Details on PC Cabinet support for TPA

DaPinballWizard said:

Most certainly not. But I feel like cabinet is getting pushed to the side. I realize we need PC first, but I just don't see any urgency on their part. They don't even discuss it anymore. Just one sentence that they hope to support it in the future. I am not sure how they built their engine but it seems like they built it without being able to easily add cabinet support. Why that is, I don't know. iOS has portrait, why not here? What is so different?

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Do you want them to work on TPA, or stop and answer your questions?

I want them to release a cabinet version. Simple enough. They said they would support it. Now would be a good time to start!!

I don't know man the betas only been out for 3 days, and anyone in that beta forum sees all the bugs were pointing out and the nightlies they are releasing to fix them. It's gonna get done just chill out for a sec. If the game it self doesn't work right portrait mode is gonna suck anyway. Also the percentage of cabinet players to regular pc players is really lopsided to begin with, I'm just glad it's on their to-do list.

Portrait isn't a simple addition. First it requires engine tech. Since PC is DirectX you can't just copy from iphone or android. Once the engine tech is in, then every single screen needs to be setup to work in portrait. I believe that's nearly 80 screens that have to be redone. Again they can't just be copied from the phones cause PC screens are different. They have different controls (Mouse, Keyboard and Joystick) which makes them complicated. Consoles have just controller, and phones/tablets just have touch input (similar to mouse). None of those do multiple input methods.

Our engine guy has been busy on other tasks lately, and should be freed up in the next few weeks to add in portrait. After that Stuart said he'd help setup all 80 screen to work.

Before we can do cabinet support we need to finish up the standard PC version and get it out.

Thanks for the update Mike. Appreciate it very much. Look forward to it. Glad to hear it is still in the plans.

Mike, this is really important for us. Portrait will hold us over until it can have cabinet options added in later.
Stuart deserves a raise and an extra week's vacation if he can pull it off for all devices

Mike Reitmeyer said:

Consoles have just controller, and phones/tablets just have touch input (similar to mouse). None of those do multiple input methods.

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Okay well then give us the portrait mode on Ps3/Xbox
Would be great also.
Is that easier??

Pinball fx2 in portrait mode on Steam makes my Pinmame setup look very flat now. After playing in portrait on a large display, its very difficult to go back to landscape verisions of the same tables on my 360 now. The difference in enjoyment is staggering!!! Once in a while I'm sure people would like to hook the 360 up to the bigscreen tv and lay it down flat/longways for an instant pinball table too. Perhaps all of the directx devices can be done across the board at the same time with 1080p as the standard portrait resolution. I think that would benefit the most amount of people initially while the rest is fine tuned.

http://youtu.be/Bt9zSfinwFA just kidding... Just quoting a link from papa.tv

Draftcard said:

Pinball fx2 in portrait mode on Steam makes my Pinmame setup look very flat now. After playing in portrait on a large display, its very difficult to go back to landscape verisions of the same tables on my 360 now. The difference in enjoyment is staggering!!! Once in a while I'm sure people would like to hook the 360 up to the bigscreen tv and lay it down flat/longways for an instant pinball table too. Perhaps all of the directx devices can be done across the board at the same time with 1080p as the standard portrait resolution. I think that would benefit the most amount of people initially while the rest is fine tuned.

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It's really not that haed to go back. I run vp in cab mode and desktop mode all the time and it doesnt ruin the enjoyment any. Honestly.

Now farsight may have said they want to do this but that dows not put them under any oblogation to do so. Cab owners are less than 5% of their audience and that will remain so even after the pc version is launched officially. This is going by the numbers of people who own vp cabs vs desktop players. And I'm sure that those willing to install and configure vp in the first place are going to more naturally inclined to take it to the next level than people willing to pay for and allow the automatic configuration of a game through steam.

FS wants to make sure that they have a good product for 95% of their audience before catering to the 5%. And they are in the right in doing so. They have priorities and cab support is not on the top of that list. It's somewhere on it but surely not at the top. Take the software for what it is and not what you think it should be. We don't have any real say in the development path of this software. We are not entitled to any say in the development path of the software and if they give us any feedback at all on our suggestions and requests at all we should feel lucky.

I feel like we're being ignored...seriously people need to grow up.

superballs said:

Cab owners are less than 5% of their audience and that will remain so even after the pc version is launched officially.

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Given the size of the mobile audiences, I would venture that cabinet owners are less than 0.05% of their total audience - that is, less than 1 in 2000 people.

For all our passion for the game - both in our enthusiasm for it and our convictions about what needs to be added/changed/fixed, we have to remember that the forum membership is extremely un-representative of the total TPA playerbase. Especially on the financial side, what may appear to make perfect sense to us may make no sense at all to FarSight from a business perspective.

superballs said:

We don't have any real say in the development path of this software. We are not entitled to any say in the development path of the software and if they give us any feedback at all on our suggestions and requests at all we should feel lucky.

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While it's true we're not entitled to a say in the development path, we've actually enjoyed quite a bit of it, from the polls that eventually brought us Centaur and Flight 2000, to the interactions of the beta testers of all stripes in pointing out errors and inaccuracies, to features included in the game that have their origins in requests made here.

Sean DonCarlos said:

Given the size of the mobile audiences, I would venture that cabinet owners are less than 0.05% of their total audience - that is, less than 1 in 2000 people.

For all our passion for the game - both in our enthusiasm for it and our convictions about what needs to be added/changed/fixed, we have to remember that the forum membership is extremely un-representative of the total TPA playerbase. Especially on the financial side, what may appear to make perfect sense to us may make no sense at all to FarSight from a business perspective.


While it's true we're not entitled to a say in the development path, we've actually enjoyed quite a bit of it, from the polls that eventually brought us Centaur and Flight 2000, to the interactions of the beta testers of all stripes in pointing out errors and inaccuracies, to features included in the game that have their origins in requests made here.

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Do we have any idea of how many paid table packs are purchased on the various platforms. I mean are we talking 1000s, 10000s, 100000s. I know the original pro pinball series sold 3 or 4 million but have no idea if those are the sales achieved nowadays.

Where it is true that real 'full-blown' cab owners are in the minority, I think the market for people that would play in portrait is huge, and in fact if that option alone was offered on consoles it may attract new buyers who aren't interested in the now tiresome 3D video pinball view. Of three PCs in my house two have wall mounted rotatable monitors. They use a bracket that costs 10 euros from Amazon. I have friends who aren't normally that interested in pinball who see a simple wall mounted monitor rotated playing a VP table and they say they are interested in getting one. I support PA on two platforms already because I want to see portrait mode one day on PC or even console, but to be honest at the moment I play way more VP in the cabinet and hardly any PA. That is simply down to the view. Will carry on waiting - sounds like it might come soon from what Mike said.

"I feel like we're being ignored...seriously people need to grow up."

It is not about being ignored. Just don't want to be forgotten. Totally understand that PC needs to happen first and that cab is in the minority. Cab is miniscule. But cab IS the best way to play it. Period.

So, you're suggesting that Farsight needs to have a regularly scheduled widespread announcement posted, that says they haven't forgotten the long list of things that forum fans don't want them to forget.

And if they should fail to list something that people want, they should go back and revise the list to included it, and correct any previous announcements, so as to eliminate confusion, doubt and anxiety about Farsight possibly forgetting your very important issue that means a lot to you.

Just making sure I understand what it is is you want. Did I forget anything?

Sean DonCarlos said:

Given the size of the mobile audiences, I would venture that cabinet owners are less than 0.05% of their total audience - that is, less than 1 in 2000 people.

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I stopped reading once you started making things up. Have you considered that most of the mobile users aren't paying any money at all and that the PC version will cost significantly more than the paid mobile versions?

Rooter said:

I stopped reading once you started making things up. Have you considered that most of the mobile users aren't paying any money at all and that the PC version will cost significantly more than the paid mobile versions?

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As far as I know (and this has been the case for the console versions), the PC version will cost the same as the mobile (and console) versions. As a matter of fact, PS3 gamers got the season 2 pack for $10 less for a time because it was on sale.

None of us have any idea how many people are actually paying customers for the mobile versions, but it has been stated that mobile is by far their best selling platform, so saying that the PC cabinet users are a very small percentage of total users isn't that far fetched.

I would LOVE to see a fully supported cabinet version as I'm in the process of building one myself, but it's hard to see how it would be a huge priority for Farsight, especially as the PC version hasn't even been released yet.

Rooter said:

I stopped reading once you started making things up. Have you considered that most of the mobile users aren't paying any money at all and that the PC version will cost significantly more than the paid mobile versions?

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I have, and I consider the first statement irrelevant and the second statement false:

• In the latest issue of Pinball Magazine, Bobby King clearly states in an interview that iOS is providing most of the revenue right now. The fact the iOS may have many non-paying players as well would not diminish its business importance.
• Table packs and season passes, barring the occasional promotion, have always been the same price regardless of platform, and therefore there is no reason to believe that the Steam version would be any different.

I've also considered your accusation that I'm just making things up...I've played in a few leagues, am therefore in close association with a number of people who play pinball, who own pinball machines, and who own cabinets. Therefore, I might be able to make at least an educated guess on the relative frequency of cabinet ownership among TPA players. I even said "I would venture that...", meaning that I'm about to state an educated belief (that cabinet ownership is closer to 1:2000 and not 1:20), and not a hard fact, so even if I were flat-out wrong, it would still not mean I was speaking in bad faith.

So please do not jump down my throat in the future without better proof that I'm acting out of turn.

I think a lot of people will start buying cabinets once a lot of good games like Pro Pinball and TPA support it. I know I will...

Rooter said:

I stopped reading once you started making things up. Have you considered that most of the mobile users aren't paying any money at all and that the PC version will cost significantly more than the paid mobile versions?

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PC will be same price. From my understanding, most of our sales/revenue comes from iOS followed by Android, then consoles, then Mac.

The mobile version is cool, but now that I've played the PC version, this is where it's at for me. Touchscreen controls will never compare to physical controls, IMO, as well as playing on a huge monitor. Now the mobile version feels more like a novelty that I'll probably only play once in awhile.