I would argue that with photography, only the tooling changed but the craft remained, while with AI the craft completely transforms in something else, in which I'm just not interested in.
Yes, it matters to me because art is something deeply human, and I don't want to consume art made by a machine.
It doesn't matter if it's fun and beautiful, it's just that I don't want to. It's like other things in life I try to avoid, like buying sneakers made by children, or sign-up to anything Meta-owned.
Yes, Volley was a nice project because one of the dev team has one at home, so we got ultra detailed assets. It was also a great use case to test Visual Scripting.
But before we dive into more table builds, we'll be focusing on the engine work.
But at the end of the day, this is a hobby, and Unity is an awesome engine to work with. I'm following Godot more closely than ever, but too much effort to still be able to call it fun would be necessary to port this over.
We're working on something like that using Unity[1]. It's nice, because contrarily to the commercial platforms, we don't need to support low-end devices like the switch. And yes, the DXR features will make a difference[2] (sorry, I don't have a more recent video).
Concerning physics, we're using VPX's engine, which is very well tuned to pinball. Not sure if the breaking the glass is going to be a thing, but PR welcome if you think so. ;)
TBH I just started looking into it, together with a few other developers from the community. I'll post something at the usual place as soon as we know more.
It depends on the effort you want to put in, and the tables you want to play.
VPX has the largest table collection, and the good ones play very well. But there is also Pinball FX which is a lot easier to set up, and they are catching up in terms of cabinet support (we're helping them, the next thing is force feedback support).
There is also Future Pinball which runs a few original games with mods pretty well now, but it's still closed source.
If there are any pinhead game devs out there, we're still working on the next generation of Visual Pinball, called VPE[1].
However, given the current drama around Unity, we're currently looking into Godot to evaluate how much effort it would take to port, and how Godot will support our needs.
I still want to bring vpx-js to a level where people can actually play a WPC table in the browser. That'd be really awesome and hasn't been done yet, at least not that I know of.