For users who like to tweak their tables and scripts, version control software such as Git could be used on the backend to preserve the official state of a release (or to allow the creation and sharing of patches to files, to easily enable commonly adjusted features like free play, or even to share high scores via comparison of the relevant portion of table nvram files). I also think there is great potential to decentralize content storage and hosting in the VPDB model by allowing users of the system to opt into peer-to-peer sharing of their files, reducing some of the overhead of hosting the collection and improving performance. As it stands now, the only other option for acquiring content besides a buying or downloading/torrenting one of a couple of monolithic, flawed, and non-updateable table packs is spending hours pulling down tables one by one while trying to remember what you do and do not already have, trying to make sense of the different version numbering systems for table updates (is “1.0a” a pre-1.0 Alpha or is it an updated version of 1.0?), trying to guess what mod or edition of a game is the best, etc. If pulling down a copy of new releases were a trivial task, there would be no value in bootleg “fully loaded” builds and table packs because they would all be out of date. Their vision for content distribution and automated cloning of new files is something I would like to see, so I hope it picks back up sometime soon. I also don’t see anything about the platform that they describe in the link above, apart from some developer documentation. as far as I can tell they haven’t posted anything new in like four months. I’ve often wondered what was going on with vpdb.io. I’m hopeful one of the other sites (like VPU) grow stronger from the shift of the community, but I was in there earlier today and it doesn’t seem to have the same level of content or community discussion at this point. You just made the content more exclusive, instead of offering it free to the community so packs wouldn’t have to be purchased. This is not going to solve the issue, and if anything, may drive more people to those selling the packs as a means to obtain tables that are no longer available otherwise. I feel closing the site to prevent the few who are attempting to sell packs hurts more of the folks using it honestly. I was really excited to get into designing tables in VPX and started learning techniques and scripts from some of the tables I’ve downloaded so far. I’ve collected all the parts for a physical build and am currently getting my cabinet body CNC routed after designing it myself. I’m one of the newbs that joined the community late, as it is a hobby I decided to pick up during COVID.
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