Guys. Timeshock is out. Get hype

[Heretic]

thats a very weird thing.

if it the camera angle? the portrait view? nudging or key travel?

all of the above?

 

[vikingerik]

Camera angle, portrait view, and a 10" tablet screen instead of 24" are aspects of one same problem. All those together make the flippers and ball really tiny. The visibility just isn't as good for fine details of ball position and movements.

Nudging is hard too, I can't get the hang of swiping while holding a flipper. They've been separate buttons for 20 years for me going back to Epic Pinball.

But the big problem is lack of precise timing with touchscreen control. I have an incredibly accurate sense of timing for video games. I routinely pull off moves on NES games and stuff like Guitar Hero that take single-frame timing precision. I can do bangbacks in Pro Pinball with a keyboard more than half the time, thanks to having the timings drilled into my muscle memory. But touchscreens just can't do that. The nature of the capacitative touchscreen gives precision of maybe 50 ms rather than 17, and that's way more than enough to make me miss almost every shot. I actually even completely whiff with the Timeshock upper flipper sometimes.

 

[Heretic]

thanks for your answers

id more or less the same thoughts but in my mind i was making excuses to why i suck!

still needed find my glasses!

 

[SilverBalls]

Camera angle, portrait view, and a 10" tablet screen instead of 24" are aspects of one same problem. All those together make the flippers and ball really tiny. The visibility just isn't as good for fine details of ball position and movements.

A really nice feature in the 2nd alpha PC build of Pro Pinball is the ability to zoom in/out of the table and pan up/down and left/right while the table is playing. Once you are happy you can then play the table in this view. This means the user can opt to lose parts of the side/top/bottom of the table, and get a closer view and for me even better, a bigger silverball. It is almost a bespoke camera that you can set but WITHOUT the angle adjustment. I hope they keep this feature in the final PC build. It might even be worth asking them if it is feasible on tablets too.

What is impressive is even though it is pre-rendered they can still allow zooming and panning in real time.

Edit: just to add. Although my cabinet playfield TV is 1920 x 1080 I can still load the table with the higher resolution textures (from memory 2560), and by default the table is zoomed in and the excess resolution pixels are truncated.

 

[vikingerik]

What is impressive is even though it is pre-rendered they can still allow zooming and panning in real time.

That's easy, technically. GPU hardware does the zooming. Texturing onto a 3D polygon is fundamentally the same thing as 2D scaling. You draw it as a polygon that's oriented flat towards the screen. So the zooming is done by all 96 hardware texture units or whatever in parallel.

Tablets mostly use a shared GPU memory architecture, so the limiting factor is memory bandwidth to iterate through all the prerendered textures every frame. I don't know anything about how good tablets are in that area.

 

[DaPinballWizard]

A-men Shawn. I bought the pro version, and it's fun and graphics are great but when I play pinball it just feel right unless it's a recreation of an original table. The physics are great etc, but I still favor TPA. Finally got a chance to play a few games today then went back to TPA ..,., IMHO TPA still wins. However, I can completely understand why people like this table. Beautiful graphics etc......it's obvious a lot of time and love went into reproducing this table!!!!

I guess you will have to try the table again after the real table is released. Maybe then you can enjoy the digital version.

 

[SilverBalls]

A-men Shawn. I bought the pro version, and it's fun and graphics are great but when I play pinball it just feel right unless it's a recreation of an original table. The physics are great etc, but I still favor TPA. Finally got a chance to play a few games today then went back to TPA ..,., IMHO TPA still wins. However, I can completely understand why people like this table. Beautiful graphics etc......it's obvious a lot of time and love went into reproducing this table!!!!

And just to add I also have a physcological thing about not liking a table unless it was real in the past, but with Timeshock (and all the Pro Pinball series) these are exceptions. The tables are so good in terms of design/ruleset/implemenation you would expect them to have been designed by one of well known tables designers of real tables. Due to the fact that a real table is now being made of Timeshock just goes to prove how good it is.

 

[mpad]

Is there no professional review of this game?
Maybe it would help get some attention.

 

[Fungi]

What? One star reviews because it actually costs money isn't good enuff for ya?

 

[mpad]

No I meant some game magazine or something...
But it is only ios, and I have no idea what popular sites are, since I am new to apple ecosystem.

 

[Pinballwiz45b]

Got an article on Fun With Bonus's blog on the Ultra Combo. So stoked.

http://funwithbonus.com/timeshock-ultra-combo/

 

[Tarek Oberdieck]

Some news about the "real" timeshock! http://www.pinballnews.com/games/timeshock/index3.html

 

[Pinballwiz45b]

WOW. This is a real eye-opener. Stern should help out with this.

 

[Jeff Strong]

I like how the two sides blend together on the backglass.

 

[invitro]

Sorry guys, but the art looks really dull/uninspired to me. And I can't believe they have the nerve to call it "surrealistic". There's nothing remotely surreal about it. Ernst would be rolling in his grave if he cared.

 

[mpad]

They wanted to say "unrealistic"

 

[Jeff Strong]

Well, at least it's original art and not something slapped together in Photoshop like a lot of Sterns are these days.

 

[mpad]

True. I too like the color blending.
Just the backglas is missing "something".
And I think they should have used more of the playfield color palette - not so much blue, more green yellow red orange grey (just checked)