Wow, I completely missed that. When did this "freak out" happen?

I think the truth is that JPop just truly enjoys "Arts and Crafts" day vs. doing the less creative "real" work of getting machines actually built and coded. Once he finishes mocking up one game with foamcore and artwork it's simply time to move onto the next.... In his fantasy world every day is "Arts and Crafts" day.

I believe he's referring to this:

The Great Harm.

Thanks! I somehow missed that. I assume that was in the AIW blog? He definitely didn't mention anything about it in the RAZA blog. So I guess John pulled a 180. Not surprising, but very disappointing.

Add to that burnout, magic girl is what 4.5 years in the making? I don't care HOW passionate you are about pinball, that's a long time to work on anything. It's no wonder why there's 2 other pinball projects, the KISS prototype, a $500 neon clock. JPOP isn't slow, he's just bored.

I have a feeling jpop has a secondary account name to read these threads

Jpop take your nada and stick it where the sun don't shine.. keep hiding behind it..

A couple years ago I saw a 'jpop' on Multimorphic's forums. Not 100% sure if it was him though, as anyone could have signed up with the name jpop.

That is him. I bought his old p-roc and PDBs based on an ad he posted there.

http://www.pinballcontrollers.com/forum/index.php?action=profile;u=628

Huh. Guess that was him! Looking at the job posting on pinballinventor.org, I coulda done that...and not get paid. Awww..

Looks like he was quite active on the forums, looking back.

That's because it's ok to spy on other dudes, but it's "great harm" if they see your stuff.

Is there a name for this psychological condition?

rd

Yes. But I am not an armchair psychiatrist.

I think someone who still has John's ear should explain the "great harm" he has done, well, ... by not doing anything to get even a funcioning MG prototype together.

As other people have said, even IF you had a hardware complete game that was production ready, you still have the small matter of:
- actually picking a boardset
- coding it, and making it "not crappy"
- video creation/integration, sound / voice effect creation

And actually producing it. I am sure I missed a thousand small details as well.

My impression is that he quickly jumped from MG into multiple projects, effectively delaying them all as he is only one person. So it's more of a lack of a focus in the first place than burnout.

LOL i responded to this post, talked to him awhile about it, then was told by friends that i wont be paid and discontinued such talks

He's not a "nice guy".

Believe me, I am trying. And I am a virtual nobody in the pinball world, so take that for what it's worth.

Chris

STILL looking for a programmer:
http://pinballinventor.org/jobs.html

If (when) nobody wants to work with him, how are any of these going to go beyond a basic flipping machine with no rulesets, no animations, heck not even basic scoring? Is JPOP going to teach himself to code and do that himself as well? If that's the case, you might be seeing them run on mission pinball platform since it seems to be the most user friendly, but that might require to go back to PROC hardware.
giphy[1].gif

it is worth clicking on that link just to read the "job descriptions"...

Wow, good luck finding a programmer.

He would be better off trolling college recruiters for someone that doesn't know any better and will take a $45k job right out of college.

Just out of curiosity - Was the NDA written in Comic Sans?

Chris

Entry level programmers out of college are now making 65k to 70k out here in the midwest, it's really escalated the past few years.

There was no NDA for AIW.

yup...

i used to be a programmer before i exited the rat race... if i had even bothered to apply after reading that job description, here's how i think that interview would go:

john: (spiel about inventing games, etc.)..
me: ok, what are the requirements for the project?
john: i have them all in my head...
me: no written design document with requirements?
john: why would you need that?
me: thanks for your time...

He has no money left. They would have to work for free.

Yeah, at this point his only hope is probably someone from Nigeria or the eastern bloc that is advertising on oDesk.com for $7/hour.

or a naive pinball fan

My students make about the same at graduation, though the upper end is higher (and should be for the greater Boston area).

There are programmers (and skilled ones at that) who will work in a barter situation, largely for the "fun of it", fwiw. The trouble is that everything coming to light surey taints the idea that it would be as fun as one might hope.

Maybe we should tell him just to ship us the cabinets and populated playfield and call it a day and we go with FAST/Mission on our own or something. Just to get this thing done. What a nightmare.

This cannot run on indefinitely, there will be a wall that will be hit at some point.

the wall was hit a long time ago... i think people have realized now that it will be impossible to get over the wall...

Has anyone talked to JPOP in the last week or so? I refuse to join facebook so I am not privy to the info on the private group site. Anything worthwhile going on there?

If the eventual software sucks as badly as we fear (lets pretend he "completes" it, but it is a shadow of a game that is in no way close to modern Pinball rule standards) we might want to reprogram it anyways (Cactus Canyon Continued style).

The FAST board is still not for sale yet. MPF is incomplete. What's the rush?

MPF uses pyGame for video. As someone who (co-?)wrote the original HD VGA fork of pyprocgame using Pygame (and recently re-wrote the new hardware accelerated version) allow me to assure you that doing this:

http://pinballinventor.org/games/magicgirl/preview/33/wizardry.html

In Pygame would be rather difficult without some very beefy computer driving the game. There are ways to do FMV in another process (via udp or similar) controlling the graphics and we've seen quite a few variants of this on the pinballcontrollers forums over the years. So, if you want to make good on John's goals for this game, you're not likely to do it easily/soon with fast+MPF.

There's also potentially no need to order new boards if there are enough QPC boards for every machine. Others have stated that the QPC board has been made to run pyprocgame so I assume that means they ported Libpinproc. Since MPF leverages Libpinproc for p-roc support (Brian, do not crucify me for oversimplifying) then the QPC can probably run pyprocgame code OR MPF code.

There's certainly a way to get this done. Flushing what has been done already is almost certainly not the way.

I think jpop has a t-shirt with that.

That would be a fun idea, however, there's no way he could charge $17K for it. Maybe $2K for the cab/populated PF/boards. If not the boards, at least put the wiring on molex connectors to hook it up to PROC, FAST, a Commodore 64, etc.

I'm not saying my idea is great or perfect, but this is the state we're at, trying to figure out some sort of solution to a problem he barely acknowledges. And that is if we get anything for our money at all.

I found this line interesting.

"We are a boutique interactive studio designing in the social-mobile space of today. Creating media for interactive games, handheld toys and full-size pinball machines is what we do."

Here's the smell test for future pre-orders:

Are you paying them to BUILD a game, or DEVELOP one?

(I'll let you guess which choice is the bad one)

Wait, paying some one to develop one isn't bad if you know that Stern or JJP is going to do the build

Maybe change that to just Stern, unless you've got a Hobbit sitting in your gameroom and aren't telling us.

But yes, Stern's a well oiled machine. They're always selling, so they've got cash flow to be always developing.

Here's a quote from jpop on the p-roc forums:
"Pinball is tough to do anyway, and games need a full time programmer/designer leading (at a minimum)."
6742.gif

Trick question:Nobody will pre-order any more. The answer is pay them to DELIVER an already-built & developed machine.

Speculation, maybe true but a guess on your part.

Skit-b had a "final" machine and was collecting money for the build, so Ben's test while good isn't perfect.

"Cash & Carry" really is the only safe way to buy a pinball. Anything else is putting your money at risk.

I do think some companies have built reputations though to deliver a product, so they'll be able to continue being paid on build (Spooky being one of them).

I think in terms of funding pinball startups the pre-order model is pretty much over. In fact, I think crowd-sourced pinball projects (kickstarter, etc) are dead as well.

So ... he just freaked and deleted all the videos, boning the AIW buyers by the way, over ... nothing?

I dunno what to even say anymore guys. It's obvious John is reading this stuff, no one believes a bunch of people messaged him over the AIW videos appearing in this thread. But he obviously is too wrapped up in his own head to hear anything other than what he wants to hear.

I did what I could behind the scenes, but that failed. I know it's not my job to save this, but I feel for everyone feeling trapped. John, if you're reading this, you're really trashing the legacy you built up now, it's sad.

in english please

Look, he owes some serious money to some serious vendors. So if he's not broke, then he's a petty criminal who I would never want to support. Either way, it's bad.

What gets me is the crazy high price tag associated with his proposed machines. He charges as much as for a new car, yet won't pay vendors, a lawyer(who he's going to really need soon), or programmers? And yet, looking in the early part of this thread, he's praised as being this big messiah of pinball. The collection plate comes around, and people are throwing money at him. Yet, all that's being delivered(after pulling teeth) is just a few sketches & arts & crafts projects here and there.

I am stumped. No, not blaming any people giving him money, I am just confused at how it got this far. Make-believe product with real money.

Sure. Knowing literally nothing about the contents of the code beyond the fact that it is supposedly far along and written for PyProcgame and needs a separate "graphics engine" (something else to let cool high resolution video/effects happen on the screen). My guess would be either Flash or Unity, since both are mentioned in the job description. Given that the screenshots show mostly 2D graphics and Unity2D is a relatively recent development, my guess is that thing might be Flash, but it could just as easily be a custom OpenGL, SDL, Allegro, whatever graphics engine. I don't think it's PyGame given my experiences with it, but I could be very wrong if the frame rate is low and the updates take place mostly in small regions.

Anyway, you asked for English:

The software can be finished by someone without changing the current hardware (QPC) or the current software platform (PyProcGame). You could probably run some MPF derived game on the QPC hardware if you were so inclined.

As for finishing the game for PyProcGame, I can name about 5+ people who can do it. They all hang out on the pinballcontrollers forum. I'm one of them.

So has Iceman given up on this? Are we back to square one?