Future Pinball released!!

[nipsmg]

Just a heads up, Future Pinball was released today at some point.  Download is available at FuturePinball.com

[CM]

I'm not familiar with this .. is this in any way compatable with VisualPinball table files or will it be all new table creations?

[Howard_Casto]

I have no clue why more people aren't mentioning this. 

To answer your quesitons no and yes.  Visual pinball was 2 3/4 D future pinball is full 3d.  Before you ask, it's been said that pinmame support is in the works, so evenutally people will start making new tables for this engine. 

[mahuti]

Wow, that looks cool. Can't wait until there are a few more tables to try.

[D5A1AC]

This looks great. I hope someone makes a twilight zone model for this!

[nipsmg]

There's limitations with this release.

#1) No ramps !!!!?!??!?!?!?! 
#2) No Pinmame support.  Accordign to their forums also, there apparently may be no "official" pinmame support.  By that statement I could see them exposing functions to drive the table through an extenal program, but not actually write the support themselves.  So a "third party" would have to write a pinmame/FP bridge.  Oh well.  sounds like a "we're covering our butt" type of thing.

When the website for FP first came up, they were showing images of "black knight 2000" and how realistic it looked, as well as Terminator 2.  The tables looked amazing.. Then all of the sudden those pics came down.

When you launch FP, they have a statement that says something to the effect of "the Future Pinball Team does not condone the usage of artwork to which you don't own the copyright.".  Not that it's not possible, it's just "not condoned"

This is a first release, but I have to tell everyone, I'm absolutely blown away.  It takes a beefy machine to run with all the reflections/high resolution, but it's breathtaking.  Can't wait till more tables come out.

--NipsMG

[jcrouse]

Looks very promising although upon initial installation and about half an hour of messing with it, it doesn't look and more cabinet friendly than Visual Pinball. It still launches to an editor and requires the mouse to load a table and then the F5 key to launch it. I didn't see how you can load a table from the commandline although I may have missed it. Also, when playing a game pressing the ESC key simply takes you back to the editor. Again, not very cabinet friendly.

John

[mccoy178]

Sounds like its wrapper time, eh?

[Doc-]

I posted a message on their General Discussion forum asking if they could consider making the program more cabinet friendly (feel free to chime in there). 

Just allowing a command line option to run a table, then use escape to exit and P to pause (perhaps one more key for switching camera views) would make the whole thing easy to integrate with a cabinet front end.  Hopefully they will fix this in a future release.

The initial table is awesome though - hopefully there will be many more to come.

Doc-

[Howard_Casto]

I wouldn't worry about it at this point.  Right now table associations don't even work.  If you double click on the sci-fi table in explorer, future pinball loads up but it doesn't load the table. 

What troubles me is the fact that half of the keys are hard-coded.  I don't understand why you wouldn't make them all re-mappable as it doesn't require any extra work. 

[Onji]

Looks like they are making pretty good progress with this (ramps, command line arguments, etc) There are quite a few tables released for it too.

I'm thinking about adding it to my cab. Does anyone know how cab friendly it is now at all? I saw that vplauncher (http://vplauncher.rolandscholz.de/) now supports future pinball, Will this help us cab guys out some? Is anyone using it on a cab now?

(im currently using mamewah)

thanks

[jcrouse]

I am using it on my cab with MameWAH as my front end. It is competely cabinet friendly, unlike Visual Pinball. My only complaint is the orginization (directory and file) on the folders. The tables folder is as much of a mess as it is in Visual Pinball.

John

[unclet]

Future Pinball is already cabinet friendly.  You can launch a table (fpt file) from the command line with the following command:

futurePinball.exe /open "C:\futurePinball\Tables\Sci-Fi Classic.fpt" /play /exit


After starting the table like this from the command line, you can exit the whole application by simply pressing ESC.   

Also, you can map the keys by starting Future Pinball manually and going into the menu option "Preferences/Game Keys and Console" and settings up the keys you want.

[youki]

Hi,

AtomicFE have a plug'n play module dedicated to pinball . This module includes Future Pinball, VPinman + visual pinball.

Have a look.   I have lot of user that uses it  and most of them i think in cab.

[Onji]

thanks everyone, gonna give it a try tonight