3889 replies to this topic

[fuzzel]

Then you're oblivious. 

Did you mean me or Arcade4?

[Arcade4]

And if me. Oblivious to what?
I have been involved with VP since the Shiva Site days.
I don't think I'm oblivious to anything.

[KieferSkunk]

A comment from the peanut gallery: There were two reasons I disappeared from this community in 2001.  Aside from having my career take off right about then, I also left because of stuff just like this.  Politics in a hobby community - both in VP in particular, but also in the broader emulation community (at the time, there were a lot of "trolls" who drove some of the old regulars like JoseQ and the developer of the CPS-1 emulator out of the community).

 

Kinda makes it much less fun for those of us who are trying to enjoy something we love.

 

Accept the fact that some people just want to play the current commercial hotness for free and don't really want to contribute, and ignore them if they're not on the same page as you.  For the rest of us, Visual Pinball by itself, along with the rich scripts that have been developed alongside it, provides a great set of tools to make just about anything you can imagine.  And just because VP10 is in beta doesn't mean you can't start converting or creating.  In fact, the more you do, the more likely the final release will actually be stable and perform well, because you'll inevitably find bugs that we might otherwise not have found.

[hmueck]

And if me. Oblivious to what?

Oblivious to how hurtful your comment was.
Why do i make all those tables when nobody cares, because they are just none of the popular ones. And i know, that's probably the reality, but it still hurts.
Maybe we should just make the top 20 tables in vp10 and then go on with our lives. And on the way get the latest SAM tables of course to satisfy our curiosity.


By the way: i will not recreate any table that is included in The Pinball Arcade. If you want to play those, buy TPA. I also think we should remove them from here, but that's another thing.

P.S. sorry for being off-topic.

Edited by hmueck, 15 June 2015 - 06:14 PM.

[freneticamnesic]

And if me. Oblivious to what?
I have been involved with VP since the Shiva Site days.
I don't think I'm oblivious to anything.

 

Exactly. 

Here's one last gasp to help you understand, and after this I'll be done.

"I have nothing positive to add to the beta discussion, and fuck everything else you guys are doing, when will VP10 be out of beta so i can play a good table?" is how your comment reads to the people who are ALREADY making tables, albeit not the ones _you_ want.

I'm done derailing the thread.... sorry devs keep it up

also hoping not to scare away anyone who might actually create the popular tables in VP10... that's not my intention either and I have nothing against those tables. I just hope you do it because you want to. This shouldn't feel like a job to anyone!

[hauntfreaks]

I believe what makes VP great is all the tables people have never heard of... these are the same tables you will most likely never get to play in real life... so i commend all the authors and the devs for doing this just for the joy of doing it.... i try and give back as much as I can (which isnt much compared to others)  so I will also thank everyone for all their time and effort (sometimes as adults we need to have thicker skins)

 

as for Acade4, I truly believe he didnt have any malicious intent in his comments, it was just taken out of contexts

 

lets just all go back to having fun with this crap, in the end it all just a bunch people wanting to relive their childhoods, and play with our elaborate toys.... lets do all that and be adults at the same time    

Edited by hauntfreaks, 15 June 2015 - 06:46 PM.

[cyberpez]

 

also hoping not to scare away anyone who might actually create the popular tables in VP10... that's not my intention either and I have nothing against those tables. I just hope you do it because you want to. This shouldn't feel like a job to anyone!

 

 

I was starting to feel like I wasted my weekend    And yeah, I did it because I wanted to play the table  Its the go to table when friends are over.  

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[freneticamnesic]

 

 

also hoping not to scare away anyone who might actually create the popular tables in VP10... that's not my intention either and I have nothing against those tables. I just hope you do it because you want to. This shouldn't feel like a job to anyone!

 

 

I was starting to feel like I wasted my weekend    And yeah, I did it because I wanted to play the table  Its the go to table when friends are over.  

 

 

Lmao nope, I play them too, I realized it started to sound like a crusade against the tables, but it was just a crusade against the attitude. Looks great are you going to release in the table testing thread?

[cyberpez]

 

 

 

also hoping not to scare away anyone who might actually create the popular tables in VP10... that's not my intention either and I have nothing against those tables. I just hope you do it because you want to. This shouldn't feel like a job to anyone!

 

 

I was starting to feel like I wasted my weekend    And yeah, I did it because I wanted to play the table  Its the go to table when friends are over.  

 

 

Lmao nope, I play them too, I realized it started to sound like a crusade against the tables, but it was just a crusade against the attitude. Looks great are you going to release in the table testing thread?

 

 

HaHa, thanks no worries!!  Yeah, a couple of thing to finish up yet, but yeah I plan to release it for testing later in the week.  

[Arcade4]

I believe what makes VP great is all the tables people have never heard of... these are the same tables you will most likely never get to play in real life... so i commend all the authors and the devs for doing this just for the joy of doing it.... i try and give back as much as I can (which isnt much compared to others)  so I will also thank everyone for all their time and effort (sometimes as adults we need to have thicker skins)

 

as for Acade4, I truly believe he didnt have any malicious intent in his comments, it was just taken out of contexts

 

lets just all go back to having fun with this crap, in the end it all just a bunch people wanting to relive their childhoods, and play with our elaborate toys.... lets do all that and be adults at the same time    

You sir, could not be more correct. Bravo.

I am still dumbfounded that people jumped to the conclusion I thought their efforts and time were being wasted.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

So please stop putting words in my mouth that just are not there.

I am probably one of the biggest supporters of all kinds of pinball that there is.

Please let's get back to the regular topic as we are simply arguing over nothing.

Edited by Arcade4, 15 June 2015 - 07:23 PM.

[hauntfreaks]

AFM is my wifes 

 

 

 

also hoping not to scare away anyone who might actually create the popular tables in VP10... that's not my intention either and I have nothing against those tables. I just hope you do it because you want to. This shouldn't feel like a job to anyone!

 

 

I was starting to feel like I wasted my weekend    And yeah, I did it because I wanted to play the table  Its the go to table when friends are over.  

 

 

AFM is my wife's absolute favorite "the one with the bouncey green guys" she says 

[freneticamnesic]

Itching for a final release so table authors can start churning out the popular tables again.

 

Then put words in your own mouth, and explain how this isn't what several people read it as? You're seriously that oblivious, and now dumbfounded apparently, that you can't read this in anything but your own voice? Or are you choosing to ignore that you said something rude and are simply playing dumb? I don't know what's worse.

[KieferSkunk]

Just another comment, again from the peanut gallery...

 

My wife sometimes looks at me funny when I say I'd rather hole up in my office and write VBScript over a whole weekend rather than go work in the garden, or go to the beach, or go see a new movie, etc.  But as I explain to her, it's because I love solving problems and puzzles, and in my case, coming up with new code to simulate real-world mechanisms like troughs and magnets is a tremendously rewarding hobby.  And I firmly believe that people on all sides of the creation end of pinball simulation feel the same way about the parts of the hobby that call to them.  I enjoy scripting.  Fuzzel and toxie apparently enjoy C++ programming.  Others enjoy recreating commercial tables, and still others enjoy designing and building brand-new original concepts.

 

But the thing we all have in common is that we enjoy creating things, and most of the time, the end goal is not the finished product, but the fun you have on the way there.  Personally, I get a lot of satisfaction out of making something work better than it did before, and the best reward I can receive is a simple "Thanks, it's working better now".   I personally don't care if that's on a "popular table", an original one, or one that was just released to the arcades in the last year.  My aim is to help others get more out of the hobby by doing much the same kind of thing I do in my professional career (create development and testing tools and processes).  And of course, to enjoy my own selection of favorite tables more as a result.

 

I think feathers tend to get ruffled when people either come in to the community for the wrong reasons ("Hey, this thing lets me play Medieval Madness for free!"), or wires get crossed in communication such that people THINK that's what you're here for.  Miscommunications happen, folks, and we all should know how to recover from those.   But it is also true that there are some for whom Visual Pinball+VPinMAME really is just a free-game vehicle, and that is obviously a sensitive topic.

 

My personal philosophy is this: Visual Pinball is really no different than, say, a music composer program.  You can use a composer program to create awesome, original content.  Or you can use it to create renditions of existing songs, or simply to play other people's renditions of those songs.  And with enough time and effort, you can exactly duplicate someone else's song.  The choice is yours, but it's not up to the developer of that program to dictate what you can and can't do with it.  Likewise, Visual Pinball has the capability to exactly duplicate every aspect of a real machine, and there are a number of VP tables that do exactly that.  But just because it CAN be used for that purpose doesn't mean development on the program shouldn't continue, because for every faithful VPM creation, there is also at least one truly original piece of work that might otherwise not have been possible.

 

Keeping that in mind would help us avoid petty arguments like this.

[Arcade4]

Omg, Frenitic. It simply means I want as many tables as possible.

You have simply taken the word "popular" and substituted the word "good" for some reason.
It was explained to me earlier that people would not start redoing tables that were already finished until VP 10 was finalized.
The comment is nothing more then me wishing it was finalized.
Is that good enough for you?

I have stated more then once that I appreciate every table and all the hard work put into them.

I'm not sure what else you want here.

Edited by Arcade4, 15 June 2015 - 09:55 PM.

[KieferSkunk]

Omg, Frenitic. It simply means I want as many tables as possible.
It was explained to me earlier that people would not start redoing tables that were already finished until VP 10 was finalized.
The comment is nothing more then me wishing it was finalized.
Is that good enough for you?

I have stated more then once that I appreciate every table and all the hard work put into them.

I'm not sure what else you want here.

 

I understand you, and as I just said a bit ago, some wires got crossed.  Let's get this one resolved, folks.

 

That said, I don't honestly see why you're people are not willing to start converting tables during the beta.  Again, if you run into something that doesn't work well or makes it more difficult for you, the beta period is a GREAT time to report those problems and get fixes for them.  It's more difficult in general to do that once a product is "finalized" - partly because in that respect it never truly IS finalized.

 

(EDIT: Rephrased slightly - "why people are not willing".)

Edited by KieferSkunk, 15 June 2015 - 07:57 PM.

[jimmyfingers]

Hope there's no problems that develop and more understanding when I release an AFM mod that is being converted to VP10 from a whole slew of other things I've done to that table.  It's been the longest running and most time sunk VP table I have worked on over the 5 years I have been part of this community.  The table has been upgraded and updated but never past about 95% complete so never got released (first BMPR / GI8, then combined with PMv5, then saucer ROM controlled / moving LEDs, and a bunch of other things).  It is now delayed due to getting converted to VP10 and some of the first few things I started to do with it are no getting obsolete or outdated but most of it I think will still make it a notable table (for instance I had ball reflections going using some interesting methods but never got the table out before a basic ball reflection on table was added natively).  In total, I've spent over 400 hours on the table with all the things I tried to add even before doing anything regarding the VP10 conversion. Now it just makes sense that I might as well release it as a VP10 mod and talked to JP as he generally did not wish for VP10 mods instead of rebuilds but I explained this has been a WIP for 3 years (starting with BMPR) plus I will be manually resizing the table and all elements to be proper dimensions - as a result and with how cool and JP always is, I received the go ahead.

 

Point of all this is, AFM is obviously a main title, now one that also someone else is doing so will be 2 versions for VP10, but I'd still like to release it for VP10 once I'm done working through some physics issues with fuzzel and Toxie regarding the VPX code in general - I've spent way too much time on it to not do so.  I really hope that in doing so that it doesn't stir negative argument or issues and I don't see any reason why, in moving forward with VP10, that we can't have duplicates and different people's takes or focuses on their MODs or versions of popular or rare tables, without dividing and / or inflaming the community.

[Arcade4]

 

Omg, Frenitic. It simply means I want as many tables as possible.
It was explained to me earlier that people would not start redoing tables that were already finished until VP 10 was finalized.
The comment is nothing more then me wishing it was finalized.
Is that good enough for you?

I have stated more then once that I appreciate every table and all the hard work put into them.

I'm not sure what else you want here.

 

I understand you, and as I just said a bit ago, some wires got crossed.  Let's get this one resolved, folks.

 

That said, I don't honestly see why you're people are not willing to start converting tables during the beta.  Again, if you run into something that doesn't work well or makes it more difficult for you, the beta period is a GREAT time to report those problems and get fixes for them.  It's more difficult in general to do that once a product is "finalized" - partly because in that respect it never truly IS finalized.

 

(EDIT: Rephrased slightly - "why people are not willing".)

 

Thanks kiefer. You "get it" and I understand.

I was only commenting on Frenitics wanting me to diagram my sentence for him. lol.

[KieferSkunk]

Thanks kiefer. You "get it" and I understand.

I was only commenting on Frenitics wanting me to diagram my sentence for him. lol.

 

 

Yup, just part of what I do on forums - help mediate when things are getting out of hand.  Cooler heads prevailing and all that.

[dark]

[cyberpez]

Hope there's no problems that develop and more understanding when I release an AFM mod that is being converted to VP10 from a whole slew of other things I've done to that table.  It's been the longest running and most time sunk VP table I have worked on over the 5 years I have been part of this community.  The table has been upgraded and updated but never past about 95% complete so never got released (first BMPR / GI8, then combined with PMv5, then saucer ROM controlled / moving LEDs, and a bunch of other things).  It is now delayed due to getting converted to VP10 and some of the first few things I started to do with it are no getting obsolete or outdated but most of it I think will still make it a notable table (for instance I had ball reflections going using some interesting methods but never got the table out before a basic ball reflection on table was added natively).  In total, I've spent over 400 hours on the table with all the things I tried to add even before doing anything regarding the VP10 conversion. Now it just makes sense that I might as well release it as a VP10 mod and talked to JP as he generally did not wish for VP10 mods instead of rebuilds but I explained this has been a WIP for 3 years (starting with BMPR) plus I will be manually resizing the table and all elements to be proper dimensions - as a result and with how cool and JP always is, I received the go ahead.

 

Point of all this is, AFM is obviously a main title, now one that also someone else is doing so will be 2 versions for VP10, but I'd still like to release it for VP10 once I'm done working through some physics issues with fuzzel and Toxie regarding the VPX code in general - I've spent way too much time on it to not do so.  I really hope that in doing so that it doesn't stir negative argument or issues and I don't see any reason why, in moving forward with VP10, that we can't have duplicates and different people's takes or focuses on their MODs or versions of popular or rare tables, without dividing and / or inflaming the community.

 

I didn't mean to step on toes and I'm not really working on it for an official release.  Simple conversion of JP's table to play and test out.  Please continue with you're version.  I'd love to see what a real pro could do!!!