Zaccaria Pinball

[gsxrboy]

Snaffled the gold membership in prep for the new sim mode and up coming table goodness. Keep up the progress and improvements .. and port the engine mods to the other apps too!

 

[Kolchak357]

now now boys

things are heating up

im gonna do it arent i?

im a very shicked but pleastanly suprised! for these to be back ported to real and age of wow

im ****ing in! after the upadate ha well i needa play

I knew you couldn't hold out for long.
Don't be the last in the pool. Jump in, waters fine.

 

[drdrey]

Please do a android version. I definitely will get it. Thanks in advance

 

[jhamdotme]

Notes about “Age of Pinballs”

(Sorry to post generic A.S.K.-related comments here. This doesn’t really have anything to do with Zaccaria Pinball. Perhaps night is right and we need a whole A.S.K. subforum.)

@Zsolt Do you have something more formal that you’re using for bug tracking and feature requests? I’d love to help whenever I see something, and post it in here, but then you’re probably going to have to parse everything into something usable. I’d like to make this whole process easier for you, if possible.

In the mean time, I’ve noticed a few things while revisiting Age of Pinballs:

• I’ve purchased the all-in-one package in Age of Pinballs, to get all of the in-app purchases, but the “In-App Restore” button and icon are still visible. Once the app can recognize that you own everything, this button probably isn’t necessary anymore. And actually, it probably isn’t necessary to show the individual in-app purchases anymore, either, once you’ve already purchased them. Before you’ve purchased these, it makes sense to have them here, to remind the user about what’s available. But once you’ve already got everything, it just seems like onscreen clutter.
• I haven’t purchased any in-apps yet in Zaccaria Pinball, but it appears as if it’s possible to adjust all of the settings that are unlocked with in-app purchases. In Age of Pinballs, this doesn’t seem to be the case. From the options, you can adjust the “Blocking Gate”, the flippers, the balls, the retro sound effects, and the “used table” feature, but there are a few things that you can’t disable, it seems. It doesn’t seem possible to go back to just using three balls, rather than five, I can’t disable the “Drain Blocker”, and I can’t disable the “Aid Pack” with the slow and rewind features.
• The “Drain Blocker” is a good idea, I suppose, but it’s implementation is flawed. Even with a drain blocker, the ball should be able to drain when the flippers aren’t activated. But this isn’t the case here. If you leave the flippers alone, the ball will come to rest between the drain blocker and the tip of one of the flippers, and you’ll be able to kick the ball back up and into play. Essentially, you’ll only be able to drain with the left or right outlanes. (And even this is pretty hard, if you have the optional blocking gate enabled.) Sure, you can still drain down the middle with poor play, but the user can “hack” the game and just always wait until the ball has come to rest between the flipper and the drain blocker. (In the Art of Pinball Table Pack standalone app, there’s a drain blocker for the table Beast Master, and the ball can drain between an at-rest flipper and the drain blocker. This is the only place where I’ve seen this correctly implemented.)
• The “Drain Blocker” doesn’t appear with any of the “Real Pinball” tables.
• In Age of Pinballs, it doesn’t seem possible to adjust the flippers with many of the tables. In the ’70s and ’80s section, the non-Art of Pinball tables seem to respect this preference, but none of the others do. In the ’90s section, none of the tables respect this preference, including any of the tables from the “Real Pinball Pack”
• I like that you can adjust the camera on each of the tables, but this preference should be saved on a per-table basis. Right now, the app only remembers your last used camera setting.
• Actually, I’d prefer it if all of the options were saved on a per-table basis. Here are some reasons I might want this:
  - I only want 5 balls for the Art of Pinball tables
  - I only want the Used Table look on the older tables
  - I only want the blocking gate on the Real Pinball tables
• If there were per-table options that were persistent, it would probably be easier to deal with certain in-apps that aren’t compatible with certain tables. I mean, the flippers should probably work with any table, so that’s probably a bug, but maybe you don’t want people to be able to use the “Drain Blocker” on the “Real Pinball” tables. So if that’s the case, just don’t put this as an option in the options menu for any of the “Real Pinball” tables. As it is now, this option seems like it should work for all of the tables, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
• If you adjust the options in the middle of the game, it should tell you that these changes won’t take effect until you restart your game, or until you start another game.
• You shouldn’t be able to change the camera angle when the ball is in the plunge view. It’s meaningless here, because the view doesn’t actually change. It’s possible that you’ll be changing the view inadvertently, and you might not even notice that you’ve changed anything.
• When the ball is at rest — in the plunge view, between the flipper tip and the “Drain Blocker” — the ball is still spinning. It should come to rest naturally.
• When the ball is at rest in the plunge view, it’s still possible to hear the “ball rolling” sound.
• During the 3,2,1 countdown, there should somehow be a sense of which way the ball is travelling. Perhaps there could be arrows of some sort, to give a little context. Or, as a more whiz-bang approach to this problem, you could maybe use your rewind feature and play back the last few seconds before letting us take over. (During this “coming back from pause” rewind, the flippers should be disabled until we’re back to where we were when we paused it. Also, the 3,2,1 should be made smaller and these numbers should be placed where they won’t be blocking your view.)
• Perhaps this is just me, but it doesn’t seem like we should have a ball save feature for the older ’70s-style tables. We see that the plunger is manual, but the table will auto-fire the ball back into play when we quickly drain. According to a post on Pinside, this feature didn’t appear until 1984. (If we’re going for authenticity, it should probably be removed, but perhaps some users like this feature anyway. Maybe it should be a per-table preference. Or maybe it should be disabled in “Simulation Mode” and only left in for the casual players who are playing “Arcade Mode”.
• In the Options screen, “The Rules” button doesn’t seem to do anything. The text for “The Rules” will change from green to white when pressed, but nothing seems to happen other than that.
• In the Options screen, what is the Facebook button for? I click on it and it opens up my Facebook app. Surely something more than this is supposed to be happening? No?
• This one is obvious, and it’s been mentioned a million times before, but it bears repeating: All of your apps need Game Center support. This should be for “pure” scores, too. To register a score on the leaderboards, you shouldn’t be able to use the “Aid Pack”, “Drain Blocker”, the “Blocking Gate”, or the 5 balls option.

 

[Kolchak357]

Maybe just start a different thread for age of pinball and move this post over there. Although I think you would need mod help to move a post.

 

[Zsolt]

Feel free to post them here the way you have done so far, I can process them easily
Anyway thank you for your detailed list. I don't know when Age of Pinballs gets the next update, currently we work on Zaccaria Pinball at full pelt.

 

[Clawhammer]

Come on Apple, approve the damn update already!

 

[Kolchak357]

Come on Apple, approve the damn update already!

I have Friday off, so I hope we see it before then.

 

[robx46]

Did ASK say is they were going to make a proper flipper gap? Its incredibly small! The ball barely fits through! If they can do this on top of the new physics & better graphics, we might be well on our way to something good. Btw, ASK, you guys make some good improvements here, it will be worth your while. Many people here will buy every table. I know I will. I have lots of feedback I can give, but there are lots of smart people here that I think have covered most or all things already.

 

[SilverBalls]

Did ASK say is they were going to make a proper flipper gap? Its incredibly small! The ball barely fits through! If they can do this on top of the new physics & better graphics, we might be well on our way to something good. Btw, ASK, you guys make some good improvements here, it will be worth your while. Many people here will buy every table. I know I will. I have lots of feedback I can give, but there are lots of smart people here that I think have covered most or all things already.

Agree about the flipper gap - if the gap can be matched to the gap on the real table that would be superb. I will certainly buy every table based on these improvements.

 

[night]

So far as I can see it, comparing the flippers with original table photographs, the flippers are a bit too big in size. They need to be scaled down somewhat, and this will fix the gap.

 

[Kolchak357]

I'm ok with the flipper gap the way it is. It makes up for the sad nudging they have going on there. If you widen the gap, then you better have side nudging working.

 

[night]

I'm ok with the flipper gap the way it is. It makes up for the sad nudging they have going on there. If you widen the gap, then you better have side nudging working.

I have shaken and stirred my iPad a few times, trying to evoke a nudge. I get this 'look' from my girlfriend-soon-to-be-my-wife when I do this (it makes you look like an imbecile).. and I can't tell the difference, nothing happens?! Nudging is something that should be on ASK's agenda for the next update. And flipper size.

 

[Heretic]

Night, if you flip the top of the tablet itll almost dead stop a ball

 

[Kolchak357]

Night, if you flip the top of the tablet itll almost dead stop a ball

Yes this does it, but it is terrible. It is like slamming on the breaks. But you can't nudge left or right.

 

[Heretic]

Ive found the trick is just to stop it aka nudge in optium postion a better nudge system is need for v1.2 pretty please

 

[night]

Night, if you flip the top of the tablet itll almost dead stop a ball

Sorry, I flip the top, hold it upside down, have thrown it out of my window, the ball does nothing.

Btw, anothing strange thing I noticed is that the gold and silver option seems mixed:
Gold: offers content of silver and bronze membership on a discount price.
Silver: Offers all Zaccaria pinball tables so far and the onces to be released in the future..

That should be the opposite, right? I'm on the iPad2.

 

[Heretic]

Its cheaper to buy sliver and bomze than goldmin the uk...quirks for not ill stick toma buy ler table mode...

Night im glad i got night mide so much more me

 

[night]

Indeed Heretic, the night mode is very nice. It could use more balance, Time Machine needs more light in the centre playfield, a tad too dark, Devil Riders is too dark in the back. As a graphic artist myself my head is in this stuff all day and night, I have to accept someone else is behind the controls and not me. At least I am not loosing my cool on Zaccaria as I do on TPA. ASK does a great job so far on the graphics and I hope they keep this consistent quality till the last table. In the meantime I just post some suggestions from the sidelines for what's worth it. Even though how hard you work on a project it is always good to have objective fresh eyes looking at your work. So far, besides the physics there is very little to complain. I bet that after the update there will be some more fine-tuning to do, but nothing is perfect from the start. I hope that our suggestions might help Zaccaria to become real close to seriously briliant.

 

[Heretic]

Might dude while i domt umderstand the atteion for gfx detail i really to appericate you do so in thatnrespect ill go with you

You anal ass