Introducing VPDB, a platform for content around virtual pinball

[freezy]

Hi everybody,

It's a pleasure to present my little side project I've been working on over the last three years. Some of you might remember this thread at VPF. Thanks for all your feedback, this here is the first result!

   https://vpdb.io

Shouts to Tom Speirs who supported me all those years and who generously sponsored a beefy server to host VPDB on. Thanks also to all the testers who gave valuable feedback recently and of course the courageous authors who already uploaded some content!

Note that VPDB is still in beta. If you encounter any bugs, please post them in this forum, or even better if you're on GitHub, here. If you have comments or suggestions, let me know about them as well. 

By the way, VPDB is free and open source and comes with a public and documented API. So if you're a dev, get creative!

[RustyCardores]

Nice looking site and looks like it eases the effort needed to bring all the pieces together.  Good work. I shall watch with interest.

 

[Draco1962]

Good job! I look forward to seeing how the site and content progresses!

[freezy]

Me too!

[B2K24]

This is awesome work! Thank You for sharing this with the community.

[Lucky1]

Congratulation Freezy !! You did it !

[freezy]

Cheers mate

[mkl66]

Hi Freezy

your site looks amazing.

I just remembered the thread on vpforums and that I hoped that this project will become reality. Now the time has come ;-)

 

[freezy]

Thanks!

If anyone wants to participate in a more critical discussion, also check out this thread at VPB.

[B2K24]

17 hours ago, freezy said:

Thanks!

If anyone wants to participate in a more critical discussion, also check out this thread at VPB.

I don't wish to sign up and post over there, so I'll put in my little 2¢ here.

 

There's douchebags when it comes to every hobby and we can't let them stop us from evolving. After all GameEX Evolution tells us "Evolve or die" right?

VPDB is definitely a step in the right direction for Visual Pinball to Evolve. Now if we compare Visual Pinball to the MAME project and some MAME Dev said 15 years ago that people were making money selling pre-loaded cabs or selling ROMs so we must stop the project. I for one don't want to live in that world and that would really suck if it was reality.

 

Very few people these days buy MAME ROMs (if any) because everyone and their grandmother knows that complete [FREE] sets are so widespread that it basically eliminates anyone from making a shady dollar from the hobby. Word of mouth spreads and completely squashes any shady dealings because everything is available for FREE!

 

This is where VPDB comes in. If VPDB can match the reality that MAME ROMs is in and the word of mouth spreads, then it will basically completely eliminate all this douchebaggery.

In addition to the above; anything that improves the experience for the casual user to make exploring the world of VP is a very good thing. This whole ideal behind people having to visit forums and reading pages upon pages spending countess hours just to get some tables and artwork is absolutely ridiculous. 

[tthurman]

15 hours ago, B2K24 said:

VPDB is definitely a step in the right direction for Visual Pinball

I agree with this statement 100%.

Some of the best tables are flying under the radar because not everybody reads a multitude of different forums like some of us do   If the process can somehow be more simplified and centralized, it's sure to increase participation in this hobby, which in turn should be a win win for all.  It will have zero impact on how often I frequent the other virtual pinball forums, where I go to keep up with the goings on, even if I am mostly just lurking while trying to soak up things.  There are some dedicated participants in these communities just as there are here, and members tend to stay put where they are most comfortable.

If you look at the popularity of PBX, one would think that energy would spill over into the forums here, but as is evidenced by participation, that isn't always the case.  I view VPDB similarly, providing the community with an invaluable tool that will go a long way towards automating what can otherwise be a somewhat cumbersome hunt for content.

[SteLo]

Thank you for your hard work on VPDB!

At the desktop application I get an Error "Access denied to VPDB. Seems like the site is protected and you need to put additional credentials here."

Even if I place my User and password at HTTP Basic Auth I get the error.

My default VPDB API Endpoint ist: https://staging.vpdb.io

Can you help me?

Thank you, Stefan

[freezy]

Hey, sorry but the desktop client isn't ready for prime time just yet. Good news is I just started working on it again. I'll keep you posted!

[odie]

Wow this looks very cool. Thank you Freezy!

 

[odie]

Freezy- I see their are options to download tables. If you down load are the needed files in a zip with it (ROM, dmd etc.)? Sorry I am at work so I couldn't test.

[freezy]

Yes, the selected items are all in the zip in the usual folders.

[odie]

Thanks Freezy.  I looked at the site some more and it is laid out wonderfully, it appealing to the user and the information about the history of the table is interesting. I downloaded my first Visual X table (Tommy) and it was very easy an intuitive for a newbie like myself. VPF on the other hand is not intuitive and is overly complicated and it makes no sense to a beginner. 

I did download Monster Bash and it showed as not being a VP X. For some reason I was under the impression on the tables were VP X, but perhaps my assumption was wrong.

Thank you again Freezy.

 

[freezy]

Cheers, glad you like it. Yes, VPDB can host tables from any Visual Pinball version. You'll see which you're downloading under "Compatibility" in the release details.

[patrickfx]

Hello, I have i basic question.  When I first try the tools a year ago (before the beta), from what I remember I could install something which make the ability to update version on my computer directly, very cool !!!.  I do not find anything about this.  I'm I missing something important ?

By the way, very good site.  We see that you like to make thing the must simple possible but at same time, everything is here.  

Could I suggest you make the forum option more visible, now is only available at the button, like if is shying in a corner!  I read vertically thread about having or not forum.  I understand you don't what reinvented that thing.  

[freezy]

Yeah, it's still in the works, although I took a break from VPDB in favor of the DMD coloring stuff. Basically I want to be sure it works well before I release it.

[Xantari]

Freezy, this is exactly what I was thinking of doing myself. You have gone much further than I could have imagined, awesome job! 

I am contemplating re-creating game manager if I just had more time! (the pinball X provided one has many issues, see my enhancement request here, specifically about crowdsourcing the seed for the tables and other info) and would like to know of the following:

1. Can you link table uploads via the API to backglasses, table images, table videos, VPM ROM? It appears you can, but I don't know the permissions for such a feature. For instance if someone else uploaded only the VP table, but I wanted to add a screenshot for a  backglass, as well as the backglass file itself can I add it to the VP game that was uploaded, or can you only add backglasses, roms, etc to a table upload if it was your own upload?

2. Where is the binary data upload for a game and what API endpoint is that? 

3. orientation appears to only accept WS or FS, but most VPX tables can be either WS or FS (which is awesome btw), so there might need to be a third enum?

I think the key to making this take off (and I really want this to take off because I waste so much time trying to find backglasses, tables, and manually adding them to game manager, then editing the pinball X XML to add alternateexe tags, then fetch wheel, then flyer, then instructions, and often times not found for some of them and leaving me with an incomplete set of data in pinball X).

This is awesome work!

[freezy]

There is already a client-side app in the works that will basically manage all your table needs through VPDB. You can get more details here. Note that it's work in progress at the moment and there are some structural changes needed before anyone should play around with it. To your questions:

Check the documentation out here. Backglasses are the same as releases, they are game-specific, so you link them to a game. Same for ROMs. Table images and videos are release-specific and are linked to the release they were taken from. Currently permissions only allow to deal everybody with their own stuff, i.e. table shots must be provided by the table author.

Given there are only the very basic media types available at VPDB, this will probably change in the future.

Some documentation about the binary endpoints can be found here.

Orientation also accepts "any" for VPX files.

While the above mentioned app won't be solving all your media issues when released, it's kind of the next logical step to me. Having a tool that manages table life cycle correctly is pretty complicated and once that works, I don't see why media wouldn't be taken care of as well.

 

[simbamame]

nice +1

[jocooter]

"error occurred while sending the request" logged in red directly below API key

[freezy]

Hey, thanks for posting. I was actually debugging the shit out of that while you were surfing and getting spammed by the crash reporter ;)

There was a bug when setting the password after logging with OAuth. Basically it updated the session with an empty object resulting in 401s. That should be fixed now however. If you hover over the VPDB logo, does it say "VPDB 8f95a62"?

When you're saying "below the API key", do you mean under profile when creating? Or listing? A description how to reproduce would be appreciated.

Cheers!

PS: VPDB Agent is currently on hold and probably miserably failing due to some late API changes. I'm currently on another project but  I will eventually get back to it and make it work in full glory :)