Do you prefer the new lighting on the original tables?

[Jeff Strong]

Well, of course it's going to look brighter when the camera's flash is on

 

[Fungi]

In an interview a farsight member said he wants to preserve it for the kids - but when you show your kids the dark table all you do is showing them how pinball machines looked in dark bars but they won't get a clue of how beautiful this (old) machines were.

I like this. Unlike judging the lighting with examples that are knowingly incorrect, I like this as an argument for having different lighting environments. I agree with your premise and would like to bring home some brochures.

Now I just hope FS can pull it off.

 

[Franky]

Well, of course it's going to look brighter when the camera's flash is on

right , but the brightness of the arcades i grew up with looked like a that.

 

[Tabe]

Which is why they want to make a lightning slider so people can adjust it to their own liking.

So long as we get to adjust the thunder that goes with it, I like your suggestion!



Tabe

 

[Fuseball]

As a general rule, I like to play arcade video games in a dark environment (lights off = no screen glare) and pinballs with the room light switched on. The sweet spot is being able to see which playfield lights are lit without them being distracting or blinding but still getting the dazzle of the flashers.

PS3 TPA errs on the side of making the playfield lights so bright and over-saturated that they distract from the ball. This is particularly noticeable on ToM, where the illusion lights just above the flippers are way too bright rectangles rather than the light just coming softly through the letters. It probably doesn't help that the flasher effects are almost non-existent on ToM. If the flasher effects were up to the standard of CV or MM then you could lighten the table, dim the playfield lights a fraction and still get the full effect of playing in a dimly lit room.

I also noticed, while playing MM particularly, that the playfield is lit in a very flat way. There is no accounting for the light generated by the bulbs under the playfield plastics. For example, typically a lot of light spills out from under the slingshots and return lanes, lighting the area around the flippers. This makes a considerable difference when playing in a dark environment. Of course it could be that FS have some dynamic GI (the lights under playfield plastics) lighting control and effects in the works, which would be the perfect solution. Fingers crossed.

 

[devilmosh]

First off, hi everybody!

I was put off by the darkness, especially in Ripley's and ToM. There were parts where I could barely see what was going on, like in the top left corner of Ripley's. Even the flippers looked like someone turned the brightness down. I liked how the lights showed up more, though.

But is it just me, or has it recently updated again?

I didn't get a software update, but then again, I have Playstation Plus so it may have updated automatically in the early morning and my wife bypassed the screen letting me know.

Anyhow, I started it up yesterday and the games were lighter again, not the same as before but more of a happy medium - perfect, in fact! At least in my opinion. They're darker than they were but everything is still clear. MM is improved, as well. I haven't touched my television or any of my settings, and it's a 52-inch HD so change is hard to miss.

Am I going crazy here or did they make another adjustment (for the better!)? Either way, I'm a happy camper at the moment.

 

[Fungi]

Some tvs have auto-brightness that changes with the surrounding environment. Many sets are defaulted to that so you may not even know it's on, if you have it that is.

 

[devilmosh]

My TV does have that, defaulted originally, but I turned it off shortly after buying it because it would react funny to some movies or shows, usually during credits but sometimes during dark scenes. But I'm also noticing this as being consistent regardless of the time of day I play (light or dark room), just in case there was something with that. Everything else looks normal, too. Nothing brighter than average or I'd suspect my TV changed altogether.

 

[Fungi]

It could be a tumor.

 

[laughing_lunatic]

It could be a tumor.

You lost me there...

Anyways, having just played TOTAN on my XBOX after 3 days of playing on my PS3, I have to say that the XBOX version seems overly bright now. Admittedly you adapt to whatever you're looking at, at the time, but even so...

Maybe it's a tumor.

My arcades for instance looked something like this:

But anyway... <<snip>>

yeah, yeah, light.. dark.. old people... preservation... so on and so forth... but... is that a Playboy machine I see ??? Do we dare hope that just maybe....!?!

Meh, scratch that, just checked, not that exciting... and I had jokes about extra balls and everything....

 

[devilmosh]

Could be an update glitch, too, where it's extra dark until you restart your system. I'll go a few days sometimes before doing so. Oh well, no one else seems to notice but I thought it was interesting given the subject of the thread.

While I have a minimum of five seizures a day (not visual-related, thank goodness), nope, no tumors that I'm aware of.

A Playboy table?!?

 

[Sinistar]

yeah, yeah, light.. dark.. old people... preservation... so on and so forth... but... is that a Playboy machine I see ??? Do we dare hope that just maybe....!?!

Meh, scratch that, just checked, not that exciting... and I had jokes about extra balls and everything....

That's a PlayBoy machine, and Im guessing it's the 3rd one released , because I was only aware of two others , and this one isn't either the one I knew of before seeing that photo. My brother owns the first Playboy Pinball : the Grotto , it was very cool .

 

[Stormchild]

I just watched some videos of the new lighting in the PS3 version the other day. Have to say, it looks pretty damn good. I never knew Black Hole could look so cool (hate to say it, but the way it looks on iOS makes it look pretty dated and boring). Love the darker playfield and glowing lights. All four tables I've seen with the new lighting look much better in almost every way. (Only odd thing I noticed is that the captive balls on the Theater of Magic table aren't reflective like the ball-in-play; they look washed out and flat. Maybe it's a bug?)

I realize there are performance issues that limit how much can be done to improve the lighting on some platforms. Enabling "post processing" on an iPad 3 drops the frame rate to a point where the game is basically unplayable, and it hardly looks any better at all. At the same time, though, I've seen Medieval Madness changed a couple times over the last few months, and that one actually looks pretty good now.

So to some extent, it does seem to be possible to improve the lighting and contrast without any additional computation, just by tweaking the artwork. If the other tables follow in the footsteps of Medieval Madness, they could all look better on every device, even without the extra touches of HDR lighting.

 

[Pinball Wizard]

i like the brighter playfield more

 

[Franky]

of course the lightning looks better on darker tables but i would still like to own the "original" table at first and get an extra "night mod" later on. To spend some money to kickstart the recreation of an original table and ending up with an "non-original" table seems wrong to me. and "NO" a darker playfield is not original unless it is dirty.

This is a very good example of what a recreation should look like in first place:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8yrGzydz1c&list=UUASnV2tqn8P0Kxt2z4PYmmQ&index=6&feature=plcp

 

[SKILL_SHOT]

did the captive balls on ToTAN get dull? I noticed how they were chrome first compared to TPHoFTWC and now they're dull again???

 

[Jim O'Brien]

did the captive balls on ToTAN get dull? I noticed how they were chrome first compared to TPHoFTWC and now they're dull again???

Yes they did same thing happened with TOM.

 

[Crush3d_Turtle]

I just started up the PS3 version again for the first time in a month and decided to try Blackhole. I cannot believe how awful the lighting is on that table. The entire middle of the playfield is completely black and the only part of the ball I can see is the shiny top. I know this is not a brightness issue with my television since tables like Funhouse and MM look great and I can see everything perfectly fine. I just took a quick look at the rest of the original 4 tables and they are all pretty bad, but Blackhole is awful. This lighting does the artwork no justice at all, makes gameplay more difficult, and makes it look like they are trying to hide something. The flipper lag doesn't seem as bad for me anymore, but now more than ever they need to do something about the lighting.

 

[Fungi]

Yikes. Well something's amiss because I can see the whole ball in my PS3 BH.

 

[Crush3d_Turtle]

Yikes. Well something's amiss because I can see the whole ball in my PS3 BH.

I have a picture of the game up from IPDB, and I cannot see any of the planets or stars in the middle of the playfield. The top left astronaut cannot be seen and the arm of the one on the left is slightly visible. I tried to snap a couple of quick pictures, but they came out even darker and I don't want to give a false impression.