FP is what we need!?

Well, as I hinted...much the same thing could be said about OpenOffice or the GIMP. Yet despite all the nonsense, despite all the geeks working on them that would LOVE to have those things become impossibly hard for average people to use and become their own sole provence, despite how difficult such people can be in offering help to the "uninitiated," and how little they care for people with less experience and expertise at computers than themselves (even though they LOVE the rare occasion of having people look up to and admire them!)...despite all of that, those programs keep moving on.
 
Tudnut, I don't think you've been keeping up with the times. Randy licensed VP. That means he DOES care about money and he just got some, probably quite a bit for VP. Now why on fracking earth would he give away the source code at this point?

Ultracade is getting licenses from Williams for the game they plan to include. If they can't get a license, it won't be included. It's that simple.
 
Hey, take it easy, Pac. I'm not the one that mentioned open source in the first place, I was just expounding upon the pros and cons of it.

As for Randy licensing VP, I'm not so sure that would preclude the possibility of making it open source, anyway (though that would, of course, aside from being up to him--which I agree, is no doubt out of the question--also be something possibly addressed IN that license). Sun made their office suite open source and it branched off into OpenOffice...yet Sun still kept the office suite as a commercial product, as well.

At any rate, like I said, I'm just responding, more about open source than about VP.
 
From a different point of view, an Open Source VP release could improve even more the table development: with a better, more stable and improved VP release, I'm sure there would be a great improvement also in table releases.

Remember that UC obtained (as far as I can read from ther posts) a great help from the VP community, especially on the table development on Pinball Legend project.

tiltjlp said:
I've been around close to five years now, and from day one I have heard talk of a need for Open Source. I figure it won't happen , simply because it hasn't yet. If the programmers among us haven't banded together to start an Open Source project, it must be because it's harder than it seems. And if Randy was going to give us the source code, hw would have done us before now. Another thing to be considered is the old adage Too Many Cooks Spoil The Broth. With all the egos in VP/FP, if there was an Open Source project, there would probably be so much in-fighting that it would stall out 15 minutes after the project ws launched.

I partially agree with you, John, but remember that EGO is no = to good programmer. I'm not a programmer, and since it is needed a great skill for developing such program, I really believe that there are only a few good programmers amongs us (without offence, but at the moment, beside Randy and Black, I only have in mind bublehead :( )
Otherwise, as you say, the Open Source project would have already started...
 
No, it wouldn't have started without the code in the first place...though perhaps someone else would have used the program as an inspiration and have come up with his own (open source?) program.

By the way, out of curiosity, does anyone know what this thing (vp, I mean) was actually written in? I'm thinking it wasn't VB, even though it allows our table "plug-ins" to piggy-back on it.
 
To the best of my knowledge this VP thing was written in C and makes extensive use of the Microsoft Direct X version 7 libraries amongst other microsoft codecs.
 
Yeah, somehow even with my (VERY!) limited knowledge of languages, I didn't think the actual program was written in VP. It's too clean.
 
mmmm....fancy stumbling across this ol' thread, well worth a revisit.

The code was handed back to Randy and he did try to incorporate the Ultrapin additions into VP8.1. At an educated guess I'd say those additions were rather poorly coded and/or documented, thus rendered less then useful. Now there is VP9 which works for me though still from what I can gather, that's just a hit or miss affair as the code was written for specific hardware and not designed to be handed back to anyone, some work was done thus VP9.02, though it's still a bit of a mess and I doubt we will see any further updates, I'd like to be proven wrong.

As for FP, well, it looks nice, runs nice, but still plays like shit and is way to restictive in it's enforced coding practices.
 
No more updates?
What a waste of effort VP9 for windows would be then.
 
Ta da...where is BoB? :D
 
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