Wow, I just now ran into this interview from back in may. VERY well done!
I don't know if any newer members from the past 2 or 3 years realise just how elusive Randy has been in the past. I remember back in '04 to somewhere in '06, he was completely MIA, VP6 lasted for years and man VP6 got some serious mileage from
VP users!
Even when he did pop up on forums, as the interview states, it was ever so brief. The day he popped up with one sentence after all that time gone, people went berzerk, and of course his appearance followed with an updated
VP. What a cool day that was.
Thus, to me, to many of us probably, I never thought we would ever hear so much as a full paragraph out of randy, and so that interview was an absolute delight to read. We actually have some insight on the man who made a great hobby, and to hear the details of how it started was very cool. Obviously, he never intended for
VP to take off like it did, and that explains why
VP never got the attention we all wanted it to get (from a dev standpoint), as he's got a whole community asking for everything but the kitchen sink, and to him its just a little side project that grew into a monster.
Also good to hear that Randy still cares about the state of the program, and some of his comments actually give us hope for what many of us thought a few years back was never going to see an update ever again.
Absolutely amazing that
VP was designed to run off a 100mhz cpu with a hamster wheel driving graphics! Yet here we are today with, in my case, 2 cpu cores running at 3.7ghz, 4gb of RAM, and a gpu (GTX 280 OC'ed) with a billion transistors pushing out 1gb of RAM. But due to
VPM, some tables still require all the cpu power they can get. PK's Cue Ball Wizard always comes to mind as one table that I could never get a perfectly smooth rolling ball on (close, but not quite).
Let's also respect the frame rate thing randy talks about. I think we take that for granted, but it makes sense. Look at the ball physics from another pinball game from the time
VP was starting out, Microsoft's Pinball Arcade with the Gottlieb tables. Nice graphics for its time, but that awful jittery frame rate ruins that game for most of us.
In the end, as nice as the other bells and whistles are, that nice frame rate really has been key to
VP catching on like it did, as nothing like that was really seen before. Hell, the main issue on many games to this day is frame rate, its a tough thing to perfect and keep consistent.
I also think we were so lucky that
VP and Pinmame worked so well together, cuz for the most part most
VPM tables were still able to maintain good frame rates so long as you pc was at least somewhat up to date.
I remember the day I upgraded from a 1.4ghz P4 to a 3.2ghz P4, as that was the day I was finally able to play all those Gottlieb games (Sys 80, I think?) and some of Scapino's
VPM's I was now able to run balls out.
Ah, nice memories.
VP certainly has personality, its been through ups and downs, and it was actually
VP's limitations that forced so many of us to think outside of the box (i.e. the hacks randy eluded to).
Finally, great to hear that
VP may not have seen its last update, and even better to hear that we could see a 3D
VP. However, him doing it on his own might make this pretty tough with his kid and job at M$.
Let's hope for the best. And he didn't shut the door on the open source idea either, so you never know,
VP might have a hell of a 2nd wind in its sails!
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