PS3 - Ball skins

Yay, there's a gold ball skin! That was the one I really wanted in Pinball Hall of Fame. : )

These skins look like they're going to be way better than the ones in PHoF, but I did notice a few things that could be improved:

- They all have the shininess and reflection of a regular silver ball, so it's actually somewhat difficult to see the skin under all that shiny silver coating. Each one should really have its own shininess and reflection settings to match the base skin texture.

- The 8-ball texture is scaled up too high--the "8" part and the white circle around it wraps around the whole ball.

Yeah that 8 ball is a bit bad. Hopefully they fix that...thought it would be cool to use on Big Shot.

I only play on android devices but I agree that the artistic and functional purposes of many of the ball skins are undercut by the reflection settings that were tuned to simulate a shiny pinball. Shouldn't the "camouflage" ball have a matte surface, for instance? I actually like to use the white tiger-striped ball because I think it's easier to see, and because you can easily discern how it's rolling. Pool players often use spotted cueballs for the same reason, and if the flipper physics ever get good enough to properly model some of the fierce backspin I see on some live tables, it should make for a good show. I wouldn't even object to balls that were illuminated in some way beyond the ordinary power of a metallic sphere. Nothing garish on the order of Zen, mind you, with trails or anything else that would extend past its borders. Maybe just make it glow a little; or gleam.


Having said all that, I recently tried out TPA on a new iPad, and if I could have THEIR pinball, I might not be using one that looks like it used to work for Siegfried & Roy. But I will say that tiger ball looks super in ToM, CV, and ToTAN.

As of PS3 version 2.10, the custom ball skins still have a silver ball's shininess and reflection, and most of the textures are distorted. The Twilight Zone ball is an exception: it looks correct. Others, however, look pretty bizarre. Photos of some of them:

The Eight Ball


Star Trek Federation Skin


Star Trek uh whatever I'm not a modern Trekkie Skin


Star Trek Borg (?) Skin--can't tell with this one actually as it's just noise


Those Star Trek balls are DLC and cost money, it would be nice if they looked like they're supposed to look.

Ball texture distortion has been fixed in PS3 version 2.14.

Some balls, like the gold ball, are not shiny at all now, although a post in the PS3 forum almost made it sound like this is temporary and goes away once you run the game again--haven't tried that yet.