Hmmmm, every time I give some thought to making a table again after all these years (and some nice things a few said on the Pinball Arcade forums when they realized who I was made me think I should take another look here again since lately I've been getting a pinball itch after playing with the newer Windows version of Pinball Arcade and seeing what DX11 can do visually lighting-wise on at least Ambient/GI/Flasher wise), one trip to these forums seems to put me off it once again.
As I said, I've been playing Pinball Arcade (you know that fully 3D pinball emulator out there for multiple platforms, even the Mac) and it's pretty darn sweet to see the attract mode with the camera swooping over the table recreations (unlike Future Pinball that wanted nothing to do with emulation), etc. Some tables like Junkyard look darn near photo-realistic to boot (others look good, but rendered) and the toys all work in real 3D and are fully smoothly animated, etc. etc. and yet when I quit looking at the attract mode camera antics and actaully play Pinball Arcade's Firepower from a fixed camera view similar to the one I made myself, I find the gameplay slow and sadly lacking compared to a real table with strong flippers and a ~7 degree slope and sadly no way to adjust the gameplay to "fix" it. The slope is too low (slow), the balls don't fly back from the stand-up targets properly (i.e. dangerous high speed kick back) and despite all the nifty 3D design and rendering, the damn table lights are STILL little more than the 2D playfield image being "lit up" as-is. There's no sense of the lights being below the playfield surface any more than the photo already projected. The lights are grainy looking as a result as well and they sure as hell don't any sense of incandescent 'fade' as the bulb cools down. I noticed Kristian's post on the forums there which prompted me to come out of hiding and reveal my true identity on there as he made a lot of similar gameplay observations.
Now I haven't played any VP9 versions of Firepower or other tables to comment on them at all (in fact, I hadn't even downloaded VP9 until a couple of weeks ago so this is not a commentary on any VP author's current table), but given I made all my tables around 1600x1200 resolution using the highest resolution images I could get my hands on, I wasn't exactly shocked when I compared my own (lame old VP8 that is clearly all but forgotton on these forums) Firepower table to the Pinball Arcade one side-by-side on two different computers to find that my table still looked better overall with vastly better table lights and of course gameplay that reminds me of the real thing since I made it an tuned it myself (within VP's limitations of the time, of course). So what's wrong visually that it would need remade other than wide-screen not being usable without stretching on modern monitors? Is it not sharp? Yeah it's still sharp. It's capable of 1600x1200 and the vantage point is the only real viewpoint I would ever want to play a so-called "desktop" pinball game from (approximately equivalent to the Camera 3 setting in Pinball Arcade) and the backbox works, unlike the Pinball Arcade version, which is static (except scores in attract) even when you can see it.
Now I'm sure the physics could be improved (although I contend that the ProPinball comparisons of the newer physics mod giving me a bit of pause (not sure how closely that comparison actually goes), as while Pro Pinball suffered few of the problems VP had in terms of "resolution" of shots, it also didn't feel "real" to me in the sense that I'm pretty decent (not the best) at REAL PINBALL and I SUCK at ProPinball by comparison. I last played a real Theatre of Magic a few years back and even though I hadn't played it in years, I managed to play it for 3.5 HOURS on 1 credit (50 cents) and I got achy from standing there so long and left like 12 credits on the machine. So when I say I'm "very good" at real pinball, that should give you an idea, at least. I couldn't do that with ProPinball to save my life. Something is off there too, IMO. I know Tarek Oberdieck can adapt to anything (he ruled the Pro Pinball charts and now rules the Pinball Arcade charts as well), but I do for real, I don't do in Pro Pinball. Pinball Arcade is the opposite. I've only played a few games of each table as I just got all the packs and have 62 tables to try out, but I made it across the US in RoadShow TWICE on my 1st game. I'm pretty sure I've never done that in my life before with a real Road Show because it's a wide-body drain monster when it's running fast and that's how I based my own RoadShow (which once again, holds up better than I thought it would when I compared them side-by-side) and I do about as well on mine as the real thing. This got me wondering what others thought and I started reading on the Pinball Arcade forums and saw Kristian's post about how EASY Pinball Arcade tables are compared to the real thing. Not only do they tend to max out extra ball settings (something rarely seen in the real world arcades of the day), but it has the table slope equivalent of maybe 4-6 in VP8 and somehow the ramps and Red seem easier to shoot as well, etc. I couldn't hardly lose the ball without trying!
I posted to Kristian (my old buddy from the old days on here) and in so doing gave my up true identity and some nice guys from the scene who liked my tables (Heretic was the first to reply) actaully cheered me up a bit by not only knowing who I am, but apparently really liked my tables. That got me reminiscing and going through my old tables some more and doing more comparisons, etc. and I looked at my tables I had in progress before I disappeared off the face of the earth (Lord of the Rings, which I had fully functioning photo-realistic fading lights already done and Pinball Magic, which I had a good chunk of the layout done and Junkyard, which I had a bit of layout done, but had tweaked out Bubblehead's wrecking ball to work really nice). I had the sudden itch to finish one, mainly Pinball Magic and thought maybe a newer VP would be just the ticket and so I thought I'd see what's happening here a bit and discovered VP10 Beta and its aforementioned incompatiblity and realized making a VP9 table now would be an utter waste of time since from everything I've read VP10 kills all VP9 tables (in the sense they don't run) as well as VP8 tables.
Given the time frames involved i people creating these games (as in years of labor overall), I find that utterly disappointing because it indicates to me that whomever is maintaining VP doesn't give a rat's hind quarter about ensuring preservation of the past and a lot of hard work some of us put into VP over the years, but equally so are the "Gimme gimme a NEW version" posts I keep finding in threads like this one (as if there were something wrong with the current versions). I have nothing against authors wanting to try their own hand at a game that's already been made and if they can make it better in some or even all ways, that's great. But on the user end, I find it disturbing because it implies the work people have already done is lousy enough to need a rebuild (and I don't mean just to fit on a pinball cabinet setup). Call it ego if you like, but I spent the better part of 7 years making over 30 solo tables (and quite a few more in tandem with others) and I can't escape the feeling it was a waste of time in the long run (other than I still like and play my own tables because they feel close to the real thing and near as I can tell compared to Pinball Arcade, most still look pretty damn good compared to the latest in "rendering" technology (I used photo and animated overlays for many things). I'm pretty sure Kurt's (Scapino) tables still look pretty darn favorable as well. And of course, if VP9 hadn't broken a lot of tables, it might be easy to adjust them to improved physics, etc. and move them up to VP9 Mod Physics (aka VP10) so even if they're old school in style, they would play better than ever before. But clearly, it would likely take considerable work to figure out how, if at all they could even be fixed for VP10. It seems features were either dropped or modified that they broke in the first place. In any case, I simply find it unappealing to make a table that will likely break once more in VP11 since clearly whomever maintains VP clearly doesn't give much stock about the work the authors put into their tables over the years. Call me disappointed.
After looking at my table comments/reviews on here in the downloads section, I noticed a reoccuring pattern of people not having any clue that VP8 tables (for the most part) need to be run on VP8 and not VP9. I see comments about table.slope breaking the table (VP9 got rid of that, it seems for reasons unknown/no good), balls getting stuck (known issue but I still have no idea, why they changed the size of the ball internally so it would break or why those with the source code to VP9 didn't fix it so it wouldn't be an issue) and flippers being weak (apparently flipper settings have no direct correlation and they are weak in VP9). I put replies telling them to use VP8 with it, but many of the comments are fairly old. What surprises me is that these things aren't better known. Is there no FAQ type thing on here or a READ ME FIRST type note that could be put in the download menu telling people to use the VP8 executable with VP8 tables?
I also noticed loads of comments that were essentially "I wish this was remade for VP9" which just reenforces my observations above about people never being happy. What's wrong with the VP8 versions they need a remake for VP9? If it's just physics (something tells me it's not), that could have been solved by VP9 not breaking VP8 tables that could then be updated to VP9 physics with minimal fuss. Why not restore the missing bits and put an option in so they work in VP9? Isn't that better than breaking almost a decade worth of tables? As you can see by the comments in the review section, a lot of people don't understand that VP8 rtables don't work at all or don't work right in VP9. Surely, I thought VP10 would address it, but like I said above, it apparently breaks VP9 tables as well as VP8 tables. I saw similar comments under Scapino's tables and others. It's a darn shame, really. I don't have the time or inclination to "fix" nearly three dozen tables to work in VP every time VP decides to break older tables. If I was going to spend my time with VP, I'd want to work on something new, not having to constantly fix what others break. I'll get off my high horse now and fade back into the shadows. Have a nice day.
-PacDude
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