see a tab called "Camera". You can edit the values for all the paremeters here. The disadvantage of this approach is that you won't know what the result looks like until you launch the table, which can lead to some tedious back-and-forth between editor and table.

The better option is to launch the table in PoV-edit mode using the F6 key. Now you can cycle through parameters using the magnasave buttons (left and right CTRL) and adjust the values using the flipper buttons (left and right SHIFT). The results are shown in real-time so you can quickly find settings that work for you.

1. Inclination [table setting]

This is the 'tilt' on the table, where an inclination of zero means you are looking straight down on the table from directly above, centered horizontally and vertically in the middle of the playfield.

Suggested setting for Desktop mode: variable, but start around 30

Suggested setting for Cabinet mode: variable, between 0 and 7 depending on preference

2. Field of view [camera setting]

This controls how much of the playfield you can simultaneously see. Very high fields of view settings will result in an un-natural fishbowl effect where everything is warped so you can see it.

Suggested setting for Desktop mode: variable, but start around 20

Suggested setting for Cabinet mode: variable, between 30 depending on preference

3. Layback [camera setting]

This is a hard one to describe. Some say it represents how far back the camera is moved from the center of the playfied.

Suggested setting for Desktop mode: start around 0

Suggested setting for Cabinet mode: start around 60 and adjust to preference

4. XY Rotation [table setting]

This describes the rotation of the table, relative to your screen layout. On a horizontal (landscape) screen, a rotation of 0 means the table will display north-south (the far end of the table being north, at the top of your screen). A rotation of 90 or 270 will rotate the table so that it displays east-west. For a person playing on a standard landscape desktop monitor, the rotation should be set to 0. Equally, a person playing on a rotated monitor that is in portrait orientation, with Windows set to Portrait orientation, should also leave the rotation at 0.

5. X-Scale/Y-Scale/Z-Scale/Y-Scale

These three settings will increase the horizontal, vertical and depth scales of the table. Z-scale shouldn't be touched, but the other two settings can be adjusted so that the table has "pleasing" proportions in desktop pinball, or so that it fills your screen in cabinet pinball.

6. X-Offset/Y-Offset/Z-Offset

These three settings allow you to move the table around the three respective axes. Z-Offset in particular can be a useful way to make the playfield 'fill' the screen, to the extent that you want that. You probably won't need to touch X-Offset and Y-Offset unless the table authors used strange values that don't work for you.

Note: POV files can be found online, that list the "optimal" starting points for each parameter, for a given table. However, they will almost always assume you have your display set up in landscape mode, so if you use portrait, they'll be no use.