Flipper lag theory

[Mark W**a]

Sorry. I'm right though. Kids these days.

Flipper lag is cause of internal scaler on ps3 hardware. i think. Probably. Maybe not. regardless some one needs to figure out how rock band and zen pinball gets around this then relay the info Farsight. I'd do it but I'm lazy. Except when it comes to writing gigantic know it all posts.

 

[brakel]

Sorry. I'm right though. Kids these days.

Really? Just let it go dude.

I'ts ALL BRAKEL's FAULT! Just a theory.

"I have theory, it might be witches!" OK, if you need a patsy to blame, I'll be your Oswald!

 

[Jim O'Brien]

Farsight liked my input on facebook when I mentioned another company that uses a flipper sensitivity adjustment, I'm waiting to see how this plays out on their end.

 

[Crush3d_Turtle]

Farsight liked my input on facebook when I mentioned another company that uses a flipper sensitivity adjustment, I'm waiting to see how this plays out on their end.

Can you please elaborate on what you mean by flipper sensitivity adjustments?

 

[Jim O'Brien]

Can you please elaborate on what you mean by flipper sensitivity adjustments?

In Zen Pinball 2 you can adjust the flipper sensitivity in the operators menu and it does not effect your online scores, Marvel and Zen 1 also had that feature as well. Basically it works like this all their tables have a set ratio to flipper sensitivity (the amount of time you press the button that controls the flippers) the lower that you set that parameter to the quicker the flippers react to drastically cut down on any lag you might experience from your television. Arcade should add it to the options menu seeing how you have to pay to access the operators menu.

 

[ER777]

Can you please elaborate on what you mean by flipper sensitivity adjustments?

Zen's games have an option to change the point where the triggers register as being pressed. The default is 20% and it allows a maximum of 50% I believe (for the two stage flippers it has an additional setting for how much further the trigger needs to be pressed to register the second stage).

So by default the flipper flips when the trigger is just a little bit pressed in (20%) but you have the option to make it not register until its half way pressed in. By making the flip not register until the button is further pressed in it simulates some lag because of the extra time it takes your finger to press the trigger in further.

I personally don't find it to be a very useful setting because I naturally start to get used to the new effective trigger point and end up compensating by never fully releasing the trigger. Unfortunately its not possible to compensate for actual input lag the same way.

 

[Crush3d_Turtle]

In Zen Pinball 2 you can adjust the flipper sensitivity in the operators menu and it does not effect your online scores, Marvel and Zen 1 also had that feature as well. Basically it works like this all their tables have a set ratio to flipper sensitivity (the amount of time you press the button that controls the flippers) the lower that you set that parameter to the quicker the flippers react to drastically cut down on any lag you might experience from your television. Arcade should add it to the options menu seeing how you have to pay to access the operators menu.

Thanks for explaining that and I fully agree that this needs to be implemented. I find the current 2-stage flippers on tables like Funhouse to be very annoying due to the amount of pressure it takes to fire the upper flipper when using R1/L1 as the flipper buttons. The current 2 stage flipper system is all wrong compared to how they are in a real table. You have to press softer to get the upper flipper to not fire instead of pressing much harder to make it fire. It does make sense how this can be seen as flipper lag as it certainly feels like it.

 

[smbhax]

SYT got the true story on the PS3 flipper lag during his visit to FarSight's studio:

We talked a bunch about how the game is developed, what it takes to take the 360 version down to a mobile version, and then started getting into the PS3 and Vita. “Well I think the Vita’s main complaint is we don’t have any HDR lighting, there’s no real time lighting effects, which we do have on the PS3, which is why there’s a slight lag. There was a bigger lag, we actually improved that in the update patch that I think was in October. It went from being a 2 frame lag from HDR lighting to 1 frame lag that’s still there for 1080, but it’s there because we’re doing this post processing thing. In order to have the lighting technology that we do and run at 60fps, we need an extra frame to process everything after the controller input.”

I asked if putting in the option to remove HDR was possible, and Bobby said that’d mean it would have the same look the Vita does. Having your TV set up properly to interact with the PS3 should get you to that 1 frame lag. My PS3 is hooked up to a CRT rear projection, so I didn’t think I was experiencing the lag, but I guess I am. They keep on trying to optimize the code, so there’s still hope yet for some of you experiencing it badly. It shouldn’t have anything to do with your controller, but then Bobby uses a wired controller when he plays. As to why it’s not a problem on the 360? Not as many HDR effects, and it’s a different way of running them.

So, originally there was a 2-frame delay at 1080--the recent update cut it to 1. And (I'm presuming here, although a bit of 480/720/1080 comparison testing seemed to bear this out) if you play at 720 there's no delay.

 

[Matt McIrvin]

Regardless some one needs to figure out how rock band and zen pinball gets around this then relay the info Farsight.

With Rock Band it's no mystery. The actions you're supposed to perform are completely predetermined by the song, so it's easy to compensate for audiovisual delays by delaying the time window for a scoring response relative to the sounds and pictures. There's a screen in the game in which you calibrate the delay compensation by responding to a simple rhythm.

Unfortunately, this isn't possible when you're running a simulation that interacts dynamically with the player's actions; to compensate for the delay the game would have to predict what you're going to do. Networked racing games actually do some forward-in-time extrapolation to compensate for network lag, and it can result in opposing players appearing to teleport abruptly. The situation in pinball would make it completely impractical.

 

[brakel]

Anyone who has more than a one frame delay has an issue with the controller or with processing delays on their tv and/or av receiver. This to me doesn't excuse the ps3 controller issue that TPA causes that Zen and no other game cause. This only happens with the newer controllers and it causes probably at least a 10 frame delay. This problem is fixed by plugging the controller in while playing but it shouldn't be necessary.

 

[ROTTEN]

I don't care why I get input lag. All I know is I get it and it sucks big time. I won't play this game until it's fixed. This has been going on long enough and it should have been fixed months ago.

 

[brakel]

I don't care why I get input lag. All I know is I get it and it sucks big time. I won't play this game until it's fixed. This has been going on long enough and it should have been fixed months ago.

You should care. If its more than one frame of lag, FS isn't going to fix it and you'll need to make some adjustments on your end. And they probably won't get that one frame of lag to go away. If the one frame lag bothers you then your only real choice is to play at 720p or not to play. I've gotten really used to the 1 frame of lag and find it very playable. I've also reduced as much processing my tv does as it allows me to and we plug in the new controller to get around the new controller lag.

 

[Byte]

I use the PS3 to play TPA but also for Netflix, as a media player, etc. As well, 1080p is my TVs native resolution. For those reasons I'd rather leave it on 1080p.

A 1 frame lag - as in 1/60th of a second - should not really affect game play. I think the problem people experience is both lag and the physics model

 

[ROTTEN]

You should care. If its more than one frame of lag, FS isn't going to fix it and you'll need to make some adjustments on your end. And they probably won't get that one frame of lag to go away. If the one frame lag bothers you then your only real choice is to play at 720p or not to play. I've gotten really used to the 1 frame of lag and find it very playable. I've also reduced as much processing my tv does as it allows me to and we plug in the new controller to get around the new controller lag.

I'm happy for you ...... seriously, I am.

I don't have to adjust my TV to play any other games and I'm not going to do it for TPA. It simply does nothing (I've tried all of the fixes) except make the game look like garbage. The game plays better in 720p, but it's still not 100%. This is an issue with the game itself and should be fixed by FS not the user.

 

[ER777]

SYT got the true story on the PS3 flipper lag during his visit to FarSight's studio:

So, originally there was a 2-frame delay at 1080--the recent update cut it to 1. And (I'm presuming here, although a bit of 480/720/1080 comparison testing seemed to bear this out) if you play at 720 there's no delay.

I'm glad to hear that they're still working on optimizing their code for the PS3 (hopefully they can mitigate some of the external factors causing lag for people) but it sounds like they are saying there will always be at least a 1 frame lag in 1080p. It would be nice to get confirmation as to whether it is truly lag-free at 720p like you said, even though a 1 frame delay should be barely noticeable if at all.

 

[smbhax]

I'm glad to hear that they're still working on optimizing their code for the PS3 (hopefully they can mitigate some of the external factors causing lag for people) but it sounds like they are saying there will always be at least a 1 frame lag in 1080p. It would be nice to get confirmation as to whether it is truly lag-free at 720p like you said, even though a 1 frame delay should be barely noticeable if at all.

It *would* be nice to get confirmation. A 1 frame delay is quite noticeable, though, if you compare it back to back against no delay; earlier in the thread (page 5) I describe my method for doing this, which is basically to shoot for KISS repeatedly on Creature at one resolution, quit the game, use the XMB's Display Properties to switch to another resolution, then shoot KISS repeatedly and observe the differences. Currently the ball seems to go where I want it at 480 and 720p resolutions, whereas at 1080p it shoots a little late and tends to miss low, presumably because the flipper response is slightly delayed at that resolution. But yeah official confirmation would be good.

 

[shutyertrap]

It *would* be nice to get confirmation. A 1 frame delay is quite noticeable, though, if you compare it back to back against no delay; earlier in the thread (page 5) I describe my method for doing this, which is basically to shoot for KISS repeatedly on Creature at one resolution, quit the game, use the XMB's Display Properties to switch to another resolution, then shoot KISS repeatedly and observe the differences. Currently the ball seems to go where I want it at 480 and 720p resolutions, whereas at 1080p it shoots a little late and tends to miss low, presumably because the flipper response is slightly delayed at that resolution. But yeah official confirmation would be good.

Was me getting Bobby to talk about the 1 frame lag not official enough?

 

[smbhax]

Was me getting Bobby to talk about the 1 frame lag not official enough?

For 1080 it was, but the question is about lower resolutions; from the wording in your article I *inferred* that there's no delay at sub-1080 resolutions, but technically it wasn't specifically stated. As I stated on the previous page, personally I'm pretty confident that there is no frame delay at 720; my post above was in response to ER777's post where he was wondering about 720p--I'll go add a quote so that's a little clearer.

 

[ER777]

Yeah, its just the 720p I'm wondering about now. Its noticeably better than 1080p on my setup, but its still not perfectly responsive. I've done a side by side test with 2 PS3s on different HDTVs in the same room, and switching back and forth between 2 PS3s at different resolutions on different HDMI inputs into the same TV. There's clearly a difference between 720p and 1080p either way (it seems a little more noticeable on one of the TVs though - 1080p has more lag on the Samsung LCD than the Sony LED/LCD it seems).

So if we had 100% confirmation that there was no delay in 720p I could isolate the lag as being related to "external" factors.

Its also worth noting that I also have a copy of PHoF:WC and at 1080p the flipper action in that is still crisper than on TPA at 720p for the same PS3/TV/Controller setup. That's why I'm still hopeful that their code optimizations could still provide major improvements on the PS3 version.

 

[smbhax]

Its also worth noting that I also have a copy of PHoF:WC and at 1080p the flipper action in that is still crisper than on TPA at 720p for the same PS3/TV/Controller setup. That's why I'm still hopeful that their code optimizations could still provide major improvements on the PS3 version.

You're right about that, and "crisper" is a good way of putting it.