phreezie

I would argue that with photography, only the tooling changed but the craft remained, while with AI the craft completely transforms in something else, in which I'm just not interested in.

> Does it matter? Like how does it matter?

Yes, it matters to me because art is something deeply human, and I don't want to consume art made by a machine.

It doesn't matter if it's fun and beautiful, it's just that I don't want to. It's like other things in life I try to avoid, like buying sneakers made by children, or sign-up to anything Meta-owned.

Hey, I'm building a next gen virtual pinball simulator!

I'll post an update to VPU in a few weeks!

If you're in for a deep dive into this "underground" community, I've co-authored an article about it last year.

https://www.thisweekinpinball.com/a-peek-into-the-digital-cr...

Yes, I also have a Tilt Five kit, which is awesome.

We're still doing lots of work on the core parts though, so these things will come later.

Yes, Volley was a nice project because one of the dev team has one at home, so we got ultra detailed assets. It was also a great use case to test Visual Scripting.

But before we dive into more table builds, we'll be focusing on the engine work.

Yes.

But at the end of the day, this is a hobby, and Unity is an awesome engine to work with. I'm following Godot more closely than ever, but too much effort to still be able to call it fun would be necessary to port this over.

Absolutely, that's the main goal. I've built my cabinet over 10 years ago, so testing is assured. ;)

We're working on something like that using Unity[1]. It's nice, because contrarily to the commercial platforms, we don't need to support low-end devices like the switch. And yes, the DXR features will make a difference[2] (sorry, I don't have a more recent video).

Concerning physics, we're using VPX's engine, which is very well tuned to pinball. Not sure if the breaking the glass is going to be a thing, but PR welcome if you think so. ;)

[1] https://github.com/freezy/VisualPinball.Engine [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CfZImFl1ME

Aw, thanks :)

TBH I just started looking into it, together with a few other developers from the community. I'll post something at the usual place as soon as we know more.

Yes, we're targeting all the desktop platforms, i.e. Windows, Linux and macOS.

But thanks to recent efforts, VPX also runs on Linux now! It's on the standalone branch[1], under actions you can download a build.

[1] https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball/tree/standalone

Oh, and if you don't know where to start, check this out:

http://mjrnet.org/pinscape/BuildGuideV2/BuildGuide.php

It depends on the effort you want to put in, and the tables you want to play.

VPX has the largest table collection, and the good ones play very well. But there is also Pinball FX which is a lot easier to set up, and they are catching up in terms of cabinet support (we're helping them, the next thing is force feedback support).

There is also Future Pinball which runs a few original games with mods pretty well now, but it's still closed source.

If there are any pinhead game devs out there, we're still working on the next generation of Visual Pinball, called VPE[1].

However, given the current drama around Unity, we're currently looking into Godot to evaluate how much effort it would take to port, and how Godot will support our needs.

[1] https://github.com/freezy/VisualPinball.Engine

If you're interested in how XPBD works, I can highly recommend the YouTube series of one of the authors who wrote the paper, Matthias Müller: https://www.youtube.com/c/TenMinutePhysics/videos

Thanks! :)

I still want to bring vpx-js to a level where people can actually play a WPC table in the browser. That'd be really awesome and hasn't been done yet, at least not that I know of.

Well, maybe one day.

Hey, I didn't know somebody was actually using vpx-js. That's awesome!

Matthias' work was also featured in Two Minute Papers here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0QwAhUnpr4

Yes, definitely. I did some tests with my headset, and while a few usability and performance issues need to be resolved, it looks incredible, specially the reflections.

Thanks! :) What we're doing is adding adjustable randomness to the collision resolvers, which results in more or less control over where the ball goes. You can also adjust many parameters of the flipper bats, e.g. you could make the coil less strong, which would be the case for many worn machines. Finally, as you can see in the Volley video, texturing is a big part of adding visual wear, and it makes the whole thing a lot less uncanny.

Yes! Our CI builds for Windows, Linux and MacOS.

Shameless plug, we're working on a next-gen pinball simulator called Visual Pinball Engine[1]. It's free and open source, using Unity, and will eventually support importing FP's table format.

It's still WIP, but we've put a lot of focus on tooling, so anyone can easily create tables.

Quick video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CfZImFl1ME

[1] https://github.com/freezy/VisualPinball.Engine

I think what you're missing is that this discussion is not about the legal consequences of these individuals, but about ethical decisions that will have a negative impact on the ecosystem as a whole.

It's not the signing that OP criticizes. It's that the "something" is defined by an URL whose destination can change, and otherwise none of the "something"'s content (like, for example a hash) is in the contract.

I doubt a court would consider such a vague definition of content as "real".

If you want to play a modern, hi-resolution 3D version of Space Cadet, there was a Visual Pinball port recently by JPSalas: https://www.vpforums.org/index.php?showtopic=47560

This made me think of this excellent read:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/13/the-truth-wear...