leegethas

Hi, PinballX already has the option to close a running table, after a certain amount of inactivity and fall back to attrack mode. I wonder if it's possible to let PinballX shutdown itself (honoring all the scripts it's supposed to run at shutdown) and then signal a complete shutdown of the system itself, after a certain amount of inactivity in attract mode? On my cabinet, everything runs as administrator. So, permissions to signal a shutdown shouldn't be an issue. And my cabinet is a dedicated machine. PinballX can have full controll, without having to worry about other things that might be going on. It would be a nice feature, because people often forget (or simply don't care... ) to shutdown the cabinet, when they're done playing.

Hi, PinballX already has the option to close a running table, after a certain amount of inactivity and fall back to attrack mode. I wonder if it's possible to let PinballX shutdown itself (honoring all the scripts it's supposed to run at shutdown) and then signal a complete shutdown of the system itself, after a certain amount of inactivity in attract mode? On my cabinet, everything runs as administrator. So, permissions to signal a shutdown shouldn't be an issue. And my cabinet is a dedicated machine. PinballX can have full controll, without having to worry about other things that might be going on. It would be a nice feature, because people often forget (or simply don't care... ) to shutdown the cabinet, when they're done playing.

First of all, sorry for the late respond... And second of all, thank you for your reply. I will try to test your patch later today. One question though. How does PinballX close gracefully, if Visual Pinball is not closed? Isn't it possible to send the signal (esc) that makes PinballX close the table, and wait for PinballX to return to the homescreen, before closing PinballX itself?

Hi, First of all, thank you for PinballX! It's awesome and I love it. I placed my cabinet in the canteen of the company I work. And some of my co-workers really like to play it, which is nice. We even build a website to compare our scores with a company closeby, who also have a cabinet in their canteen. However, I do have a small user issue. Hopefully PinballX could provide a solution. Some of the users tend to simply push the powerbutton and walk away when they're done playing pinball. This causes Windows to close all running programs and shutdown the cabinet. Although no harm is done this way (as far as I know) this kind of behaviour bugs me to no end. First of all, I simply don't like Visual Pinball and PinballX being abruptly terminated like that. And second, when closing the table and closing PinballX, several scripts are executed to upload scores and make backups. These scripts will not be executed when people push the power-button and walk away. I repeatedly asked users to not do this. But they keep doing it anyway. The main argument is that they do not have the patience to way several seconds for a table to close and shutdown PinballX the correct way. This might sound a bit stubborn, but it is what it is. People do it and I can't police the cabinet all the time. I have been thinking about disableing the powerbutton altogether. But this will probably result in users pressing the power-button for 6 seconds, until the entire cabinet shuts down. And that WILL do harm. So, I decided not to do that. So, my hope is that a future release of PinballX will include a feature to intercept the power-button being pushed and automatically shutdown everything the proper way. Than there is the complete opposite type of user. The one that doesn't shutdown the cabinet at all. In the worst case, it keeps running all weekend. Or the cleaning lady simply janks out the powercord. Both scenario's are not good. Maybe a future release of PinballX could include a feature to shutdown automatically at certain times. Or after a certain idle time? Or a combination of both? Thanks!

It's not really a phobia. Pretty much anything in my home is somehow connected to the internet. Internet rules! I <3 internet. I can't wait to get my 200/200 fiber connection (somewhere in September, I hope). Money or knowhow isn't an issue either. In fact, I have a USB-WiFi-adapter laying in a deskdrawer for some time now. I could easily put that in my cabinet and be done with it. But since my cabinet runs XP, I'm not really fond of letting that thing anywhere near the internet. When building my cabinet I had to choose the OS. I chose XP, because (according to several forum posts) VP would run better on XP. It would also be more lightweigh and leave more performance for VP. When making this choice, I also decided that I would keep my cabinet offline, for obvious reasons. But the prime reason is that it just bugs the hell out of me that they're pressuring me to get this thing online.

Thanks

Call it whatever you want. It just bugs met that Steam is trying to force you to be online all the time. My cabinet doesn't need and shouldn't be online all the time. And I simply refuse to do so.

Ah, you misunderstood me. I don't mind tinkering, I actually like it! But it has to make sense. And in this case, Steam should just have a simple option to disable this pop-up. But obviously it doesn't have it, because Steam is just playing mindgames. With this pop-up coming up every time, it manipulates the user the enable the online-mode, whenever possible and discourages the use of offline-mode. That's why I hate to use solutions like AHK in this case. Because it should not be necessary in the first place. It's funny how legal solution always stick it to the user. I bet I could download a hacked non-steam version and it would work just fine.

No, thanks. I hate messy workarounds like that with a passion. It sound be easy to just turn off that pop-up, imo.

I tried that, but Steam keeps bugging me with this popup

I managed to get Pinball FX2 to work with PinballX. However, there are still a few issues. My cabinet is not hooked to the internet. So, everytime I start Pinball FX2 from PinballX, I get this annoying pop-up notification from Steam, informing me there is no internet and offering me the option to start Steam in offline mode. Is there any way to get rid of this pop-up and always start Steam in offline mode? When I exit Pinball FX2, PinballX is still running, but minimized in the taskbar. How so I get is to pop to the foreground, after Pinball FX2 exits? Thanks!