Indiana Jones is my favorite movie series, Addams Family is my favorite table, and Dr. Dude is in my top five... so I took the time to set up Unity 3D Pinball mentioned above on my PC to see what the alpha release was like since it has these three compatible releases.
My rig is powerful enough to lock in at high frame rates, so the engine performance feels rock solid at all times. I fired up Dr. Dude, and the first thing I had to do was turn off the bloom effect. It looks horrific:
With it off, the lighting looks pretty good, but some of the major lit objects are far too garish than they should be. You can't barely see any detail in things like the upper left ray lamp and the flashing heart because it is so washed out with light. The game has a lot of options though, so I'll play with that a bit. The play field itself looks very clean, though I haven't zoomed in yet.
As for gameplay, the first go around was pretty bad because of the crazy lag with default settings. Why do they have VSync on by default? In any case, I disabled VSync, which improved things a ton, but it removed my ability to keep the game at full screen, so I am forced to play in window mode instead.
Still, minor lag still exists for me even with this setting, but because the VPF forums have many people who sense the lag and those who don't, I think it might be a user setup situation that we may individually have to address. I'm not sure on that, but if it is a program issue, I have no doubt the programmers will figure it out. It is in "pre-alpha" after all.
The sound is fantastic. Very nicely emulated and has some effects not in TPA.
The physics are definitely different than TPA. The gravity is stronger in Dr. Dude, but that's not the only thing. The ball can fly around much faster from a powerful flipper punch in U3D. But there are anomalies that need to be addressed. The ball will unrealistically swerve at times, curving in arcs that look as if the ball was being pulled by a magnet. Sometimes the ball acts as if it hits a pot hole when you try to trap it, with a sudden dip on the flipper hinges where you expect it to simply slide over instead.
Also, some techniques just flat out don't work (at least on this table). I tried to post pass after a trap with quick inputs of the flipper, and the ball baaaaaaaarely moves up a few millimeters before settling back on the cradled flipper. If I slow down my input, it treats it as a normal flipper slap and the ball goes flying into the play field again.
Lastly, although control pad options work, I can't get it to recognize my left/right input on the left analog stick for nudging (up/down works fine).
All in all, I will keep an eye on the progress of this program. I'd say it has a strong foundation to be a top-tier option for real tables, maybe even surpassing TPA (for instance, U3D Pinball's plunger controls are 1,000,000x better than TPA). In order of importance, they should address flipper lag (if it is the program causing issues and not user setups) and the at-times-strange physics behavior as the main priorities.
