Modding TPA

What's the situation with modding TPA when it's released for PC, are FarSight going to allow it?

I wouldn't mind seeing the custom sound ROM for ST:TNG made available.

Dream on.

Yeah, I wouldn't hold my breath on different roms. For me, the mods I'd be interested in would be improvements to art (not to knock the folks at FS) in the form of higher resolution textures, higher quality sounds, etc.

Yeah, I'm only really thinking about opening up the texture sets and artwork, to at least allow us to have some fun with those.

How about it FarSight?

kimkom said:

Yeah, I'm only really thinking about opening up the texture sets and artwork, to at least allow us to have some fun with those.

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As the artwork and textures are the property of FarSight's licensors and therefore not under FarSight's direct control, I would think these would be the game assets that would be least likely to be modifiable, at least legally.

Sean DonCarlos said:

As the artwork and textures are the property of FarSight's licensors and therefore not under FarSight's direct control, I would think these would be the game assets that would be least likely to be modifiable, at least legally.

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That's a real shame if true. A lot of really good publicity can come from mods.

How about if I just wanted to modify the arcade environment textures?

Sean DonCarlos said:

As the artwork and textures are the property of FarSight's licensors and therefore not under FarSight's direct control, I would think these would be the game assets that would be least likely to be modifiable, at least legally.

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Absolutely, like all other games, and people should respect their work. I imagine it would happen like mods on all other games: original art by the mod teams.

If there is one aspect that users would be able to mod it's most likely that it would be the textures. Not officially, mind you, but by using a program called TexMod.
While I don't see a problem with people making their own modifications for personal use, I wonder if the developers would frown upon users uploading those modifications?

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How tight is Steam when it comes to being able to mod games without developer approval? Farsight might not get a vote on whether the game gets modded or not...

Tabe said:

How tight is Steam when it comes to being able to mod games without developer approval? Farsight might not get a vote on whether the game gets modded or not...

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I've installed 3rd party mods on Steam games and never had a problem.

there are no laws that say you cannot open up a game and change out textures and such for your own home enjoyment. TPA will definitely be cracked open and modded by people and no one can stop that no matter how much money you throw into security some genius will get it open and mess with it anyway. Every single PC game ever released has been pirated or modded you cannot stop it. Luckily for pinball arcade the benefit of new tables and updates keeps people wanting to have the real thing, and the die hards feel that farsight deserves their money (you couldn't make a crack work that would add the new tables every time they came out). Modding will happen. I can't wait to bust it open and make Rudy's texture even more evil looking, Throw an upside down cross on his head and give him dethklok style make-up. get into the rom and circuit break his voice samples to preform glitchy, make the table's colors more dark and scary. Evil funhouse. However to make original tables someone would either have to leak the tools farsight uses or built their own table maker from scratch which would be way to much work so we probably won't see originals just mods. That is unless the table creator is buried somewhere in the game release itself waiting to be found and hacked.

Sexton Hardcastle said:

I've installed 3rd party mods on Steam games and never had a problem.

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Same here. Just look at the modding community for Skyrim, and that's a AAA title.

The difference here, as Sean suggested, is that FarSight do not own the rights for all of the imagery they are re-creating.

Having said that there are tons of mods for games like F1 2012 (also on Steam), and that brings licensing issues on a whole different level.

If they do modify the roms, it'd at least be interesting to see someone adding in the complete Cactus Canyon ROM, if it actually is available somewhere.

LanceBoyle said:

If they do modify the roms, it'd at least be interesting to see someone adding in the complete Cactus Canyon ROM, if it actually is available somewhere.

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Well that'd mean not only cracking TPA, but getting your hands on and cracking the PROC rom. That was a total labor of love for a very small niche group of owners. Just wouldn't be right with no compensation.

I do think it would be awesome though to have a mod with the stickers for the bad guys put back into CC, or to make the Boogie Men dance in SS, or any of those other mods that FarSight themselves had to take out due to it not being 'table release' accurate. Drop targets in Firepower, moving earthquake center in Earthshaker, all those kind of things that were prototype only.

shutyertrap said:

Well that'd mean not only cracking TPA, but getting your hands on and cracking the PROC rom. That was a total labor of love for a very small niche group of owners. Just wouldn't be right with no compensation.

I do think it would be awesome though to have a mod with the stickers for the bad guys put back into CC, or to make the Boogie Men dance in SS, or any of those other mods that FarSight themselves had to take out due to it not being 'table release' accurate. Drop targets in Firepower, moving earthquake center in Earthshaker, all those kind of things that were prototype only.

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That would be nice. Although I think that the TPA version of Scared Stiff does have some of the stuff not on the actually released version (like the bony beast being textured instead of just plain white)

i mostly just want a texture editor to extract images edit them in photoshop and then replace them back into the game. just for fun. I think there would really be some joy in that for me. DMD animations and changing the sounds on the roms would be a nightmare that I wouldn't bother with but I could take the older non dmd tables and re-theme them. Who wouldn't want to tell their friends or loved one's "hey check this out i themed this table after you". You can goto the company pick-nick with a pinball table themed on your company and be the coolest guy their with your laptop, or maybe just slack off with the guys at the warehouse you work at with their ugly faces awkwardly all over the table. All this with the simpleness of just editing some images and pasting pictures. Anybody figure out how to get into the images on the beta?

I would love to add shadows to the playfield (pimping that shadowless TZ table comes to mind). All I need is the playfield artwork image map.

night said:

I would love to add shadows to the playfield (pimping that shadowless TZ table comes to mind). All I need is the playfield artwork image map.

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That's exactly the kind of thing I had in mind too. I've no interest in modifying game or rom properties, but texture modding would be cool.

Once the PC version is out, whether we like it or not, it's only a matter of time before it's dissassembled and moddifiable.
Pretty sure that the online pinball community (vpinball/future pinball users etc) will eventually find a way. Which leads to the question of will modding be allowed to be discussed here, will it be embraced or will we have to discuss it somewhere else? I'd prefer if another sub forum under PC titled modding was here, so the senior moderators can keep tabs on it, although I can also understand why it might not be allowed to though.

Moddings definitely not always bad for the developers if done in the right way, iD still charge for the original doom pc files on Steam which you can then use for the thousands of doom mods out there.

Could imagine Farsight doing something like this, charge for the original Pinball Arcade and table files in order for mods to still work. (With scores disabled of course!)

Or something like that! So long as their not out of pocket I can't see it being a problem? Better here then hidden somewhere else surely, atleast Farsight read the boards here and can see whats going on