First, forgive me; this is long. I'm ADD and Asperger's and I just don't know how to write short. :-( I don't see a lot of activity on this site, but hopefully I'm just here at the wrong time of day or something. I hope to get some feedback/assistance on what follows.
I'm an experienced software engineer, but a complete noob at VP, and I'm having trouble running the game "57 Chevy." Backtracking the Download in my browser, it claims I got it from https://www.vpforums...s&showfile=5586 .
I don't remember launching it, but when I closed a bunch of other windows, behind them I found a nice-looking, playable, 57 Chevy table waiting for me. Played it a while, enjoyed it enough to want to keep it and play it again sometime (though subject to disappointment at its seeming incompleteness, but the author acknowledges this so I can't be angry), then closed it and went on to other things.
I have never again been able to get it to open and play properly.
Double-clicking 57chevy.vpt on the Desktop to launch VP and open the file "all in one motion," VP comes up, rendering begins, but then I get a warning (which the forums here suggest is well known) about "D3D [supporting] only power-of-2 textures" -- but I can "click through" that and let table initialization continue. VP then crashes before the table appears on the screen.
If, instead, I launch VP itself, first, from the Start Menu, it comes up and seems stable. I can Load 57chevy.vpt without undue difficulty. When I then go to Play the table, rendering begins, the D3D warning comes up, I click through, and a "playable" table appears -- but I use the term "playable" very loosely, because it "isn't really playable playable."
First, the graphics appear to be incomplete or incorrect. The $50/$100/$150 labels on the tops of the three round bumpers are missing; the bumper tops are plain white. The geometry of the bumpers themselves "doesn't look quite right;" there are some blocky, rectangular (?) -looking sections where everything ought to be round. (In the Editor, I find that the labels are present, but (making no other changes) I have to turn off bumper-top visibility in order to make the labels visible in the rendered table. I'm thinking, suddenly a rendering-order problem, maybe? Other graphical elements strike me as not looking the same as they did that first time, but I don't know of anything else specific.
Second, if I start a game and the ball hits any of these round bumpers, the game crashes (?) and pops up the Script Editor at a line that is attempting to set that Bumper object's State property to 1. The error is, "class Bumper does not have property State," or words to that effect. That can't be right; that'd be a showstopping error that would have prevented this game from being released at all, even in an "incomplete" state. (I also certainly didn't experience that problem the first time I played the table.) As a software engineer I'm wondering whether VP is somehow loading the wrong Bumper class definition -- perhaps a slightly different one originating in, say Future Pinball, which was already installed on this same computer when I installed Visual Pinball. I was pleased, in FP, to find a nice Help file with complete documentation of all the different classes, properties, methods, etc. that could/must be used in scripting there, but I haven't found equivalent documentation for VP, and I'd like to. Please advise.
Fourth, ignoring all of the above and going ahead and trying to play the table, it's completely unplayable for what I can only describe as "bizarre physics" reasons. At first all seems fine: the Plunger has no difficulty shooting the ball to the very top of the table as expected -- but then the ball takes almost exactly the same, somewhat dog-legged, path, every time, from the top of the table, down the far-right chute to what's supposed to be a Kickback -- but when that Kickback fires, it doesn't have anywhere near enough force to actually kick the ball back up onto the playfield: it sort of "lobs" the ball, in a very peculiar way, maybe a ball's-diameter or two, which isn't far enough to get the ball back into play. The ball falls back and -- the Kickback now having been "used up" -- goes down the drain. On the rare occasion that the ball makes it to a Flipper, when I go to hit it the Flipper also "has no strength," being capable only of "lifting" the ball, but not of imparting any real momentum to it. All I can do is flail limply until the ball rolls off the end of the Flipper, down the drain again. It's as though either "The ball is too heavy" -- but then, the Plunger wouldn't work, would it? -- or "the flippers aren't strong enough" -- but I tried changing Flipper strength settings from 6 to 60 (a factor of 10 increase), without making any difference at all in behavior.
Possibilities seem to include: physics-engine and table-component library mismatches between VP and ... who knows? ... maybe one or more versions of FP; corruption of the downloaded .vpt file, sometime between that first play and my second attempt; and maybe even having somehow managed to load-and-play 57chevy.vpt in a program other than VP, or at least other than the version of VP () I find myself faced with when I try today.
Finally, on the off chance that I somehow corrupted the .vpt file from its freshly-downloaded state, I returned to the page linked in the first paragraph, above, logged in, and tried to download a fresh copy of the table -- but clicking the Download button/link brought me to an error page saying that the item in question did not exist (or words to that effect). Now, after an hour or so and writing all this, the download is available and I'm grabbing a fresh copy.
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