Visual Pinball V9 review

[sleepy]

Now I'm not sure. I hit a ball that bounced off a Wall like the ball off of a Kicker ball and it shoots back way too fast the same way, so I dunno.
Maybe it's just the too fast behavior, but a ball hitting a stationary ball in a Kicker would likely slow up on the playfield surface movement since the english on the moving ball to the stationary ball would tend to be vertical against the (top half or so) round of the other ball.

 

[Shockman]

Hitting a stationary object is subjective. It depends on the shape of it and the properties, like elasticity etc.

Check to make sure that that wall does not have a slingshot (you will see a darker line/lines. And make sure no slingshot property is assigned to that wall, if you think there should not be. If there is and there should be, then adjust it.

Balls are as subjective, but where they are hit would have a dramatic effect on where the ball will go because just a little difference in position changes the angle a lot. I don't think there is much you can do directly on a ball to ball collision, because I don't think they have those user adjustable properties, at least not in the editor. The off a hit should be equal more or less, but not much more or less, but the direction not opposite, because there would only be one chance in infinity of such a square hit. I thought VP handles this well. It does not have to be perfect, it just has to not trigger an adverse reaction, and I have not gotten that sense.

I will get a table with a captured ball that can be hit and check it out. If there is a problem with speed of such a hit, I would think a trigger before it to read the speed of the ball, and a command at the hit to return the ball to the stored speed. If that is too early to have the desired effect (the command may come before the programmed reaction that might over-ride) the have another trigger to do if just after the bounce.

It's really the things that have no work-around that is a problem. And the problem is not so much the fact that they exist, but the reaction you get from reporting it. It turns good people into liars.

 

[rascal]

For a free, now open source program which had it's beginning on Window 95 and will be 12 years old in December, it amazes me that it gets any attention or reviews at all. Any other program would have been abandonware and covered with dust by now or completely redone from the ground up and not even resemble itself.

It's amazing that the program even still runs on todays computers and that people still talk about, enjoy it, and use it. Something must have been done right, or nobody would care and you would have to find something else to complain about.

For that reason alone I give it a 10 out of 10.
Visual Pinball rules!

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

Yet maybe it's not always a good thing when something very old is supported indefinitely. Out of death always comes new life... new life appropriate for its time and circumstances. Is it better to keep patching an old roadster through the decades, or does a day come when it's better just to buy a new car.

Maybe the 'something that's done right' is the fact that the authors and pinMAME team never gave up on VP?

EDIT: BTW, VP started with win98, not win95 AFAIK. Also, it was not open-source for most of its life. That was, you know, part of the whole problem.

 

[StevOz]

I tend to agree that VP is well past it's use by date and does really need a complete rewrite to conform to more modern and open standards, ideally this would be using OpenGL and python for scripting, to enable the use of any OS.

That said it would be a huge undertaking and there just doesn't seem to be enough VPers with the time, talent and inclination to commit themselves to such a project.

So the real question is how do you gather together and then coordinate such a team to build a new VP.

There is Future Pinball of course and various projects are being built in and around that platform, though I'm rather dubious about the entire legality of those if push ever comes to shove and I just can't see Black sitting back on the sidelines forever or handing over his baby for gratis.

So until some sort of demi god of coding addicted to VP comes along or some other sort of solution can be formulated. I think slight improvements to the current VP is all we can hope for.

 

[Shockman]

Like everything else, VP is what it is. VP use to be more though. I have said it has some nice graphics improvements, but your interaction with a pinball machine is limited, and NOTHING should come before that interaction. The plunger, the flippers and the nudging. It's the absolute minimum isn't it?

What will kill the opportunity for VP to continue is not time. As long as Windows updates allow VP to work correctly it still has a chance. The code structure is not so bad, the base is outdated, but that could be patched without a re-write.

VP needs devs that care about the basics of gameplay. Those that do are not devs and those that don't are. The niche did not create this product. This product created the niche. The niche can not support it's self, it has to have the program support them. At this point the program should support them, but it should also support it's roots. What it does is holds their hands, and for all I know that is the only reason it is so popular with cabinet users. Because I have asked for example why don't the put the table nudge in and rem it out if they would rather nudge the ball instead of the table. That was like asking them to burn their cabinets.

How much graphics improvements would make VP worth not having the most basic of function? I think the answer is no amount of graphics improvements will ever be worth not having the basic pinball function.

How do you rate a program that goes backwards in the most basic element of it's design? I rate it a 10 and it's lucky I was feeling generous at the time.

 

[unclewilly]

ive watched the dev page and honestly it doesnt really look like anyone is really working on it. the only thing ive seen worked on is gamepad support.

if the nudge was so easily reverted please feel free to fix it and add it to the current build. i would gladly use it. but no one seems willing to step up to the plate on that one. if i understood how to do it i would have done it a long time ago.

but the great thing about vp which you know all to well is overcomming its shortcommings.
you yourself have been a part of more work arounds then i can count.

so until one of us figures out how to replace the nuging with the old vp8 nudge well have to work around it.

i dont know if you can still get on vpf but my buddy jimmyfingers have created a ball momenrum engine that makes the ball movement much more realistic. if you cant let me know and ill send you some tables with the momentum engine so you can check it out.

vp jas always been a 10 for me as for me the joy comes from making stuff work that doesnt work right

 

[Shockman]

I've had it working but not perfectly. I came to believe that I could do it, but that it would probably break the reason it was taken out in the first place, the cabinet hardware. That was with version 9.07. I could not get later versions to work at all. When Paul said he would not host it or allow a link to it, I saw no point. I don't want to use 9.07

The problem, as I said, has nothing to do with software.

 

[unclewilly]

i honestly dont use the accelerometer nudge. it never functioned properly for me. no matter how many times i would calibrate it, the ball was always pulled to one side or the other.

so i opted for nudge buttons on my cabinet. so the old nudge was fine for me.

 

[Shockman]

VP tables authors' talent is off the scale, JP and you too. VP was not built for JP and you though. My point is that it should not take such grey matter to get some of this stuff to work. It has always taken someone special to make VP more than the sum of it's parts, but anyone could build a table that the nudge keys would work on. It's not hard to understand that some people still can, knowing said people.

 

[sleepy]

Sleepy missed the boat.

It's not VP. The Unity 3D project is all about upgrading Future Pinball to use the Unity 3D physics engine and integrate VPinMame.

 

[Shockman]

Well, FP would be better too, if it had a good physics engine and mame support.

 

[unclewilly]

from the videos posted. it looks like the physics are much better and the guy says they are pretty adjustable

 

[Shockman]

Personally, of course vpinmame support is nice where it is and would be nice to have where it isn't, but I think it's over rated. I think it's the coolness of this that is the biggest factor in people over-rating a simulation of pinball that is weak at best.