BlahCade 124: Dee Ex Do-over

[jaredmorgs]

http://blahcadepinball.com/dee-ex-do-over

After a very enjoyable Christmas break, we get right back into the action with an update about a fresh new look for the podcast and a pile of pinball-related talk.

There’s a long discussion about how DX9 seems to be complicating development for The Pinball Arcade on Steam. We talk about what could be done about this, and look to competitors to see some proven best practice about getting rid of the poor UX for this part of the product.

 

[QuickAceItsA2ndChance]

Google Play pinball reviews sound like a good idea. Bring 'em back.

 

[jaredmorgs]

Google Play pinball reviews sound like a good idea. Bring 'em back.

Haha, you may regret that recommendation...

I've just got to find the time again, which is why I stopped doing them initially.

 

[Spork98765]

Oh the achievements were definitely ****ed up on Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/app/238260/discussions/0/1620599015872336360/

Doesn't the comparison of the difference of how Zen and FarSight do their lighting effects raise the old argument of pre-rendered vs real-time rendering?

The minimum specs on Steam have been requested to be correctly posted/changed several times; especially after the release of SPA and the lack of DX9 in it.

 

[Blkthorne]

Couple questions I hope you can find out about with SPA, it seems like Stern mainly wants to use that as a sale tool for their current line up of tables, so does this mean future tables by Data East/Sega will never show up in SPA?? I know DE and Sega did a lot of licensed tables based on movies/tv but there are unlicensed ones like Laser War, Secret Service and Checkpoint for DE. My last question is with Stern Electronics' tables, we currently only have Flight 2000 as the lone SE table in TPA and it didn't make the move over to SPA in the transfer, will Farsight be bringing out anymore SE tables like Quicksilver or Seawitch etc. to TPA?

 

[Citizen]

Confirmation regarding whether or not any more DE/Sega tables will be coming to TPA (even if they don't currently have any planned; just if it's still considered a possibility at all) would also be nice.

I keep seeing people saying that DE/Sega tables won't be coming to TPA anymore, but I don't remember anything official about it.

 

[relaxation]

Back in June of last year I told a forum member who experienced slowdowns in dx11, as I and others on steam had, to change their GPUs prefered power state when they launch the game or update their graphics driver.

So Chris, select the beta dx9 version of the game and attempt to change your prefered power state to say.. maximum performance and report back.

I had an iffy driver from nvidia that just wasnt tuned well for TPAs workload, it would try to cut corners on performance and with the engine being fps locked we easily noticed. I'm curious if its made its way to being annoying in dx9.

 

[shutyertrap]

There never was, to my knowledge, any absolute official announcement about what would and wouldn't be included in SPA vs TPA. People from FarSight have said things in an unofficial capacity it Twitch streams and such, but it's never been something outright declared in a newsletter or by Stern. Instead it's been this community, doing what it does with rampant abandon, speculating, looking at patterns, and coming up with the conditions ourselves. We did it back in the day with alternating DMD vs alpha numeric games, with how many of any one manufacturers tables would come out in a season, what licenses constituted kickstarters, etc.

If there's one thing I've learned with FarSight (and fortunately I've learned many), it's that they never back themselves into a corner that doesn't have an exit. I've tried getting confirmation on SPA and Stern Electronics and DE/Sega, and they never commit to one answer. So while currently it appears any and all things Stern related will go into SPA, the addition of Ghostbusters into TPA shows there is no hard and fast rule. Maybe there is a release on SPA first agreement? I don't know. Maybe there was never any agreement at all and FarSight was just placating Stern? And believe me, I've also mentioned that the community here would really benefit from a heads up officially, just so our crazy imaginations don't get us worked up about something that should never have caused strife in the first place.

 

[EldarOfSuburbia]

Man, now I don't want an answer. Otherwise my crazy imagination is only going to wander elsewhere and who know what strife that will stir up?

 

[Citizen]

Frankly I'm happy just knowing there's nothing official about DE/Sega not being TPA anymore. That's kinda what I thought but I wasn't sure.

Though it would still be nice if FarSight listened to that last bit of advice shutyertrap gave them.