tiltjlp
PN co-founder
- Joined
- Jun 9, 2003
- Messages
- 3,403
- Reaction score
- 145
- Points
- 65
- Favorite Pinball Machine
- Flying Trapeze 1934
From what I've read, a lot of us with older PCs won't be able to run Future Pinball. My Dell is almost 3 years old, and I have no idea if it will run FP or not. Not being at all tech minded, I'll simply have to wait and see. But if FP won't run on my PC, I can't afford to spend X amount of $$ to upgrade, besides the fact I wouldn't have a clue what to upgrade. Beside, no 1 program is important enough to me to spend money upgrading to run, especially not a game.
Since I can and do use VP 6.1 to make tables, and not sure if my partner is going to switch to or at least use FP alongside VP, it's not very high on my list of priorities. I haven't finished reading the FP manual, so I can't say if it makes sense to me yet, but from what I have read so far, VP looks better and better, with or without any improvements from Ultracade. From what I've read, and from the comments of others, FP won't be nearly as flexible as VP has proven to be.
Another consideration is that many originals are not as high quality as recreations. Part of this seems to be due to newbies rushing to make tables before they understand the ins and outs of VP. But part of this is also because of a trend that has developed which I completely dislike. Wholesale public betas are now being released, and then die on the vine, never to be improved and completed. Of course there is no such thing as the "perfect" table, and bugs can turn up no matter how much a table is tested. But the time for heavy duty testing is BEFORE a table is released.
So if what we're going to get from Future Pinball is a series of half finished beta releases that are seldom improved upon, I'm sure not going to spend anything to upgrade in order to use FP. There are some very talented original authors, but there are also a goodly number of newer authors who simply don't seem willing to take the time and effort to make and test their work before releasing it. So unless that changes, FP will simply spawn better looking beta releases. And that, for my money, isn't much to get excited about.
John
Since I can and do use VP 6.1 to make tables, and not sure if my partner is going to switch to or at least use FP alongside VP, it's not very high on my list of priorities. I haven't finished reading the FP manual, so I can't say if it makes sense to me yet, but from what I have read so far, VP looks better and better, with or without any improvements from Ultracade. From what I've read, and from the comments of others, FP won't be nearly as flexible as VP has proven to be.
Another consideration is that many originals are not as high quality as recreations. Part of this seems to be due to newbies rushing to make tables before they understand the ins and outs of VP. But part of this is also because of a trend that has developed which I completely dislike. Wholesale public betas are now being released, and then die on the vine, never to be improved and completed. Of course there is no such thing as the "perfect" table, and bugs can turn up no matter how much a table is tested. But the time for heavy duty testing is BEFORE a table is released.
So if what we're going to get from Future Pinball is a series of half finished beta releases that are seldom improved upon, I'm sure not going to spend anything to upgrade in order to use FP. There are some very talented original authors, but there are also a goodly number of newer authors who simply don't seem willing to take the time and effort to make and test their work before releasing it. So unless that changes, FP will simply spawn better looking beta releases. And that, for my money, isn't much to get excited about.
John