Here we go!
To elaborate on Fuzzel's post: what we discussed is that VP9 is now essentially finished. There may be a 9.9.1 bugfix release if anything comes up, but apart from that, that's it. VP10 is the next target. The plan for development is like this:
VP 10.0.0 is intended to contain the new physics, the mesh ball with a shader and maybe some more shader effects, some new scripting tools, many backwards-incompatible bugfixes and maybe some other features we come up with. It is followed by a series of 10.0.X releases which are mostly bugfixes and new features which preserve compatibility to 10.0.0. The idea is that any table created for 10.0 will always play well with the latest 10.0.X release.
A few weeks is probably a bit too optimistic for 10.0.0, but it should certainly be relatively fast since the physics engine is well underway and also the mesh ball exists already.
VP10 tables will have a new .vpx extension and maybe even a new file format, so there will never be confusion which version a table is designed for.
As we develop new incompatible changes, for instance a complete shader-based rendering pipeline, there may be an eventual change to version 10.1.0. This release may not be guaranteed to play all 10.0 tables without changes. Therefore, the idea is that all VP10 tables should have a bit of code like the following in their startup script:
If VersionMajor <> 10 Or VersionMinor <> 0 Then
MsgBox "Warning: This table was designed for VP 10.0!"
End If
This informs the user that he is not running the table in the proper 10.Y version. We might even make this feature built-in to VP without scripting needed, but I think this check is easy to do and quite flexible when done in script, for instance you could allow both 10.0 and 10.1 if the table is found to play well in both versions.
Any such 10.1 release is far off at this point, one to two years in the future being a rough guess, so this is a long-term strategy to avoid the endless backwards-compatibility mess that VP9 got into at some point.
Feel free to discuss this development plan below.
For now we plan to make a series of releases the first VP10.0 will be a compatibility release e.g. new physics engine, shader support for the ball rendering and some other stuff which doesn't break the entire compatibility to VP9 tables completely, but you will have to modifiy VP9 tables. This progress won't take too much time and we hope that we can release a first 10.0 in a couple of weeks(?). After that VP10.x will change more and more and it could be that it breaks compatibility to VP10.0 tables again. Therefore all table authors should check the VP version at the beginning and warn the user if the tables was designed for a different VP version.
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