Request General Game Polish

[Pinetwig]

Only Totan is free (on most platforms). Had the lost ball bug on Centaur and Scared Stiff aswell.

 

[Terminator]

Only Totan is free (on most platforms). Had the lost ball bug on Centaur and Scared Stiff aswell.

TOTAN wasn't free for me, I paid for the my PA app, rather than downloading the free version.

 

[Pinetwig]

TOTAN wasn't free for me, I paid for the my PA app, rather than downloading the free version.

Same for me. But they made it free later on.

 

[Mike Reitmeyer]

Finally, is it too much to ask for rom emulation of older tables, like Black Knight, Firepower, and Gorgar? This was promised over two years ago from Bobby of Farsight and never delivered. These older tables still sell new digital copies to people all over the world every day, and are classics that deserve better! How hard can it be? It's not like were asking to completely rescript them from scratch, Space Shuttle , Flight 2000, Haunted House, and Centaur all have emulation and are from the same era more or less, so what's the issue?

I can't comment on art issues, as I'm not an artist, nor do I run the art department. So I don't know the details in fixing those issues.

As for bugs, some are easy, some are really hard to fix. So I can't make any general statements about those.

I can explain the complication in Rom emulation for Black Hole, Black Knight and Gorgar, as I've worked on those a bit.

Black Knight I need some code from our emulation guy, Steve. We don't have a fully working System 7 chipset yet. And while yes, it is similar to System 7, 9, 11, etc. It's still a bit of work, and his time is limited. I'm not trying to blame Steve. It's not his fault. I haven't been bugging him for it cause both of our schedules are tight.

Gorgar, I have mostly finished. I still need to implement a few goals. Once I get those done and we test it, then I can release it. There are two major issues in switching to ROM emulation. 1. We have to redo all the goal detection. Sometimes this takes a few hours, sometimes way longer. 2. We need to re-extract all the audio and set it up. I'm not involved in this, but it seems to take a few days to even longer depending on issues that come up.

Black Hole, I worked a bit on this. Even though it is the same chipset as Haunted House, it took me days just to get it to eject a ball. I have it somewhat playing now, but again, it needs all the goals redone, as well as having all of the audio done.

All these fixes, IMO, do not require that much work for the most part. It's not like redoing the UI, which takes a ton of work, this is in most cases easy to implement stuff, how hard really can it be to give a better texture for a backglass? To fix an obvious bug like silver powerball on Twilight Zone, a visible ball under Playfield in Creature, or an invisible display in funhouse? Or art issues, like the lines on the pf in funhouse?

Thanks and chime in with you're own thoughts. Thank you for reading.

I wanted to address this. I see many people suggest that a bug or change can't possible be hard.

Pinball Arcade is made up of roughly 12,000 source code files (100's of 1000's of lines of code), and over 101,000 art and data source files. It's quite a complicated system. Any single change can easily break something somewhere else you weren't expecting. So every change is complicated.

That said, we do value everyone's input. I don't think any developer really wants a product out with bugs. Even though it is nearly impossible to make something completely bug free.

 

[Pinballwiz45b]

Thanks for the explanation, Mr. Reitmeyer!

 

[Jeff Strong]

Yes Mike, your input really is appreciated.

 

[wolfson]

thanks Mike,really appreciate everything you guys do.keep up the great work.season 3 has been fantastic,thanks again.

 

[Terminator]

Same for me. But they made it free later on.

I think we the buyers should get a free table download for supporting the initial release.

 

[PinballLizard (Mark Wyda)]

I can't comment on art issues, as I'm not an artist, nor do I run the art department. So I don't know the details in fixing those issues.

As for bugs, some are easy, some are really hard to fix. So I can't make any general statements about those.

I can explain the complication in Rom emulation for Black Hole, Black Knight and Gorgar, as I've worked on those a bit.

Black Knight I need some code from our emulation guy, Steve. We don't have a fully working System 7 chipset yet. And while yes, it is similar to System 7, 9, 11, etc. It's still a bit of work, and his time is limited. I'm not trying to blame Steve. It's not his fault. I haven't been bugging him for it cause both of our schedules are tight.

Gorgar, I have mostly finished. I still need to implement a few goals. Once I get those done and we test it, then I can release it. There are two major issues in switching to ROM emulation. 1. We have to redo all the goal detection. Sometimes this takes a few hours, sometimes way longer. 2. We need to re-extract all the audio and set it up. I'm not involved in this, but it seems to take a few days to even longer depending on issues that come up.

Black Hole, I worked a bit on this. Even though it is the same chipset as Haunted House, it took me days just to get it to eject a ball. I have it somewhat playing now, but again, it needs all the goals redone, as well as having all of the audio done.



I wanted to address this. I see many people suggest that a bug or change can't possible be hard.

Pinball Arcade is made up of roughly 12,000 source code files (100's of 1000's of lines of code), and over 101,000 art and data source files. It's quite a complicated system. Any single change can easily break something somewhere else you weren't expecting. So every change is complicated.

That said, we do value everyone's input. I don't think any developer really wants a product out with bugs. Even though it is nearly impossible to make something completely bug free.

I'm very sorry for every insinuating that adding rom emulation was easy. I totally did not take into account that standard and wizard goals would need to be recoded (duh!), I didn't fully understand the nature of the work. I appologize.

Amazing news on Gorgar and Black Hole! That only leaves Firepower and Black Knight. I'm really happy this is something that you guys adamantly still care about. Thank you.

As for artwork. To me, it boils down to backglasses. The examples on the first page tell it all. Maybe get the word out to the art dept and hopefully it's an easier fix than rom emu and bug fixes. Really it's 90% backglasses, the tables themselves look good, save an odd low res texture here or there, I can and should probably provide some examples here soon.

I'm very excited to see how Fish Tales and Black Rose came out on ps4. That will say a lot about the current state of the game. You can only examine backglasses on the console, can't really do it on mobile and I don't have the PC version which I assume is like console.

Thanks again for all your hard work. Hey we only say this stuff and point this stuff out outta love. I support the heck out of you guys, and soon will own the entire game including pro modes on 3 entire platforms. To me that's my way of showing love and support for what you guys do.

 

[invitro]

I'm most worried about the game killing bugs. Lost balls on TOTAN and Ripley's, the stuck-ball lock bugs on Black Hole and Black Knight, the cannonball run camera lock on CV, the upper flipper stuck ball when ending LITZ. I wish I could fully play these tables but it's not worth my time (well I play TZ anyway) knowing odds are it will be wiped out by these bugs.

I understand the lost balls are very difficult to reproduce and isolate, but man, just give us a way to fix it when it does happen. The program has to know it's no longer moving any balls around the table, why can't it just put a new one into the plunger? Or at the very least, give us an option to quit and submit the current score rather than losing it entirely.

I certainly agree! I and others have given solutions that seem very easy. The easiest I can think of is to make Call Attendant work if the machine has been in Tilt for 10 minutes (or 1 minute, or whatever).

I had games killed by this missing-ball bug I think four times through January. But it hasn't happened since that time, and I played more in Feb and Mar than at any other times.

I am not too concerned about bugs right now. I am most concerned that the end of Season 3 will be the end of TPA, as I believe will be the case, and therefore I am trying to figure out how to encourage that the final tables be the best choices, which isn't really possible. The bug I most want fixed is that the PC version does not have tournaments, and my second-most is the low quality playfield art, such as the non-noticeable green lights on the MB Creature lane.

I think the tone of this group will be much changed if/when TPA development ends in August .

 

[Naildriver74]

Why do you think the end is near?

 

[Mike Reitmeyer]

I'm very sorry for every insinuating that adding rom emulation was easy. I totally did not take into account that standard and wizard goals would need to be recoded (duh!), I didn't fully understand the nature of the work. I appologize.

No problem. I see comments a lot about how easy something should be to do. So I figured maybe I needed to explain how complicated stuff is.

I am not too concerned about bugs right now. I am most concerned that the end of Season 3 will be the end of TPA, as I believe will be the case, and therefore I am trying to figure out how to encourage that the final tables be the best choices, which isn't really possible.

I think the tone of this group will be much changed if/when TPA development ends in August .

Where did you get the idea Season 3 is the end? We have plans for Season 4 and 5 at the very minimum. Unless in August suddenly everyone who likes Pinball will no longer like it for some reason.

 

[PinballLizard (Mark Wyda)]

Mike, can you answer a question for me?

How difficult would it be to implement a high res texture pack for platforms that can handle it, like ps4 and PC?

Assuming you guys already have higher res scans on file.

I remember in the old documentary you guys did back in 2012, I remember someone saying they scan stuff in at very high resolution, then downscale it for each platform.

With that said I would think, -maybe- it might require some backglasses to be rescanned. Scared Stiff is a photograph: we know this because you can see the key has been left in on the backglass texture (see page 1 of this thread).

Thanks

 

[brakel]

I think we the buyers should get a free table download for supporting the initial release.

Or at least a [Mod Edit: Crude sexual reference deleted][User Edit: It was only crude if the reader had a crude mind.], right?

Just because something goes on sale a year later doesn't mean that you deserve to be compensated for paying full price.

 

[invitro]

Where did you get the idea Season 3 is the end? We have plans for Season 4 and 5 at the very minimum. Unless in August suddenly everyone who likes Pinball will no longer like it for some reason.

That is great news! My guess was apparently not a well-educated one and I suppose I shouldn't have stated it. There are not many unlicensed 1990s WMS tables left though.

 

[Mike Reitmeyer]

Mike, can you answer a question for me?

How difficult would it be to implement a high res texture pack for platforms that can handle it, like ps4 and PC?

Assuming you guys already have higher res scans on file.

I remember in the old documentary you guys did back in 2012, I remember someone saying they scan stuff in at very high resolution, then downscale it for each platform.

With that said I would think, -maybe- it might require some backglasses to be rescanned. Scared Stiff is a photograph: we know this because you can see the key has been left in on the backglass texture (see page 1 of this thread).

Thanks

I haven't done any PS4 submission work, so I'm not sure what's involved in the patching process. Many of the consoles make it really hard (or impossible) to fix stuff like this. I'm not sure where PS4 is in that regard.

Patching on Steam is one of the easiest. I would need an upgraded art asset, rebuild each table (a bit time consuming...but doable). And then I create a new patch.

I'm not sure what we have in as far as texture quality, if I get some free time I'll look into it.

The only thing that can be an issue is we don't currently have a good way to let the user choose higher/lower res textures. And it's not a trivial task to implement due to how our engine works. And I fear that if we put in a really high res texture, it might cause performance issues for people with older pcs.

I'll see what can be done.

 

[The loafer]

On the art stuff, although this may or may not affect TPA, having larger art assets can cause bugs to appear due to increased memory usage. Adding a higher quality backglass IMHO should work ok but all this has to work within available memory footprints. This should not be a problem on next gen/pc but would certainly be on mobile and since there's a lot of code sharing going on ... so again it's not as simple as just switching the art asset and bam it works bug free. Assuming it is certainly does farsight no favors.

 

[jbejarano]

Where did you get the idea Season 3 is the end? We have plans for Season 4 and 5 at the very minimum. Unless in August suddenly everyone who likes Pinball will no longer like it for some reason.

I never gave much credence to the thought that Season 3 would be the last. I'm very glad to hear that more pinball tables are on the way for the forseeable future. There are so many great ones out there, and you guys do such a great job in re-creating them. Thanks again.

 

[Buzz1126]

Why do you think the end is near?

I think there are some Easter bonnets that are on too tight...

 

[Tabe]

As for artwork. To me, it boils down to backglasses.

I gotta be honest - there's probably 500 things I'd want them looking at before they do anything to address any art issues on the backglasses. They aren't any part of gameplay (except stuff like the one Elvira game where the backglass is in play) and you hardly look at them at all. Spend the time working on things I actually see during gameplay and any actual gameplay or sound issues, THEN maybe think about the backglass.