VP is Flawed - FP is far superior technology

[Shockman]

Whatcha guys talking about?

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

welcome back, phil shockley!

place has been weird without you.

 

[bob]

Whatcha guys talking about?

Holy shit! I feared the worse for you. Welcome back and don't pull that disappearing act no more! It's one thing if we make you disappear, but for God's sake man, you can't disappear on your own.

 

[yogiholzer]

Ha!

Welcome back, phil!

Where have you been? I didn't notice any ban!

 

[Shockman]

i was banned from the entire net (in effect)
still am (in effect)

got a chance to peek in on you guys and took it.

i hope you are better Nic.
hey Bob, miss you.
hi yogi, you are a better person than I have given you credit for being of late. Not true of some, you know.

VP9? I want one.

i've been playing with VP again lately. making a scorched earth type 2 player hot seat tank shooter game and it's working great. Also made a tilt mech that works realistically imo. I'll post one or the other or both tomorrow. i'll rewrite the key codes for ya all. I made it for my x-arcade dual stick.

see ya.

 

[Anthias]

Hey! welcome back to the net (even if it turns out brief!) good to see you're ok, and that game sounds neato!

 

[Shockman]

thanks Anthias

zizzizzit.

the only thing i locked was the editor.

it's not going to be a scorched tanks game, it is just going to have tanks shooting at things. each player will have two elements to control, the tank, which will be stationary, and another which will move try to restore the targets that the other tank is trying to destroy.

if you have a tank stick or a dual x-arcade stick, you can aim the turret with the left stick, up and down move it fast, and left and right adjust it to a single degree. The guns are flippers, 200 flippers for each gun. If you don't have the x-arcade, you can do this action with the keypad 8/2 and 4/6.

power is set with the right stick, or you could also use R to increase it and F to reduce it.

slope is set at 100. 100 seems to be a limit. it will work at any angle though, it will just change the physics of the shot. the final game will have, i hope, many landscapes with different slopes. The landscape used now is a picture of joshua tree park in california.

no restart or scoring. i just spent a couple of hours a night for a week so far on it. the time eater was the flipper collections.

most weapons are too small. oh yeah, i forgot to say that you can change weapons. do that with the top left button that goes with the right stick and the button below that to cycle through them. the rocket and heavy roller will probably be the only ones big enough to see and all weapons act as rollers at this point. the keyboard A and W keys will do this as well.

if the tanks are too small you could always resize the playfield and the aspect ratio wont matter, you will just have to scale the wall (wall2) which is only roughly set to the landscape at this point.

there is a tree, a rock, and a hill that have some deformation coded, as well as other elements that are set aside at this time.

it also was a arena i used to experiment with a tilt mech. the game wont have it, but it's there.

oh, just play with it, or don't.

 

[LeeVanCleef]

Welcome back, Shockman! Merry Christmas Happy New Year Happy Valentines Day Happy Presidents Day! Did I miss any? MLK Day? Arbor Day?

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

it's not going to be a scorched tanks game, it is just going to have tanks shooting at things. each player will have two elements to control, the tank, which will be stationary, and another which will move try to restore the targets that the other tank is trying to destroy.

sounds very cool and for VP, amazingly innovative.

but... are there keycodes?
my gamepad is buried in storage ATM and i was hunting around on my keyboard to see how i could play.
eventually i found a key to switch weapons, but are there keys to switch angle, force and to fire?

 

[Shockman]

They are all listed in the post.

the keypad 8 and 2 will swing the gun fast and 4 and 6 will swing them slow. this is the same of course with both tanks as it is turn based. ctrl fires the gun and R increases the power and F lowers it. The weapons are all the same for now other than the graphics and that is cycled up and down with the A and W keys.

the password is 'protected' if you want to see the script. like i said it's full of redundant code because I have not structured it.

i did notice that the version i posted has a few bugs that were introduced while getting it set up for showing. if the ball gets stuck the kicker is probably set to a wall and should be set to no surface. the weapons are tracked for each tank but don't always change display in this version either.

I continue to work on it and these things are not even issues on the version I work with, but it also has a lot of half done stuff in the way. This is just to show the tanks, guns and power that i think are working real nice.

i'll at least get some scoring done and a variable landscape for the next release so it should be more fun.

it sounds like VP9 might be a platform for this, as I was wanting some sprite like characters and ball animation with free movement across the landscape and it is the only thing I can think of to do them.

has VP development been handed over? is it active? is this thread too obscure for all of this?

i'll be back

 

[Shockman]

VP is flawed, but FP is too. Superior? maybe, but far is a far stretch if you ask me. I still think it is too constricting, too controlling, and when I am building something with it, which is not very often, I feel I am trying to get a puzzle put together, not creating something. And the logo should not show, it stinks up everything released with it.

 

[destruk]

The logo is a critical component for Future Pinball, and can't be removed. The program wouldn't work without the logo... Look for the class action lawsuit sometime in the future.

 

[destruk]

There were none. Never.

AJ never allowed his site to be used as an advertising platform for commercial products, in fact it was even specifically forbidden by the forum rules to advertise commercial products on the site.

Actually, I talked to GlobalVR and they wanted to sell the machines at a discount. The Man From Post was kind enough to post the thread at Vpforums.com

http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cach...500&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=us&client=firefox-a

You replied to it, so I'm surprised you don't remember.

 

[bob]

AJ never made the rules, he never enforced them, he didn't even know what they were as far as I can deduce. I was on staff there for 3 years and when he posted in the staffroom about the software update, I replied to thread and he said, "Bob, you are a moderator now!" I don't want to diminish the old VPF, but AJ was a nonfactor there the last 6 years.

 

[Shockman]

I'm sure if AJ wanted a buttload of rules he would have set a couple forth.
I know he did not care, if you guys made rules, and I know he expected you to, but I also know he did not like the bannings. not the stupid ones en mass from years back nor the picking on me later. He could have accepted a read only, but I know he did not like the banning from the database, and he hated the staff taking it away again like they did a couple of times when he himself gave it back to me.

You shouldn't talk shit about AJ. or even complain about his excitement or involvement. His apathy was forced upon him.

 

[LeeVanCleef]

His apathy was forced upon him.

I'm a little rusty on my pre-2004 history. How was his apathy thrust upon him? Was there any single event that was the cause? I know from reading some of the archives concerning the mass bannings incident he was in pretty close contact with the staff at the time. By the time I started paying attention to the boards in 2004, there was an average of maybe 2 posts a month from him. That dwindled down to only at Christmas and from there, more or less silence.

 

[Shockman]

You find yourself with a site you don't have time to maintain nor have much use for. However it is a popular site with a group of people. You pay for it to continue and entrust others to it for their sake. Who's site is it? It's yours.

I don't claim to know AJ inside and out, but I'm sure I have conversed with him as least as much as anyone else.

As far as the statement in question, it was pertaining mostly to the post 2004 era, and the attitude he faced at that time. We talked, and he agreed that the ban I was under at the time was the business of his staff, but that to ip ban me and ban me from his database was out of line so he took off the IP ban and changed the ban to a read only. That was changed back by his staff as soon as they learned about it, and they knew AJ did it. He released me from another ban later and the staff changed it back too. That is not the only two examples either, but as for any single event, I would have to point to this. AJ concidered me a charter member and a contributer to the site. His staff treated him no better than they did me. It was his site, and he was the administrator of it. Once I was told that if I could get AJ to release the ban it would stand, the staff not believing that I could grab AJ's ear. They changed that back to a ban with AJ knowing the full story. Like I said before, it's your site. How would you feel about it?

 

[Phoenixx]

AJ was a nonfactor there the last 6 years.

I dont get it, how can a person who de-facto provides an internet forum and pays the bills each month to keep it running possibly be considered a 'non-factor'?

And what if he hadnt provided the forum at all, what had that made him? A super-mega-uber-absolutely-not-at-all-mattering-non-factor?

 

[Phoenixx]

Actually, I talked to GlobalVR and they wanted to sell the machines at a discount. The Man From Post was kind enough to post the thread at Vpforums.com

http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cacheb8i_b-VkgIJ:www.vpforums.com/forum/showthread.php%3Ft%3D43941+vpforums.com+%2B%243500&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=us&client=firefox-a

You replied to it, so I'm surprised you don't remember.

I said that AJ has never allowed his site to be used as a platform for commercial advertising, as in he himself didnt want any ads to be there and hasnt put any there either.

That the people who held access to the forum system occasionally did whatever they thought a good idea without asking him if he is O.K. with it is in another book, although they should have known since the rules specifically stated 'No Commercial Advertising'.

Just another example for how much the rules really meant to them. They have been duly quoted whenever it served their case, otherwise it was who cares,...

 

[bob]

I dont get it, how can a person who de-facto provides an internet forum and pays the bills each month to keep it running possibly be considered a 'non-factor'?

And what if he hadnt provided the forum at all, what had that made him? A super-mega-uber-absolutely-not-at-all-mattering-non-factor?

I never believed the forums cost him a penny, I always said he made a profit. Look Phoenixx, he had 5,000 supporting members and this place has about 10, do the math yourself.

 

[Phoenixx]

I never believed the forums cost him a penny, I always said he made a profit.

Do you have any proof to back that up? Any at all?

Because that would make AJ a liar, since he specifically told us on several occasions that the donations are most of the times barely enough to pay the server rent and the bandwidth, let alone turn a profit.

Personally, i dont think hed be lying to us. But if you have proof of what youre saying i obviously will have to accept it,...

 

[bob]

I said that AJ has never allowed his site to be used as a platform for commercial advertising, as in he himself didnt want any to be there and hasnt put any there either.

That the people who held access to the forum system occasionally did whatever they thought a good idea without asking him if he is O.K. with it is in another book, although they should have known since the rules specifically stated 'No Commercial Advertising'.

Just another example for how much the rules really meant to them. They have been duly quoted whenever it served their case, otherwise it was who cares,...

AJ never made those rules, I already told you that.

You can't moderate people who will not accept answers that don't support their views or ideology. Period. You and Shocky both fall under that last category. I like you both, but you both can go too far with your crusades.

 

[bob]

Do you have any proof to back that up? Any at all?

Because that would make AJ a liar, since he specifically told us on several occasions that the donations are most of the times barely enough to pay the server rent and the bandwidth, let alone turn a profit.

Personally, i dont think hed be lying to us. But if you have proof of what youre saying i obviously will have to accept it,...

I only have my common sense, 5000 times and average of 5 dollars per donation. It's strictly my opinion, but the 5000 supporting members is a fact and many people gave over a hundred dollars.

 

[Phoenixx]

AJ never made those rules, I already told you that.

You can't moderate people who will not accept answers that don't support their views or ideology.

You should know me better to know that this is not true.

I might be hard to convice at times, no argument here, but when you give me facts i cant deny i will adapt to the new circumstances and if necessary even apologise to you.

Thats how life works for me,...and so far it worked pretty good,...

 

[Phoenixx]

I only have my common sense, 5000 times and average of 5 dollars per donation. It's strictly my opinion, but the 5000 supporting members is a fact and many people gave over a hundred dollars.

You say 5000 supporting members,...the question is (for the common sense thing to work) do or did all of them donate every month? Or are we talking about one-time donors? Did you have insight in the 'books'?