1388 replies to this topic

[rob046]

You don't abandon a project just because 1 person might be bugging you. That is silly to say & it sounds like you are making excuses for lou. He probably got stuck and/or burned out, & that is that. But since so many people did put in a nice chunk of cash, & even way more ppl have a lot emotionally invested into this project/thread due to the promise of what it can hold... I do think louizou should get on here & keep us updated, no matter what the situation is. Even if it is just a line or two, takes 10 seconds & everybody would feel better knowing what is going on.

How do you know 1 guy could stop this project rob, one guy is making it. if america can invade a country because of one person why does it sound so silly?.
to be honest if i was louizou reading some of the posts here i would say f#@k it too. the amount of dedication that would go into a project like this is a tuff ask even with nothing but positive posts.

If you are going to take on a project like this, you have to have some tough skin, or else don't even bother. If the comments of 1 person can cause you to quit, then you've taken on the wrong project. & that is fine, this isn't for everybody. It is true that Randy or Black certainly didn't post much, but when they were active in their projects they did post some, & when they weren't, they vanished. Randy went MIA for years once he stopped working on VP, just as Black dropped off the face of the earth once he stopped with FP. So I'm not about to see the lack of posting as good news. Hey, everything might be fine, I'm just sayin'.

I'm starting to think that for the next great editor to succeed & continue to see updates for years, that it might have to be a group effort. When everything falls on 1 guy, it just seems overload for that guy. & if 1 event happens in thier life that causes them to not be able to work on it anymore, then we are all screwed, we get nothing. I think VP was at its best as far as progress when both Randy & Black were working on it. & I feel even better today, with it being open source knowing guys like destruk & others can work on it.
So this is absolutely a tough job & nobody is getting rich, obviously, from dedicating their time to it. For this reason & just don't have expectations 1 way or another. If this thing kicks off, then awesome. If not, that sucks but at least I didn't get my hopes up too much. If it happens it happens. I would certainly do anything I could to help outside of donating a boatload of cash. Testing or whatever, I'm not much help with code or anything, but if I can help in some way I'd be happy to. I think lou really should tap this resource if he needs to. If he's struggling with anything, I would hope he would utilize all the great minds here.

Edited by rob046, 03 August 2012 - 07:52 PM.

[Themer]

VP Forums is in control of 'the dimes' and these will only be provided to Louizou once he's ready to implement the DLL interaction. It is done this way on Louizou's own request.

[CPSNine]

Man this thread has become stupid.
I am sick of reading people sitting on their asses commenting and complaining about one guy who had the guts to take on an amazing project that does not go the way they want.
Start your own project and we will see where it goes.
Louizou doesn't owe anybody anything.
I agree with P1, if i was louizou reading some of the posts here i would say f#@k it too.

[ewalker]

I hope Lou is okay...seriously.

[TedB]

If you spend so much time and put energy in a project as Louizou did I can understand criticism can get to you. Certainly when progress slows down and you are facing a wall. There are a lot more examples of project that were never finished because someone burned up before finishing it. There are probably more unfinished projects than finished ones...
Hope this will not be such an unfinished project and Louizou returns, it is just too promising.

[Arkay]

If anything this thread highlights why having a single person dedicated to a project like this at the head of a large community in wait is such a bad idea.

Remember that Lou never came here. People saught him out after seeing what he'd been working on in his own spare time. So he went from being a dude that no-one had ever heard of, hobby programming at home, to having a great mob of keen pinball players on his back with donations and/or requests for progress and info.

I know how uninteresting your hobby can become under that sort of pressure.

I haven't entered into these conversations either as it's clear to see that people are too invested in it's success. Even without the donations they have put in.

Even if is does succeed in it's current form it's no different than FP was. Potentially a great sim, but left to the whims of one man. It's never a good idea.

How things have happened is largely to blame.

Had this been a co-ordinated effort to:

1. Document requirements.
2. Gather resources.
3. Decide on tooling (based on 1 above),
4. Assign responsibilities (to multiple people), web admins, forum admins, coders, art desigers, table authors, sound people etc etc
5. Create a road map of code using tools from 3 above, with milestones to achieve.
6. and left the whole lot open source and open to anyone to join and work on.

Then we might have the project we want. Personally I think this is how it needs to be done if we're ever to have an ongoing successful open and free sim that we can all enjoy. It's how really successful projects like XBMC run. The product is not at the whim of one person and will survive regardless of the disagreements and the negative posts and anything else that comes up in these things.

But the one thing the above needs over and above everything else is resource and organisation. I don't doubt for a minute that there are enough talented people on this forum alone to make it happen and there's no telling just how many new people would be brought in from the total open source crowd (on all platforms), if the project presented itself as well run ad viable and open to new people.

But someone and then alot of someones need to make it happen and be prepared to put in the hours and the effort that it would take, just in organising the effort itself.

What I see here and how I feel myself is that we would all love to have a new and great sim, but don't have the time and the dedication to put into it personally.

It'd be a brave individual that stood up to get this off the ground and yes, they'd need a tough skin, awesome project management and very good people management skills, even to get it started.

Lou is a coder, not a Project Manager, not necessarily good with people, and possibly not thick skinned enough. But he hever said he was, and never asked to be the saviour of moderm pinball simulation.

Use of a commercial tool in an open source project is highly counter intuitive too and I don't know any open source programmer that would ever be happy to accept money to purchase a limited commercial license as a part of an open source project. So I think the open source dreams of this project are just that, dreams.

The only reason unity was used is because it provides a lot of the work already done and gives one person the chance to write something as complex as a pinball sim in isolation. The two go well together. But they, to me, are not the answer or the way forward for community based pinball.

There ARE more than enough open source language, tools, libraries, etc etc out there to write a very nice pinball sim. The time it takes as one person said is huge but that's not an excuse for not building from the ground up if that is the best way to do it. Time can be mitigated by more resource. One person might spend a lifetime doing what 100 people can do in 6 months. A large enough group of people can achieve awesome results and each only put in as much time as they can afford.

The problem here is that it's one person. There is no organisation.

In a properly managed project there would be no continued requests for information as current status would always be on the front page of the projects website.

This project also suffers because those that have offered to help with code etc have been turned away because the project wasn't yet ready or advanced enough. That's a shame too. But it's because I'm afraid, it's just all not what anyone thinks it should be.

If Lou builds something in his spare time that we can all benefit from then great. But I can understand the pressure he's been put under, the way he was brought here from afar and pounced on, and the greater pressure of the potential financial spend it enough to turn a hobby into something no where near any fun.

He really does not owe anyone anything and if he never posts here again it won't be because of the negative posts of one or two, it'll be because his home hobby project now has a heap of people invested in it's outcome.

Cheers,

Arkay.

[oldskoolgamer]

[johnparker007]

Use of a commercial tool in an open source project is highly counter intuitive too and I don't know any open source programmer that would ever be happy to accept money to purchase a limited commercial license as a part of an open source project. So I think the open source dreams of this project are just that, dreams.

The only reason unity was used is because it provides a lot of the work already done and gives one person the chance to write something as complex as a pinball sim in isolation. The two go well together. But they, to me, are not the answer or the way forward for community based pinball.

Agreed - it never really sat well with me either - but as you said in your second paragraph - Unity was used as it takes care of all the heavy lifting already. Additionally, the approach used existing Future Pinball table files, built in the (also closed source) FP editor.

As I said a few posts back - there's quite a massive todo list involved in doing this from scratch. I think ideally we'd want to write a table editor too. But as I also said in my post recently on this thread - most people who are involved in this hobby, and also have the required level of programming ability to work on this, probably already has a programming-type job they do as a day job (just guessing here, but I think it's gonna be quite a high proportion). So to work on this in the evenings, means (for me): Get up, go to work, make iOS games, put in a bit of overtime here and there, then after all that, come home to an evening of continuing to sit at a computer programming. Then go to sleep! ~15 hours a day programming isn't a lifestyle I think I can handle, lazy as that sounds! Just being realistic as I've burnt myself out doing too much coding before...

Sorry I know this isn't any kind of a solution, but just pointing out that a big (real) constraint to these ideas of creating the next iteration of VP is available programmer time. I think if someone could open-source up rewriting the entire rendering engine that would be a more feasible task, and keep iterating on the (admittedly over-extended) existing VP codebase that'd be more realistic as a goal, if not an ideal way to move forward, however that was already started by another user (cupid?) but I think they got partway through and parked it...

Also, bringing some things 'into the code' may be good for performance? For instance, the B2S system (rosve I think?) - if that could be bought into the editor (currently the 'backglass' part of the editor has been kind of repurposed for overlaying sprites at hardcoded locations on the PF as far as I can tell)... VB is slow, however it doesn't do much processing AFAIK? So I guess that'd be ok to stay as it is.

In some (sadistic!) way, I also like the state of open source hobbyist-driven Virtual Pinball being where it is, as for instance MAME has 'been done', along with most of the console emulators. It's in a way refreshing that there's still a great big part emulation that's a WIP. Plus all the potential future prospects, such as those 4xHD type TVs (can't remember the proper name offhand), but they'll look great in a cab when they come out in five years or so.... and someone had been talking about using polarised 3d glasses, but rotating the polarising lenses 90 degrees, so that a 3D TV would work from our unique view angle.... plus obviously with both the above in place, head tracking with a Kinect sensor perched on top of the cab would be mind-blowing, so that the 3D model of the table, rendered in tru 3D, would also subtly adjust as the use moved their head - like this, but easily achievable using just the Kinect (or Kniect 2 there is a lower lag sensor apparently under dev?)



Anyway, just a few thoughts...

[Arkay]

So to work on this in the evenings, means (for me): Get up, go to work, make iOS games, put in a bit of overtime here and there, then after all that, come home to an evening of continuing to sit at a computer programming. Then go to sleep! ~15 hours a day programming isn't a lifestyle I think I can handle, lazy as that sounds! Just being realistic as I've burnt myself out doing too much coding before...

I know where you're coming from and understand how you personally feel with regard to that but I don't necessarily agree completely. Yes, for you that is the situation. But something like this, done as an open source project, would be more fun than chore for most and the nature of open source is that you only contribute what you can. Even you I would say would enjoy coding a part of this that you want to in your free time vs having to do it as part of your job. Provided the choice of what, when and where is entirely yours.

There's safety in numbers. As a sole coder all the hopes and responsibility is on you, the "Lou" way presently. As open source it's on whoever comes along and picks a section to work on of their own free will for their own selfish reasons.

I would also expect that there would be a large portion of the coder base that don't do game programming for a living. The teenager coder base I think are the ones most likely to churn out a lot of code and fast, as they have the time and less responsibilities than the rest of us umm "older"... people They need to become interested in pinball though.

I do think that the project would attract far more than those already here. Getting it to the point where it became an attractive FOSS project to join is the real "hard yards", but not impossible.

Anyhow. This isn't particularly relevant to this topic and there is another post that is so I'll go back to watching from the sidelines.

Cheers,

Arkay.

Edited by Arkay, 06 August 2012 - 04:12 AM.

[johnparker007]

...this isn't particularly relevant to this topic and there is another post that is...

Good point - if I have any more thoughts about the idead of ground-up VP rewrite I'll start up a new thread in the dev forum

[Themer]

Don't forget that a lot of community projects have failed in the past as well. Here I'm not talking about the pinball community in specific. That is, without being sure that there is a fair amount of members who want to take part in the project and actually will produce a fair amount of code, it's not interesting for anyone to take up the project. Furthermore I don't think it's very respectful to start a new project based on this one, simply because louizou doesn't reply directly.

[johnparker007]

Don't forget that a lot of community projects have failed in the past as well. Here I'm not talking about the pinball community in specific. That is, without being sure that there is a fair amount of members who want to take part in the project and actually will produce a fair amount of code, it's not interesting for anyone to take up the project. Furthermore I don't think it's very respectful to start a new project based on this one, simply because louizou doesn't reply directly.

No disrespect meant to Louizou intended As this wouldn't in any way be based on his idea of loading Future Pinball tables into the Unity engine with VPinMAME. I was just tossing around the idea of a proper VP rewrite really, getting a scale of what would be involved, what could be reused from the existing VP core, etc... anyway I'll not talk about it any more on this thread, to get it back on topic!

[destruk]

Louizou said he just got a new job, so he hasn't had time to do further work on this, but he promised he'll get back to it and he'll post when there is more significant progress.

[Syco54645]

Louizou said he just got a new job, so he hasn't had time to do further work on this, but he promised he'll get back to it and he'll post when there is more significant progress.

congrats louizou! Hope it is a great job. I know how bad it sucks to have a job that you do not like.

[FDSystems]

Success with your new job, Louizou.

Et prends un comprimé contre les critiques négatives.

[TedB]

Louizou said he just got a new job, so he hasn't had time to do further work on this, but he promised he'll get back to it and he'll post when there is more significant progress.

Unemployement is always best for these kinds of projects... Hope he will be fired soon enjoys his new job

[Themer]

Lol @ TedB It's good to hear that Louizou is alright and hasn't given up on this project. I'm looking forward to his next update. I hope the doubting members now give him some time to get everything going again,

Edited by Themer, 06 August 2012 - 10:01 PM.

[gear323]

I'm sure he will get back to it once he finds the time and is settled in to his new job. In a worst case, if he decides that he will not have the time and or is just not interested in working on it ever again, I'd be willing to bet he would release whatever he has so far for someone else to pick up.

I personally hope that he finds time to work on it and gets to at least release the first release of the software on his own. But as other people have mentioned, he should do whatever he likes since it is his project. I'll be waiting here on the sideline hoping for some news with progress until then!





Congrats on the new job Louizou !!


BTW, didn't Black code Future Pinball pretty much all on his own? It goes to show you that it can be done by a singe person. Heck, Randy did most of the VP coding (up till Black joined him for a while) all on his own.

Edited by gear323, 07 August 2012 - 05:42 PM.

[Lynny]

You don't abandon a project just because 1 person might be bugging you. That is silly to say & it sounds like you are making excuses for lou. He probably got stuck and/or burned out, & that is that. But since so many people did put in a nice chunk of cash, & even way more ppl have a lot emotionally invested into this project/thread due to the promise of what it can hold... I do think louizou should get on here & keep us updated, no matter what the situation is. Even if it is just a line or two, takes 10 seconds & everybody would feel better knowing what is going on.

How do you know 1 guy could stop this project rob, one guy is making it. if america can invade a country because of one person why does it sound so silly?.
to be honest if i was louizou reading some of the posts here i would say f#@k it too. the amount of dedication that would go into a project like this is a tuff ask even with nothing but positive posts.

If you are going to take on a project like this, you have to have some tough skin, or else don't even bother. If the comments of 1 person can cause you to quit, then you've taken on the wrong project. & that is fine, this isn't for everybody. It is true that Randy or Black certainly didn't post much, but when they were active in their projects they did post some, & when they weren't, they vanished. Randy went MIA for years once he stopped working on VP, just as Black dropped off the face of the earth once he stopped with FP. So I'm not about to see the lack of posting as good news. Hey, everything might be fine, I'm just sayin'.

I'm starting to think that for the next great editor to succeed & continue to see updates for years, that it might have to be a group effort. When everything falls on 1 guy, it just seems overload for that guy. & if 1 event happens in thier life that causes them to not be able to work on it anymore, then we are all screwed, we get nothing. I think VP was at its best as far as progress when both Randy & Black were working on it. & I feel even better today, with it being open source knowing guys like destruk & others can work on it.
So this is absolutely a tough job & nobody is getting rich, obviously, from dedicating their time to it. For this reason & just don't have expectations 1 way or another. If this thing kicks off, then awesome. If not, that sucks but at least I didn't get my hopes up too much. If it happens it happens. I would certainly do anything I could to help outside of donating a boatload of cash. Testing or whatever, I'm not much help with code or anything, but if I can help in some way I'd be happy to. I think lou really should tap this resource if he needs to. If he's struggling with anything, I would hope he would utilize all the great minds here.

Well said.

Peace,
Lynny

If anything this thread highlights why having a single person dedicated to a project like this at the head of a large community in wait is such a bad idea.

Remember that Lou never came here. People saught him out after seeing what he'd been working on in his own spare time. So he went from being a dude that no-one had ever heard of, hobby programming at home, to having a great mob of keen pinball players on his back with donations and/or requests for progress and info.

I know how uninteresting your hobby can become under that sort of pressure.

I haven't entered into these conversations either as it's clear to see that people are too invested in it's success. Even without the donations they have put in.

Even if is does succeed in it's current form it's no different than FP was. Potentially a great sim, but left to the whims of one man. It's never a good idea.

How things have happened is largely to blame.

Had this been a co-ordinated effort to:

1. Document requirements.
2. Gather resources.
3. Decide on tooling (based on 1 above),
4. Assign responsibilities (to multiple people), web admins, forum admins, coders, art desigers, table authors, sound people etc etc
5. Create a road map of code using tools from 3 above, with milestones to achieve.
6. and left the whole lot open source and open to anyone to join and work on.

Then we might have the project we want. Personally I think this is how it needs to be done if we're ever to have an ongoing successful open and free sim that we can all enjoy. It's how really successful projects like XBMC run. The product is not at the whim of one person and will survive regardless of the disagreements and the negative posts and anything else that comes up in these things.

But the one thing the above needs over and above everything else is resource and organisation. I don't doubt for a minute that there are enough talented people on this forum alone to make it happen and there's no telling just how many new people would be brought in from the total open source crowd (on all platforms), if the project presented itself as well run ad viable and open to new people.

But someone and then alot of someones need to make it happen and be prepared to put in the hours and the effort that it would take, just in organising the effort itself.

What I see here and how I feel myself is that we would all love to have a new and great sim, but don't have the time and the dedication to put into it personally.

It'd be a brave individual that stood up to get this off the ground and yes, they'd need a tough skin, awesome project management and very good people management skills, even to get it started.

Lou is a coder, not a Project Manager, not necessarily good with people, and possibly not thick skinned enough. But he hever said he was, and never asked to be the saviour of moderm pinball simulation.

Use of a commercial tool in an open source project is highly counter intuitive too and I don't know any open source programmer that would ever be happy to accept money to purchase a limited commercial license as a part of an open source project. So I think the open source dreams of this project are just that, dreams.

The only reason unity was used is because it provides a lot of the work already done and gives one person the chance to write something as complex as a pinball sim in isolation. The two go well together. But they, to me, are not the answer or the way forward for community based pinball.

There ARE more than enough open source language, tools, libraries, etc etc out there to write a very nice pinball sim. The time it takes as one person said is huge but that's not an excuse for not building from the ground up if that is the best way to do it. Time can be mitigated by more resource. One person might spend a lifetime doing what 100 people can do in 6 months. A large enough group of people can achieve awesome results and each only put in as much time as they can afford.

The problem here is that it's one person. There is no organisation.

In a properly managed project there would be no continued requests for information as current status would always be on the front page of the projects website.

This project also suffers because those that have offered to help with code etc have been turned away because the project wasn't yet ready or advanced enough. That's a shame too. But it's because I'm afraid, it's just all not what anyone thinks it should be.

If Lou builds something in his spare time that we can all benefit from then great. But I can understand the pressure he's been put under, the way he was brought here from afar and pounced on, and the greater pressure of the potential financial spend it enough to turn a hobby into something no where near any fun.

He really does not owe anyone anything and if he never posts here again it won't be because of the negative posts of one or two, it'll be because his home hobby project now has a heap of people invested in it's outcome.

Cheers,

Arkay.

Exactly. Nice post.

Peace,
Lynny

[JonBaker]

Ha! Made you look