Why the low resolution flyers?

I am sure FS has many more important things to work on. I just thought this would be an easy one. Let me just say, I love TPA and will be purchasing all the tables as they are released. I have it on 3 platforms, like many others. The addition of the flyers is a VERY nice feature, but many have small to medium sized text that is not legible at all, some flyers are better than others. I searched the forum but didn't find other hits on this. The addition of being able to examine/pan the playfield and/or backglass would remedy the need for this a little, but the original flyers are also very cool. Not complaining, just posing the question. It is what it is at the moment and I await every new table/update we get. Currently, I mainly play on iPad 2(waiting on DLC for the others), so I am not talking about reading them on the iPhone. Keep up the EXCELLENT work FarSight!

Probably to save bandwidth and keep the file size down. I think it would be worth the extra size to have higher res though.

Or that the companies don't want to be distributing photo-perfect high res versions of the fliers? (Or, perhaps they have ancient 1990's low res scans of their docs that we're electronically sent to farsight?

How much space does a even a medium-ish res photo jpg REALLY take up? 500kb? Kind of a moot point; space is cheap these days.

Only farsight would know the answer here, we could play the speculation game all day and get nowhere.

starck said:

Or that the companies don't want to be distributing photo-perfect high res versions of the fliers? (Or, perhaps they have ancient 1990's low res scans of their docs that we're electronically sent to farsight?

How much space does a even a medium-ish res photo jpg REALLY take up? 500kb? Kind of a moot point; space is cheap these days.

Only farsight would know the answer here, we could play the speculation game all day and get nowhere.

Click to expand...

Yeah, but I think I recall reading on Facebook awhile back where someone asked about this and Farsight brought up the file size issue in regards to mobile bandwidth. However, I would think they would be able to spare a couple extra MB for each flyer though (most high res images are at least a few MB....medium-ish will still be pretty blurry when zoomed in).

Maybe Jake or Mike can give us an updated answer.

I really want to see and read those fliers too ... it really adds to the experience and joy.

Jeff- didn't know that they had commented on it- interesting. I agree; I'm glad someone brought this up.

The flyers are such a tease!

And you're right- I forgot about the resolution required for, say, the iPad 3 too...

If it comes down to mobile bandwidth, they could try hosting the full res flyers on their website and just provide a small link at the bottom of the flyer page or something? *shrug*

It's hard to find very high res copies of flyers on the internet but flyers.arcade-museum.com has some of the best res ones you can get. And a lot in one location. I just saved ones I wanted to my ipod. If I wanted to spuce them up as wallpaper I used the free Adobe Photoshop app to give some of them a little more pop. These are definitely way better than the ones included with the table purchases.

I honestly don't care that much, the table history section is pretty sparse as well, I usually go to ipdb or similar sites for stuff like that - and I'd rather zoom smoothly through a nice hires scan or picture of the original table (I found a very sweet Whirlwind pic on pinball archive that was something like 3000px high!) on my iPad than use the cruddy in-game interface that zooms in via onscreen buttons.

I am much more worried over the low resolution image mapping of the tables, Black Hole as the worst example. Even Gorgar has a too low in resolution image mapping on the playfield. Actually, when you pay close attention you'll see the image is pliced in two sections: the upper playfield has a good quality image map, most likely because the cam zooms in here. But the lower playfiel you see the Gorgar image with the warrior and the girl is too low and blurry in quality.
As far as graphics and image mapping goes I find Funhouse and CV the most succesfull eye-candy conversions. Overall I am disapointed in the looks of Monster Bash, do a google on this table and you get the point. All these wonderfull plastic monster figures just don't make it on a tablet screen. You hardly get a clue what's going on in the back. I think much closer camera zooming on the upper playfield would definitely help here. The playfield is too dark as well, lack color. Take a look at the colors of the VPinMame conversion, this looks much better: http://doomwadstation.com/dlw/jpm/Monster Bash Beta 6.jpg My 2 cents.

All very good points, thanks for the replies.

Hm- and I thought MB was hard to see on my tiny iPhone- interesting that it's not much easier to see things on the larger IPad screen.

Agreed on the res of the tables particularly Gorgar. MB is so tiny that it's hard for me to tell what the res is like.

What’s more, on iOS, the images are displayed using non-native controls. There are buttons for “Scale Up” and “Scale Down”, but they’re damn-near useless; to fully zoom in, you have to press the “Scale Up” button 34 times.

And besides, on multitouch devices, these kinds of controls shouldn’t be necessary. There’s a universally known pinching gesture for manipulating photos like this, and it’s available in the SDK for free. But instead, Farsight rolls their own implementation that’s completely wrong. It feels terrible to zoom in and out with the pinch gesture that they’re using. It feels completely foreign and like nothing else in the OS.

It would be nice if they had hi res images and implemented the Apple way of viewing etc. It would definitely give the app a more polished finish.