Multiple FX Pinball announcements today, plus first looks!

[pinballmonster]

I've been watching vids of FX game play looking for evidence of differences in the new arcade physics in both zen and Williams titles. It's been very difficult noticing significant differences which might be a good thing. The ball does seem to move a little faster in zen tables and doesn't seem too wild or fast in Williams titles.

These are still early days and I don't expect a major update for FX until about six months in, when embracer forces them to have tables ready to launch for console.

The next six month interval will be for steam release and I think there will be another round of significant bug fixes as it will then be ready (more or less) for general release.

A zen rep in the latest episode said they are constantly working on physics and I do think there will be more revisions to the physics at some point as the game is ported to steam.

As far as visual differences, I've often found it difficult to detect significant differences between 2k and 4k resolution unless it's on larger screens often 60" or larger. On an iMac for instance, bumping res up from 1080p to 4k in YouTube vids, it's not easy to immediately notice the difference.

It requires a big step up in processor power to play 4k smoothly as opposed to 1080p for marginal gains. Add ray tracing on top of that and you have a recipe for an overcooked GPU.

 

[trash80]

Oh I know exactly what it is, and I don't need to get my eyes checked.

Explain to me why the flipper angles in their Pinball Show are exactly like how they are in FX3, then? And not just in S2E2, but also in S2E1 when they showcased Indy?

Explain to me, also, why we haven't seen the new flipper physics on Volumes 1-3 on FX3, yet they exist on the tables found in the Arcade1UP Williams cabinets?

There's a Simulation setup in the code, and you know it. We're likely not going to see it until later on down the line. They don't call it the "Ultimate Pinball Universe" for nothing.

One major feature in Early Access at a time, and I'm willing to bet they're wanting feedback on the current Pro Physics model before easing back into Simulation/Tournament modes.

You don't need to have your eyes checked.

Arcade1Up is Android-based, it isn't FX3.

Arcade / Classic / Simulation makes sense.

You ae proposing the following:
Arcade = Pro Physics with Power Ups
Classic = Pro Physics w/o Power Ups
Simulation = Pro Physics w/o Power Ups and with WMS FX3 style flipper code (You know, people are going to complain for the "Simulation" physics on Zen Originals, and then we are just back to where we were a couple of years ago)

Look at the UI in the shipping exe, that should give you an idea of what is prioritized.

I think everyone is taking this being "early access" a bit too literally.

"Pro Physics" was the term for the Classic Arcade WMS FX3 style physics in Williams Mobile. Mel has decided that all the physics in Pinball FX are now "Pro Physics."

 

[Crawley]

As far as visual differences, I've often found it difficult to detect significant differences between 2k and 4k resolution unless it's on larger screens often 60" or larger. On an iMac for instance, bumping res up from 1080p to 4k in YouTube vids, it's not easy to immediately notice the difference.

Yeah in 2K I can't tell really any difference in quality from the Williams tables. Both FX3 and FX look sharp at that resolution. Only visual difference I'm seeing is with the lighting.

I do wish they went a bit more intense with the lighting though, particularly with any of the flashers. Should really light up the table when they go off and I'm not seeing that to the effect I would have hoped.

It requires a big step up in processor power to play 4k smoothly as opposed to 1080p for marginal gains. Add ray tracing on top of that and you have a recipe for an overcooked GPU.

Any game you run in 4K requires a lot of power. Not just this one.

As far as ray tracing goes I added Dying Light 2 (ray tracing ON) GPU stats to my previous post. The stats are pretty close with FX being slightly less intense. In both cases the GPU temperature is low under load, around 65c. In both apps the GPU usage goes close to or up to 100%. I think that would be the case with any game using ray tracing. The cards are built for it they will be fine.

 

[pinballmonster]

A fairly small point but I wish they'd done a better job of rendering the pinball itself. The FX3 pinball was bright and shiny like an actual pinball, and you could easily see the ball spin, however exaggerated.

In FX, the pinball is dull, matte, and could be mistaken for a mini grey hockey puck. It's a little reminiscent of the pinball arcade pinball which is not a good thing (as much as I enjoyed playing pinball arcade).

The FX implementation of HDR also seems to be very poor. Some of the tables look very dark, obscuring detail. I'm confident zen will get most of the major issues sorted, but I can't imagine Epic being thrilled with the current state of the product.

 

[dmil666]

I bought Attack from Mars, Theatre of Magic & CFTBL because they're my favourite tables and I wanted to play them. Ten bucks for three tables is OK by me. They all play well (and the joystick/plunger works on the tables that have them, duh) although they seem awfully lively, but that could just be me. All of the tables I've played, both bought & in rotation, seem kind of dark. I imagine that there will be lighting options in future releases.
I played around with the virtual room stuff. It seemed to work with the sample collectible stuff. Big whoop.

 

[pinballmonster]

It seems like we've got some gaming industry insiders on this forum. To put you on the spot, do you think it's possible for zen to have a polished version of FX for console by this summer?

This is speculation on my part, but I'd put the odds at 50/50 or maybe even lower if we're talking about the current 38 titles available right now. I'd say the odds are basically zero for all 100+ catalog titles.

 

[Firefox2000]

^^^Going by what we see here i would say no, unless we find out that the console version were done first and the issues with the PC version at present is that it's a port from the console version, the gaming industry have been known to do this, porting from console to PC to save money and time, but that usually never ends well, look at the mess that was the last batman game, a console to PC port which was eventually left to rot because they could not fix it.

 

[Pinballwiz45b]

"Pro Physics" was the term for the Classic Arcade WMS FX3 style physics in Williams Mobile. Mel has decided that all the physics in Pinball FX are now "Pro Physics."

LOL, calling it "Pro Physics" when I can insta-catch just like Zen physics in FX3. Any flipper apex that's higher than the shallow angles is still very much Zen physics.

Yeah, Williams got quite the downgrade in FX as it stands. No Simulation or Tournament setups yet -- you're not missing much right now.

Indiana Jones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6ZPh78JNhg

Attack From Mars:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlQyN0t08iY

Monster Bash:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htVNP-tXOKg

 

[pinballmonster]

FX just looks bad right now. The tables are super dark (at least the Williams tables) and the rendering of the pinball itself in particular is just a bad joke. Physics on zen original and licensed tables is all over the map.

Crow Continuum says devs are so good at rendering "fake lighting" that ray tracing is basically a non factor. Except for the fact that frame rates drop by 50 to 60% percent or more with it on.

I've been inclined to defend Zen as their mouthiest critics on reddit are notorious whiners, but there is almost nothing positive of note to defend. Forget about tickets or subscriptions, the tables themselves look bad.

 

[Crawley]

 

[Crawley]

So its good that they tackled the lighting. It looks better than before for sure. There's a new slider setting with the lighting - Chromatic Aberration. Turning it up will certainly make the lights glow a bit more. But at the cost of making things look a bit blurry at the higher settings. Seems 0.3 and 0.4 are the sweet spots for me. I'm using 0.4 right now and the lighting effects look more prominent but getting a slight blur effect.

What it seems they did was darken the lights around the tables to make the current lighting stand out. It's a quick fix, and an improvement, but hopefully they actually go back and re-do all the lighting to give the tables a stunning light show.

Surprisingly the lighting that looks the best to me, and I thought this previously, is Party Zone. A table I don't really care for but for some reason it seems there was some extra TLC put in the lighting on that one. It looks good.

I do not see much of a difference with ray tracing on and the new lighting. So still a technology that's underutilized for Pinball FX.

Update: Have to say the lighting on Medieval Madness looks very good too. Had forgotten to try it out. Mars Attacks is still a bit disappointing, particularly strobe multiball mode, but the lighting on the table overall is still better than before the change.

 

[Scared Stiff]

Definitely an improvement. Especially on Theater of Magic which I thought was horrible before.

 

[Scared Stiff]

Bunch of new stuff today:

New table: Swords of Fury

Released remasters:

No Good Gophers
Tales Of Arabian Nights
Circus Voltare
Hurricane
White Water
Road Show

Discounts!!!
So those remasters above are 33% off.

But they also announced other discounts:

1. For buying multiple tables in the same collection
2. For buying multiple tables in general

And both kinds of discounts can stack and be used together.

Changes to cabinet mode:

No longer have to snap a pic of your rig and send it to them. You just activate it in game from your player profile. It’s free for now but will cost whatever you think it’s worth after Early Access. It is however included in the Pinball Pass.

Zen also mentioned that they will continue to work on physics and perhaps the most exciting news for me, is that through their new licensing, we are going to see tables based on Kong and Godzilla. So that’s awesome.

All today’s info: https://youtu.be/43wIqJfsYgo

 

[Crawley]

No Congo or ST:NG stinks but otherwise all good news. Will have to give Sword of Fury a fair shake as it wasn't one of my favorites in Pinball Arcade.

The bundling is pretty nice. Bundling SoF, along with the 6 other tables was a good deal. SoF was originally 60 tickets. And the 6 re-releases were 45 tickets (with 33% discount). Once bundled together Sof was 42 tickets and the other tables went down to 21 tickets. So 168 tickets for 7 tables.

Looks like Tournaments was initially supposed to make it in today's update but has a delay.

 

[Gorgar]

Swords of Fury? *yawn* ��

Wait what? Godzilla?

 

[Narc0lep5y]

Calling it Cabinet mode is generous. As far as i can tell it lets you set DMD and backglass locations/resolutions and not much else.

If you click it, it makes a Cabinet folder in the mods directory and a settings.ini file in that folder. Settings.ini looks like this - ignore the actual numbers this is from my desktop

[DotMatrixWindow]
Enabled=True
Priority=0
PositionX=25
PositionY=25
Width=512
Height=128
DotMatrixSize=Medium

[BackglassWindow]
Enabled=True
Priority=0
PositionX=0
PositionY=0
Width=1920
Height=1080

As far as I can tell, there's no way to actually rotate the playfield (it's not in the newly revised Cabinet mode FAQ either). Even the video shows "cabinet mode" running with a landscape playfield (NOTE - I really hope that was for YouTube presentation and they don't really think people play cabinet mode that way).

I haven't found anything about direct table launch scripts either and without both of those that's kind of a non functional tease that doesn't even do what FX3 does for cabinet mode. But it's a start! and a good start except....

Mel also announced that aside from Bug fixes (uh huh sure) resources are being pulled from cabinet mode to work on console launch.

Waah Waaaaah

 

[pinballmonster]

Where is the complete list of Williams tables in FX? The company makes it such a PITA to find such a basic list.

As far as Swords, underwhelming, better than nothing.

 

[BostonBuckeye]

Calling it Cabinet mode is generous. As far as i can tell it lets you set DMD and backglass locations/resolutions and not much else.

If you click it, it makes a Cabinet folder in the mods directory and a settings.ini file in that folder. Settings.ini looks like this - ignore the actual numbers this is from my desktop

[DotMatrixWindow]
Enabled=True
Priority=0
PositionX=25
PositionY=25
Width=512
Height=128
DotMatrixSize=Medium

[BackglassWindow]
Enabled=True
Priority=0
PositionX=0
PositionY=0
Width=1920
Height=1080

As far as I can tell, there's no way to actually rotate the playfield (it's not in the newly revised Cabinet mode FAQ either). Even the video shows "cabinet mode" running with a landscape playfield (NOTE - I really hope that was for YouTube presentation and they don't really think people play cabinet mode that way).

I haven't found anything about direct table launch scripts either and without both of those that's kind of a non functional tease that doesn't even do what FX3 does for cabinet mode. But it's a start! and a good start except....

Mel also announced that aside from Bug fixes (uh huh sure) resources are being pulled from cabinet mode to work on console launch.

Waah Waaaaah

At least you were able to activate cabinet mode. I keep getting a fatal error that crashes the game.

 

[dmil666]

I was able to activate cabinet mode. I got a DMD black box on my main display (empty until you load a table) that covers up main menu screen stuff and an empty window on my second display that's complaining about a file that it can't find. I can't read the filename because the window's co-ords are off. It'd be nice if there was a hint at what was needed to set things up. I found the 'settings.ini' file (thanks Narc0lep5y) but I don't feel like blindly punching in numbers to see what happens.
This version feels pretty fragile - I bought some tables but got "Unknown error" at checkout and no tables appeared to have been bought and my ticket count hadn't changed. I exited the game, restarted it and bada-bing, the tables I bought were there and the ticket count was properly reduced. I got what I was after, but it wasn't a warm & fuzzy experience either.

I haven't got around to checking out the new tables I bought yet, so I'd better go do that, eh?

 

[Narc0lep5y]

coordinates should be the same as FX3 - it's basically your display resolution left to right depending on how you've set up multiple monitors in windows and your resolutions

If your monitors are set PF > BG > DMD left to right all aligned at the top, and your playfield is 1920x1080, BG should start at either 1921 or 1081 depending on orientation. then a 1920x1080 BG and dmd starts at 3841. vertical is either 0 or for dmd somewhere about 2/3 down like 800 or so.