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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gust334" data-source="post: 275991" data-attributes="member: 7347">tl;dr:  FarSight met and exceeded my expectation today for "working directly with customers" on a case-by-case basis.I'm being a bit cagey as I'm writing this because I don't know how much of the content of the conversation FarSight expected to expose; we neglected to have any conversation about ground rules.  I am also not going to reveal any names.FarSight followed up yesterday's emails with a request that I install TeamViewer prior to the call this afternoon.We may have revealed some difficulty with timeliness/reliability of email transfer.  I know email is not instantaneous, but well after I had sent email messages to FarSight indicating I was ready and with the TeamViewer login information, I received email messages from FarSight asking me if I was going to be available as scheduled.I then phoned FarSight directly and was partially through their automated phone system when I received an incoming call from FarSight.  I asked FarSight to hold so I could drop the outbound but fumble-fingered and dropped both calls.  FarSight immediately called me back, so that's all good.The FarSight end of our conversation was on speakerphone.  I was speaking directly with a gentleman who identified himself as a programmer, and there was at least one other gentleman in the room farther from the phone who I could hear occasionally prompting the programmer.  I have about a page of dense written notes from our conversation, which lasted 24 minutes.FarSight started by saying we would go through some questions first, then start screen sharing.For the first half of the conversation, substantially everything the programmer asked was information I had supplied to FarSight previously.  The first third of the questions were solely about my screens, RAM, GPU, and other hardware.  The next third of the questions were about various software, ranging from OS to AV to launchers and other programs running concurrently.  Some of these had been answered previously, some were new.  I tried my best to describe what I observe, not what I think it means.It was clear from the conversation that FarSight had other support data available in the room and they were correlating and cross-checking my real-time answers against that data, trying to hone in on what might be unique about my system and shared with those that experience the slow cameras.  This is excellent debugging technique.I would be remiss if I did not also openly speculate here that Arcooda's marketing survey helped in collecting such data.The programmer did express familiarity with some of the speculations made both in data transmitted and data posted in forums.  He was clearly aware of some of that information prior to the call, although I sense he seemed unaware of what data actually came from me.The last third of the conversation was a genuine technical interaction, with each of us asking and answering questions.  We explored many avenues, some of which one or the other of us were able to immediately dismiss by counterexamples.  We did explicitly discuss the page faults in detail.I did infer from the questions that--aside from the fact that I use a laptop--my system was one of the most "vanilla" of all of the folks that experience the slow-camera issue.  I hope that the relative simplicity of my system helped them cull the list of possibles substantially on their end.  At one point, the programmer opined that he didn't need to specifically inspect my system, and thus would not be a need to establish desktop sharing on this call.My notes tallied four specific areas of focus that FarSight was going to pursue further based on our call.  Three of them sounded like long shots and the last resonated as plausible.  The plausible one and one of the long shots may be related.I overheard the programmer asking a FarSight person for something that will allow him to eliminate one of the long shots tonight by himself.For the one that sounds plausible, the programmer announced his plan to construct a beta build that removes that one specific thing to see if it has any effect on slow camera systems.  Changing only one thing at a time is also excellent debugging technique.  Although the description of the removal was trivially simple, it was not clear from context if that proposed change is simple or difficult in the actual game code.I do not know right now if that specific beta build will be distributed via Steam's beta broadcast, or if FarSight plans to somehow transfer it to individuals for testing.  There may be some customers using this specific thing that might be unpleasantly surprised if the beta temporarily breaks it for them.FarSight said they would follow up on email with further information.</blockquote>

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The Pinball Arcade / Farsight Studios