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Message: <blockquote data-quote="shutyertrap" data-source="post: 279900" data-attributes="member: 134">I'm just smiling over hear as I love it when something we discuss in the podcast becomes a hot topic on the forum!First things first. I pulled the name of T2 as an example out of thin air, as I vaguely recalled Jeff and Loafer commenting on it. You could substitute Monster Bash, Attack From Mars, and who knows what else as the point remains the same; there are multiple versions of the same table and it can become a task figuring out which is the version you most respond to. That's not how I want to spend my time, I want to just play. When I was playing VP8, that's the one thing that most drove me nuts. It's what made PacDude become my favorite author, because he produced 20+ tables, they all had similar camera angle, lighting, physics, and a general quality that was consistent. As I switched table to table, it all flowed nicely. Then I'd load up some other author's table that PacDude hadn't made and I'd have a bit of culture shock.There was this one guy, I wanna say Scapino, who did amazing lighting and graphics, but his camera angles were weird, the physics not great, and they required a lot of processor power. So even though they looked the best of any I'd seen, I never played them because they failed on so many other levels. Initial setup of VP, especially with the installer (and they've had easy installers since VP8) is fairly painless. Gone are the days of setting all the paths to the ROMS and sound and game file, etc. That being said, when I tried VP9 I still had times when it couldn't find certain paths, or it would say a file was corrupted, and then I'd have to find all the pertinent files on a different website and hope that'd solve it. A table like NBA Fastbreak always proved a pain because of that 24 second clock, which required it's own set of fonts and stuff if I recall correctly. Every time there was an update to VP or MAME, it seemed I'd have to bug hunt some problem that would affect a few tables and I feared each time one dropped.Look, I get that all this might not be an issue for you guys, that you like tinkering. I'm someone who chose an iPhone over Android because I wanted a closed environment, that didn't expect me to tinker and futz with how it worked, and I knew I'd never jailbreak my phone. The only reason I started gaming on the PC was because of Steam and how easy it made it to boot up games. I don't play modded versions of games, unless it's an official DLC. My friend has been trying desperately for me to play The Long War in XCOM 2, and I told him the deal breaker was I couldn't use a controller with it. As for why I'd poo-poo VP complexity but jump into building a PinSim, allow me to retort. I'm building a physical item. The board is already coded, I just need to solder wires to it. This to me is no different than what I have to do to my real pinball machines. When I am done, it will act and be recognized as a 360 controller. Plug and play, perfect for me! I have a friend who is going to walk me through every step as he was building his own fighting stick controllers back during PlayStation One days. I'm not afraid to tackle a project when I know someone is right there in person to guide me. So it's less an adventure and more a guided tour with a definitive end destination. For as much guidance I can be given into the world of VPX, it's still a fairly open ended introduction.I like consistency, I like ease of use, I like knowing that if something goes wrong I don't immediately need to start checking my own rig but can probably put the blame on the software designers and hopefully they'll fix it soon. Oh, and my favorite part of Zen Pinball FX3 is the online community aspect. I've said it many times before, that alone triggered me from only playing Zen tables maybe 15% to TPA's 85%, into playing Zen 95% of the time. VPX doesn't even have leaderboards.My issues with VR start and end with the resolution. I can't be expected to get used to any other aspect of it when the visuals are blatantly front and center not up to my expectations. I was just on set today, looking through an Arri Amira digital camera who's eyepiece uses an OLED display. Sure that one piece of viewing equipment probably costs $15,000 but once you know what is possible, what's being used for VR becomes unacceptable. You can't plop me down into the middle of a rose garden and tell me how wonderful it all smells if you first surround me in dog sh!t. Until you clear that up, I'm never going to be able to appreciate everything else.I also made it perfectly clear that it'd be unfair for me to judge the games when it's not my setup and I didn't set the conditions. There were some carry over issues from when I first played up at FarSight in June to when I played at my friend's house, so I know certain things were not due to improper setup. And I certainly appreciate the immersive experience to be had with pinball, something I thought I made sure to point out. I'm happy for you VR guys, but you also have no issue with overlooking some glaring problems that most of the public can't get past.I'll give you a perfect example of how quirky and exacting I can be. I have a 23" monitor for my PC that is only 1080p. My friend dropped off an unused 30" 2160p (or there abouts) display for me to use if I wanted it. The problem was, it was and LCD that used CCFL type backlighting, which meant whites always had a yellow tint to them, blacks were never black, and it generated a lot of heat. There was also one row of dead pixels running vertically an inch from the left side. I tried it for 2 months, hoping I'd get used to it. As much as I liked the size and the resolution, the yellowed whites and that very narrow, hardly visible line of dead pixels were too much for me. I gave it back and plugged in my smaller, lower resolution monitor because it produced the crisp whites and deeper blacks. Sure, over time I had gotten used to the larger monitor, but all it would take was to look at a different monitor and I'd be right back to disliking the large one.I know, this was all very long winded (surprise surprise) and I don't mean to spit on the VP community. I'm just saying it's not for me, I know what aspects of digital pinball I really like, TPA fostered those and Zen is now putting 'em on steroids. Were I a cab owner, I might feel completely different as the VP community totally caters to that subset. I'm just not going to be a convert anytime soon.</blockquote>

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