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Pretty sure none of us were in on the kickstarter.

Because invitro includes the half of your tables that are highest ranked, not the half that are worth the most points. This was never an issue (rank and points were perfectly correlated) until the ties on Frankenstein and LAH decoupled them. It would make more sense to do the latter, if...

This is not true at all. The ball doesn't move in screen pixels and has nothing to do with screen resolution. It moves in its own coordinate system on the playfield. The rendering system that draws it on the screen operates independently from its movement. Proof: the same railroads we talk...

Licensing Zen for distinction makes sense, but paying them 15% of the retail price is ridiculous. Why in the world couldn't he negotiate something better than that? Heck, why is he negotiating at all, why wouldn't the VPcab just include Zen at its regular cheap retail price?

Check the leaderboard again, I did. 111B. I've gotten a lot better about nudging in open space to keep the ball off the slingshots. Particularly on returns from the bumpers. And that's really all it takes on Monster Bash, the slings are the only dangerous place on the table, nothing else...

There was a smaller version on the set, though never mentioned on-air. The leftmost unit (farthest from the camera) was smaller and looked like it was on a tabletop rather than legs. Lori was looking at it while the sharks were playing. The site shows a mini version for $4k, which is...

We've long known about the 60 Hz limitation. This thread is about realizing that that's not the whole story. The evidence is that some railroads are more frequent than others. On STTNG, there's a railroad from the left popper that almost-but-not-quite makes the lock hole, which I can make...

Pro Pinball didn't have TPA and VP and Zen to compete against. Pro Pinball stood out by leaps and bounds in its day against all the other sims that were crude cartoony vidya-games in comparison. Pro Pinball also wasn't competing against the race-to-the-bottom oversupply on Steam and the app...

But that's the wrong counter, treating the symptom not the problem. The real solution is to improve that resolution. We know it can be done because Pro Pinball did twenty years ago. (Temporal resolution may be constrained by technical platform limitations, although I'm still not sure if PP or...

The point of this thread is that we now know how those helpers work, thanks to invitro's discovery in the resource files. We see the numbers defining the regions on each flipper that will apply force in predetermined directions towards the shots. We've learned that the railroading occurs not...

These were fixed a few months ago, at least on PC. All the impossible shots we brought up here were made possible. And I see now exactly how that happened, by adding/subdividing those flipper transfer points. It's noticeable that even these fixed shots are still difficult, and that's because...

We don't know, we can only guess. Thing is, I don't think Farsight is interested. They have no need to cater to an audience that cares about ball-is-wild physics. That's preaching to the choir. We're the addicts that are going to keep buying it if had the physics engine of Pong. Farsight's...

This used to work on the PC as well, but seems not to now. Ricocheting from TLE either doesn't go towards the drop targets, or hits them but then goes up the spinner lane anyway. What you really want is to hit the drops without going up into the bumpers, but I haven't found any way to do that...

They're not using all the transfer points. There are many railroads that occur far too frequently for even me to be hitting a 1/60 timing window that consistently. CFTBL's ramp is the obvious one. STTNG also has a lot of these, most notably the shot from the left popper that...

This started in the SPA Kickstarter thread but deserves a separate discussion. Holy crap, I had no idea there's physics data human-readable in the game files. That's a gold mine of information, if we can figure out how to make use of it. And also kinda disappointing, that TPA's physics...

Holy crap, I had no idea there's physics data human-readable in the game files. That's a gold mine of information, if we can figure out how to make use of it. But I think this deserves a new thread rather than being buried in the SPA one. I'll start it.

When the ball is a few inches above it, nudge hard leftwards to smack that vertical wall into it and bump the ball to the safety of the flippers. (TPA's default nudge direction is brokenly counterintuitive here. Turn on reverse nudging and it's way more obvious that what you're doing is...

This is kind of a myth. A pinball physics engine doesn't take any meaningful CPU time on today's processors, even phones. Even if it's a thousand calculations per frame per ball, that's still well under a millisecond. What would allow better physics is getting the simulation unlocked from the...

All the tables do allow going infinite, each one always has an extra ball available. It's just a lot harder on the tables that only allow 1 stacked EB at a time (all except Pinbot and Space Shuttle) since any two consecutive drains without earning an EB between represents an irrevocable ball...

I hate on TPA Haunted House as much as anyone, but the real machine isn't nearly so bad. The size and level-changing are much more impressive at full size than in your pocket. The real flippers aren't ridiculously overly violent. And multiball wasn't a requirement for a table of its era.