New Stern Pinball Arcade: AC/DC Kickstarter is FULLY FUNDED!!!

[lettuce]

Star Trek, Starship Troopers, Frankenstein, and Ripley's will be launch titles. Frankenstein will actually be a free table. Ripley's can be purchased individually or through the Table Pack One set. The Kickstarter text will be updated to clarify.

Any insight as to what the reasoning behind selecting these TPA tables over others already released???

 

[jrolson]

SPA is a collaboration between Farsight and Stern, I don't see why Farsight has to foot the complete bill for the licensing costs.

A better question is why don't they just goto a bank and get a loan like any other business?

 

[infernogott]

They should've released the SPA app first and prove how good it is, before going to kickstarter...

 

[invitro]

A better question is why don't they just goto a bank and get a loan like any other business?

Well, they'd have to pay that back.

 

[Tann]

I'm not convinced of any difference between those. This isn't a railroad. The ball is coming out of the bumpers which do impart randomness. Note that it bounces off the right wall a little higher in the PC video, which would make it take longer to fall and feel more floaty.

The best example I know is CV's ringmaster eject. This is a long railroad that if you don't flip or nudge, always bounces off the held left flipper to settle on the right. If any drop speed or bounciness ever changed, this shouldn't work, but it always has for me on the PC. I'd like to see video evidence for comparison from other platforms, but it's going to be hard to find since everybody else recording videos will flip at the ball instead of waiting for it to fully settle by railroad as I do.

We're agreed on that. ^^

The purpose of the two MB videos comparison was to show there's strictly no difference between PC 3.0 and PS4/PS3 old physics on pre-Xenon tables. The ball acts the same floaty way on both devices, and drops at exactly the same speed.

So your theory was totally right, 3.0 implementation on pre-Xenon tables added only the drop catch & tip pass possibilities. The ball is still floaty and has a constant drop speed, whereas these both things have been slightly improved on post-Xenon tables (and TAF).

I wasn't aware of that, I thought 3.0 implementation has improved physics on older tables, to make it on par with the post-Xenon tables.

It's clearly not the case. FS lied as always.

I was eager to have the 3.0 physics on all tables on PS3 too, but knowing that, I just don't give a sh** now, as it improves nothing.

Anyway, thanks again for your useful posts.

 

[thefly0810]

They should've released the SPA app first and prove how good it is, before going to kickstarter...

Exactly. It's a new game with new physics. As with all new games, new problems and bugs come with them. Are they going to be better about patching problems across all platforms in SPA compared to TPA currently?

 

[Pinballwiz45b]

We're agreed on that. ^^

The purpose of the two MB videos comparison was to show there's strictly no difference between PC 3.0 and PS4/PS3 old physics. The ball acts the same floaty way on both devices, and drops at exactly the same speed.

So your theory was totally right, 3.0 implementation on pre-Xenon tables added only the drop catch & tip pass possibilities. The ball is still floaty and has a constant drop speed, whereas these both things have been slightly improved on post-Xenon tables (and TAF).

I wasn't aware of that, I thought 3.0 implementation has improved physics on older tables, to make it on par with the post-Xenon tables.

It's clearly not the case. FS lied as always.

I was eager to have the 3.0 physics on PS3 too, but knowing that, I just don't give a sh** now, as it improves nothing.

Anyway, thanks again for your useful posts.

Not exactly a lie. They specifically stated Flipper Physics 3.0 on their Youtube channel and in their newsletter.

 

[Tann]

Not exactly a lie. They specifically stated Flipper Physics 3.0 on their Youtube channel and in their newsletter.

In "Flipper" physics, I'd include the "flipper rubber bounciness", but it seems FS didn't. On post-Xenon, it has been toned down, and the ball doesn't bounce anymore like a crazy rubber ball, when you try to catch it.

But it seems nothing has changed on pre-Xenon tables, even with the 3.0 implementation.

As always, FS did the minimum work, only adding drop catch & tip pass.

And yet, they stated they had to tweak each table one-by-one in order to include 3.0 (and it's currently the same excuse for all the other devices which still have no 3.0 on pre-Xenon tables, almost 1 year after the PC had it), but it was a lie, as Vikingerik spotted:

Here's what I think happened. I think they intended to retrofit the finer flipper behavior that we see on new tables into the older ones. That would require table-by-table tweaking to make sure all the shots were still makeable. And then I think they never did that, but just retrofitted only the drop and live catches (because that didn't need table-by-table tweaking because it doesn't affect shooting), and decided to call that "Physics 3.0" anyway. And people believed that and never realized Farsight didn't follow through with the earlier intent because nobody studies railroads in the depth that I do.

 

[Ben Logan]

Well, it's good to see this forum alive with constructive criticism. Hopefully Farsight will identify an opportunity here to win back our trust by Hitting it out if the park with Physics 4.0

 

[Flipperdeflip]

Well, it's good to see this forum alive with constructive criticism. Hopefully Farsight will identify an opportunity here to win back our trust by Hitting it out if the park with Physics 4.0

As long as we make their Kickstarters succeed they don't feel like they lost any trust.

 

[mpad]

What would they do if kickstarter didn't exist?
Exactly, go to a bank to get a loan and invest in their business plan that a heavily licensed table like ac dc will sell big time.

 

[PiN WiZ]

Once again, please keep this thread on topic...the same as the last Kickstarter thread.

 

[Nate]

screw all this where is the god damn oculus support!

 

[Zaphod77]

Honestly most sims try to simulate the wildness by randomizing the subframes.

A literally impossible tpa shot is when the ball simply goes from too early to too late during one physics frame.

The only real solution is to have more physics frames. Having more visible frames helps some with that.

Pro pinball doesn't have a fully emergent physics engine. it never did at least before the re dos. They just did a better job cheating and tweaking then everyone else did. But anyone who played the web knows how to easily repeatedly shoot orbits by holding the left flipper up after the shot, then not waiting for the trap before shooting the orbit again.

We are also limited by timer resolution which simply isn't the best on mobile which is why mobile is so much more difficult. Because less shots are possible from a physics standpoint due to less timer resolution, they have to tweak differently to make it possible at all.

It's been as issue with digital pinball since day one. assuming that tpa does include subframes, shots that require subframe accuracy are much harder then ones that simply require frame accuracy. Funhouse trap door from hidden hallway is a one subframe shot in PC tpa, or was before it was tweaked.

 

[soundwave106]

This is true, most notably the ball-vacuuming left ramps on Creature and Medieval Madness. We (at least I) don't really call that railroading though. The railroads are going to exist anyway because of TPA's deterministic physics. What Farsight does here is tweak flipper parameters and collision geometry per-table until the railroads lead to desirable shots. Sometimes they get this wrong and the railroads lead to the posts flanking AFM's right ramp and never up it.

There may be less reason to invest in *super* accurate physics, though, if you need to keep the end product easy enough so that less percentage of the market *****es about how hard it is. It's probably harder to tweak a more complex physics model than a simple one. Again, as easy as some people find TPA tables, it's *very* easy to find people who found TPA too hard.

Also, I will say that while it's pretty easy to tell there are lane tweaks, I honestly think it's hard for any layperson to know what the *real* technical issues are on the engine (eg speculation on deterministic physics). So will probably shut up on further speculation. For detailed scrutiny, they'd need to put their source online, and as a commercial company that isn't going to happen. To give a perspective, read the C++ source code of the Visual Pinball engine. It's not walk-in-the-park stuff to be honest, and it's certainly more complex than some people would have it. It's certainly not obvious for instance whether "frames" as boundaries is a problem for them as well (didn't see any computations that calculated between-frame-positions on a quick scan, but that's a lot of C++ math to "quick skim" to really know it, so I might have missed it...).

 

[Ben Logan]

Great info, Zaphod. Forgive me if this was already answered, but does this Kickstarter video suggest that freeing the new engine from ROM emulation will free up cycles which can be put toward toward faster framerate? It seems to.

If Pro Pinball simply does a better job of faking it, then ok -- lets have TPA physics that do a significantly better job of sorcery / deception for more perceived realism.

 

[Pinhead45]

November (see delivery date by the reward tiers if you don't believe me)

Really!! Then something doesn't make sense then. So where does that put ghostbusters, a fall release? (that would be 5 tables) Hate to say this but Stern will already be two tables ahead of ghostbusters by then.

You know scanning back to Invitro's post on the SPA leak, 10 tables are included, could that be the whole first season of SPA? 7 older tables, 3 newer ones. Maybe there's a pattern here, 1 kickstarter table, a couple of new sterns and the rest older tables. At that rate they could do many seasons of SPA.

I would find a way to get us some older tables mixed in there that wasn't something from TPA so it wasn't so "updated existing tables heavy" Surely they could throw in Time Machine from Data East or Torpedo Alley or something else and not have to pay licensing. 3 or 4 tables I can stomach but 7 existing tables may be a bit much. (If that is what they are doing)

 

[mattenno]

Do we get the pro and the premium and the LE or just the premium?

 

[jaredmorgs]

http://www.pinballrocks.com but it seems to be unavailable in the App Store and Google Play Store.
If you bought it, it should be listed in your purchased apps unless it was removed by Apple because of licensing issues.

It's an IAP Smurfberries monster. Avoid.

 

[mewzard]

According to the Kickstarter, both AC/DC and Star Trek will have Premium and LE versions (though they didn't detail what specific versions of LE they would include).