vpcode
Index of Visual Pinball table scripts
The idea here is to extract the vbs files from the most popular tables and index them here so we can search through the code and compare tables / versions.
Why?
I personally think the current way of developing visual pinball tables is suboptimal. One binary file that contains everything. No code / asset versioning, no history, sharing through public file services, ...
Would it not be better to have a directory structure whith all the files that we can put in version control? I do understand there are some copyright issues for commercail tables but those tables can then be developed privately and would still benefit from version control.
Preferably Visual pinball would then also support a folder structure next to vpx files
Extracting the code
> VPinballX.exe -ExtractVBS [path to vpx file]
This will place the vbs file next to the vpx file.
Sidecar vbs support
Any vbs next to the vpx with the same file name will be picked up by VP as the table script
"side-car" table support.
see https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball/commit/132c72ad913441c5af5fd0ce667186e44cb904bb
VPX Files
VPX files are using the Compound File Binary File Format (CFBF) see also ms-cfb
You can open them in 7-zip to inspect the contents
This file format can be read using .net OpenMCDF (Microsoft Compound Document Format, also known as OLE structured storage)
or c++ POLE
or rust cfb
Existing io code in VP / VPE
c++ writing https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball/blob/c3c59e09ed56a69759280867affa1f0abf537451/pintable.cpp#L2625
c# partial read code https://github.com/stojy/ClrVpin/blob/a317f3985b77f56aac7c5109f76d541c046c87fc/ClrVpin/Shared/Utils/TableUtils.cs#LL79C11-L79C11
Previous work
There is this repo: https://github.com/sverrewl/vpxtable_scripts