                                    Night Mission

                              A Visual Pinball Bomb by 
                     Ripleyyy, Pilot (michelrorive@hotmail.com)
                                         and 
                  Joe Entropy, Bombardier (joe_entropy@hotmail.com)

                           Release 1.0, February 10, 2002

Thanks for downloading our table and taking time to read the doc. 

Please don’t modify any of the files in this zip without the express 
permission of the authors. We don't want to fly a night mission over your 
house...


Release 1.0 notes
To get help with game-specific keystrokes at any time while the game is 
running, press F1.

You know the phrase "You can't go home again"? That's kind of how I felt 
while playing the original Night Mission on my Apple II emulator. I used to 
love it, but playing it 20 years later, it seems very naive. Not so much 
unsophisticated, because at the time it was probably pretty impressive... 
unlike Raster Blaster and David's Midnight Magic, NM was an original table.
And while it's clear that the author(s) had played pinball and probably 
enjoyed it, they apparently had never carefully scrutinized a game before... 
otherwise, there wouldn't be so many things that never score points, or shots 
that can only be made by dumb luck (like the right kicker). 

Anyway, here it is, for better or worse. The sounds included are from the 
Apple II version, which is the only one I could reliably emulate on my 
computer. For some reason, the PC version (which runs too fast) doesn't 
play the sounds loud enough for me to record. I couldn't find a Commodore 
64 version. If NM fans from around the world can record sounds from other 
versions, I can add them in and make the sound set selectable by platform 
so everyone can wax nostalgic uniformly.


Known Problems:
I'm not sure that tilting while multiball is on or balls are loaded in the 
chute works properly.

The game does not have the zillions of options that the original had. Many 
of them are physics and design-time attributes in VP, so we couldn't really 
do much with that. After doing scripts and design for almost 10 tables, I've 
come to the realization that, with the exception of the number of balls per 
game, most people play the game with the default options and don't tweak the 
settings. If a great hue and cry is raised by the faithful, I may reconsider.
The only option I tried doing was ball trails, but performance suffered, 
especially in multiball. If anyone can come up with a better way to do this 
than creating a bunch of balls and updating their positions with a timer, 
I'd love to hear it.

I've found that after playing the game for a while, the annoying background 
sound (press M to mute it, btw) will just stay on. I think this is a bug in 
VP.

We didn't accurately model this in the game, but the upper left side of the 
playfield appears to be raised up. In the PC version especially, when the 
ball goes up the left ramp it slows noticably as if it's going up an incline. 
It's an incredibly hard shot to make. However, when the ball is coming left 
from the top of the playfield, it doesn't seem to be going up. It's probably 
just one of the many inconsistencies in the game...

I did take a few liberties with the demo... it's a little more active than 
the original's.


Can you find other bugs? Send us e-mail bombs!
