Graphical Updates For Season 1 & 2 Tables?

lettuce

lettuce

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Mar 17, 2012
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In the latest Twitch stream (Rescue 911) they hinted at giving the early tables some (in my opinion) much need love by going back and increasing the resolution of the playfield and models. I think this is well over due going back to these first few season tables is quiet jarring, for instance go and play Rescue 911 with its sharp and detailed graphics and table toys, advanced lighting and smoothness, then go and play Monster Bash!.

Monster Bash is one of my favourites but man are the art assets low resolution which is odd as the bumper and slingshot plastics are of a much higher resolution and that just highlights how low resolution the actual playfield is. Then there's the modeling of the toys on the table, I'm not sure what happened to these but the don't look very good at all, maybe at the time it was for performance reasons and they had to use as few polygons on them as possible but when compared to the toy models on the last few seasons there not every good at all.

Would you guys like to see FS go back to the first 2 seasons and give these tables a 2016 facelift?
 
mpad

mpad

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Jan 26, 2014
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Yes yes yes.
I am praying for this to happen since like forever.
This would be very kind of FS.
It always gives me a shiver when I go back to monster bash or cftbl.
The greatest classics definitely deserve better.

Start with the textures, then models.
 
R

Robert Misner

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Oct 4, 2014
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absolutely yes
i was thinking its in all likelihood Farsight might do the same thing as Zen has and make the VR version a separate program that you have to repurchase.
If this is the case. Them going back and redoing the assets on the tables seems very appropriate and it would be nice ot see that work transferred to all the other platforms as well.
 
francis247uk

francis247uk

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Jul 7, 2012
480
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Could anyone confirm if they've already done this with TOTAN, I think they might have already, maybe because its the free table to show off the app.
Looks pretty awesome on PC DX11 anyway.

Monster Bash is in dire need of a refresh, atleast so you could read the text on the playfield, and those 3d toys are pretty basic looking.
 
H

HotHamBoy

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Aug 2, 2014
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I would be so happy if they did this. Bride of Pinbot is a massive eyesore.

But... More important to me is updating the gameplay. Like bringing 3.0 physics to older tables, which currently only the PC version has. And on all platforms tables like Creature from the Black Lagoon and Scared Stiff need work. Those ramp shots are magnetic and take almost no precision, the ball will just get sucked onto an invisible teack. I can blind fire the ball at the CftBL ramp over and over until I quit the game out of boredom. IRL Creature is quite hard. I enjoy that challenge and I wish the game played closer to the real thing, because in its current form I don't play it in TPA at all.
 
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invitro

invitro

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May 4, 2012
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francis247uk said:
Could anyone confirm if they've already done this with TOTAN, I think they might have already, maybe because its the free table to show off the app.
Click to expand...
I don't think so. The last updates for PC11/Resource/TTotan.rez were 2015-Dec-18, 2015-Aug-24, and 2015-May-27. And none of them changed the file size, which I'm sure would happen for a resolution upgrade.
 
Shaneus

Shaneus

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Mar 26, 2012
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I'm still waiting on them applying the promised new flipper physics updates to all the old tables. Which IMO aren't amazing anyway, especially with how easy (and unwanted most) live-catches are.
 
Sean

Sean

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Jun 13, 2012
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Absolutely. I think for iOS we're also still needing some tables emulated unless I'm mistaken (Black Knight comes to mind) along with asset refreshes. I don't know if they've drawn a line yet and dropped support for older iPads and such, but I think that's going to have to be thought about soon. I see some obvious rail polys and can't understand why - surely an iPad 3 could do a smoother rendering of that kind of thing, much less my Air 2?
 
rehtroboi40

rehtroboi40

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Oct 20, 2012
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Yes, some of the season 1 and 2 tables need serious graphic "web-redemptions". But Black Knight still doesn't even have rom emulation, which FarSight claimed to be working on years ago.

Having recently obtained a GTX 950 (and loving DX11 on PC, btw), I've noticed the huge difference between seasons 1 and 2 and the rest, graphics-wise. MB, CFTBL, and WH20 easily come to mind. At this point, I'm not sure FarSight has the man-power to do this and release new tables and support the consoles. It takes time to put out a quality product-just look at what's going on with Pro Pinball (Barnstorm is said to have an even smaller studio than FS-correct me if I'm wrong). My thanks is abiding to FarSight for continuing to support TPA with new tables, but their work in simulating actual pinball machines is so much more challenging than, say, programming original simulations like Zen does.

I hope FarSight continues to provide support TPA-they've had my monetary votes since April of 2012.
 
Kolchak357

Kolchak357

Senior Pigeon
May 31, 2012
8,102
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Depends how you look at it. I've never said that a Zen pin didn't look or feel like the real version (because there isn't one). I complain about the play/feel of Haunted House on TPA all the time. I'm not saying the Zen pins aren't scrutinized, but you don't have that extra point of reference as having played the real physical pin version. Doesn't necessarily make one easier to create than the other. Zen has to come up with layout and rules, which TPA doesn't have to.
That being said, I enjoy both Zen and TPA (and also Zacc), and think both companies do a great job. Glad they both keep cranking out pins.
 
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M

Metalzoic

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Jun 8, 2012
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rehtroboi40 said:
My thanks is abiding to FarSight for continuing to support TPA with new tables, but their work in simulating actual pinball machines is so much more challenging than, say, programming original simulations like Zen does.
Click to expand...

What? Farsights job should be much, much easier. They're recreating someone else's work.
-The tables are already designed.
-The artwork is already designed and done.
-The sound effects, call outs and music are already designed and recorded.
-The DMD animations are already done.
-The rules are already designed.
-The toys are designed.
On and on... They don't have to create or design any of that. All the major work is done and they are programming a re-creation of it digitally.

The Zen guys need to do all of that creation, design and work themselves from scratch. They do the graphics, flow, table, shot design, rules, dmd, sound, music, voices, effects plus all of their additional character animations, cut-scenes etc. Then they need to program it all together into their own original creation. Seems to me they are doing far more work than Farsight on each table.
 
EldarOfSuburbia

EldarOfSuburbia

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Feb 8, 2014
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Zen are not deconstructing a physical pinball table, taking hi-res photographs of every part from several angles, recording every possible sound that can come out of the speakers, plugging the individual table's ROM into their emulation, writing triggers for events and sounds, testing and tweaking the digital re-creation to make sure it performs "the same" as the physical original, following rules laid down by the rights owners of the original table, if there are any, making art tweaks to remove assets they don't have permission to use, and taking flak from the pinball community that their tables don't stand up to the real-world counterparts and why couldn't they do X table instead of Y table. Oh and a whole list of other stuff I've probably not thought of that go into the conversion process.

It's not plug-and-play, anyone who thinks that is severely underestimating the effort involved.
 
S

steven120566

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Mar 7, 2015
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EldarOfSuburbia said:
Zen are not deconstructing a physical pinball table, taking hi-res photographs of every part from several angles, recording every possible sound that can come out of the speakers, plugging the individual table's ROM into their emulation, writing triggers for events and sounds, testing and tweaking the digital re-creation to make sure it performs "the same" as the physical original, following rules laid down by the rights owners of the original table, if there are any, making art tweaks to remove assets they don't have permission to use, and taking flak from the pinball community that their tables don't stand up to the real-world counterparts and why couldn't they do X table instead of Y table. Oh and a whole list of other stuff I've probably not thought of that go into the conversion process.

It's not plug-and-play, anyone who thinks that is severely underestimating the effort involved.
Click to expand...

Yeah the age old argument. What the companies do is different from each other but really both are pure awesome. As Eldar says...Farsight's processes are painstaking and must be true to reality as is possible. I am sure Zen's processes are also that way but the sky is the limit. Which is more difficult??? It really doesn't matter, does it? I don't know as I am not an artist nor a programmer lol. Both yield a great result. I know of very few who like one and dislike the other.

Zen has done a better job of supporting my favorite console, and farsight has been all vapor on that. But alas that is off topic and we don't want to go there, there are other threads for that *sighs*

Now which game should I play later is the big question :) Zen on Wii U or TPA on x360? That is the real question guys :)
 
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R

relaxation

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Oct 8, 2015
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lettuce said:
In the latest Twitch stream (Rescue 911) they hinted at giving the early tables some (in my opinion) much need love by going back and increasing the resolution of the playfield and models. I think this is well over due going back to these first few season tables is quiet jarring, for instance go and play Rescue 911 with its sharp and detailed graphics and table toys, advanced lighting and smoothness, then go and play Monster Bash!.
Click to expand...

While there is more noise on earlier tables, at least the artwork that gets lit up didn't suffer from solar flares. Here is a comparison of R911, NoFear, MSFrankenstein, T2 & TZ. IMO a large overhall should be done on all tables before VR shows up.. I didn't even go over aprons and instruction cards that are unsightly, some even on new tables.

PS that Sky Dive jewel on NF is out of alignment.
 
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L

Locksley

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Jan 2, 2015
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I'd love that.
And of course it is not just about resolution but about care about how you compress and use mipmaps!

One can not stress this enough, watch out for compression artefacts; watch for seams in different views, see to that there is no color banding or problems in the "sprites" (oh, some 80th love - the decade of the sprites). NO SEAMS.

I think tables look great (using -3.0 mipmap level) but I just can't understan how e.g. STNG looks so blocky? It is a kickstarted table, it should have very clear textures?! Look at the 'extra ball' in the middle of the flippers - I thought it should look that blocky; but no it should not!

Over all I am getting great results on the tables, but that is because I set up my graphics interface and monitor to compliment what TPA gives me. My monitor setting for color and brightness is crazy but looks great for pinball; I got an other setting for movies or more 'real' games.

Cheers
 

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