Should TPA have gone the pre-rendered route, like PP Remastered?

[unclewilly]

Id rather have a table that looks more like a real table then a panning zooming camera.
And lighting like the pro pinball tech demo blows away the bs lighting in tpa.
Dont get me wrong i love tpa, but when you play a real totan or tom and see the gi lighting going crazy and then you play it on tpa and it does nothing its rather disappointing.
I mean the night version of totan i modded for vp even has the 8 step fading gi lighting in totan and boy what a light show it is. And vp is a dinosaur

 

[BonzoGonzo]

Real-time is more, not less, costly.

until you have to do rom emulation with a prerender, which means every possible situation must be foreseen/prerendered...

or to quote serenseven (becouse he refused to quote himself):

"Then ask yourself, what happens when a ROM-emulated prerendered table gets into a state that was not foreseen (as they often do, see Cirqus Voltaire's behavior for many examples) and needs to load a prerendered image that isn't there? At minimum, you're going to have missing or corrupted graphics; more likely the table will outright crash."

and when you start doing new prerenders for the whole table (and all of its views) becouse of one small problem/thingy and then for the end users having to download all that prerenders for a single table... time and money just ad up

 

[SKILL_SHOT]

Wich is better for collision detection?

 

[JoshuaKadmon]

I don't believe pre-rendering the TPA tables would've been the right choice. In Pro Pinball's case, all of the tables were digitally-realized and could be optimized for viewing at a set angle or perspective. But for TPA, the tables had to be recreated with the exact same layout as the original machines, and even FarSight points out that if the real table obscured a player's view of a certain target or part of the table, there wouldn't be any special concessions made for the player in TPA's digital recreation. The roaming camera sometimes assists with this, much like a player leaning in for a better look at his target on a real table. On that note, though, it would be nice to have a "Table Viewer" mode in TPA, where we could freely rotate around the playfield model, zoom in and out, etc. before starting a game on that table.

Pre-rendering looks pretty, but nothing else about it really enhances the gameplay, in my opinion.

 

[Sean DonCarlos]

Wich is better for collision detection?

Collision detection is determined by the collision meshes, which are independent of the visible table elements.

 

[Matt McIrvin]

Also, the code that runs FarSight's tables is not entirely their own. The ROMs that run these tables are mostly black boxes; FarSight does not have direct control over what they do. Contrast this to Pro Pinball tables, where Silverball presumably knows and controls every state the table could possibly be in, and can generate the prerendered images corresponding to each of those states. Then ask yourself, what happens when a ROM-emulated prerendered table gets into a state that was not foreseen (as they often do, see Cirqus Voltaire's behavior for many examples) and needs to load a prerendered image that isn't there? At minimum, you're going to have missing or corrupted graphics; more likely the table will outright crash.

I'm not sure this is such a big problem, any more than it is for TPA. You don't need a prerendered image for every possible state of the entire table (which would be impossible even in Pro Pinball); you just need prerendered assets, masks for lighting and occlusion of the ball image, etc. for the various possible states of the individual table elements, and you composite those together to make the table display. And you can still display anything the ROM code throws up on the DMD, just as in TPA.

The less flexible camera positioning really is an issue, I think, as is overall asset size. One way to think of it is that realtime 3D rendering is the more future-proof alternative that scales up better, whereas pre-rendering scales down better to low-end hardware. In any event, Farsight already made their choice about a decade ago.

 

[BonzoGonzo]

guys don't get me wrong, i think that that pro pinball target prerender is freaking gorgeus looking, but it just wasnt the right route in the end for tpa...

so we have what we have... tpa not looking shabby, the lightning engine updates keep coming, and with the announced daylight level slider things are looking good... well, hopefully

 

[night]

I think nothing beats the pre-rendered look. I don't care about camera movements, there is none in a real life situation. The constant hovering of a dynamic camera is also very unpleasant for the eyes and brain. I think it would be a very big step forward for TPA if they would go the pre-rendered route.

 

[haj]

tpa not looking shabby, the lightning engine updates keep coming, and with the announced daylight level slider things are looking good... well, hopefully

Console and PC may be updated, however not for mobile devices. It's already slowly killing older devices with current state. New features could be limited to only newer devices.. this iPad4 only, option iPad5 only.. I'd even worry about internal management for having lotsa branches.. more bugs and inconsistencies..

 

[night]

Bobby King about the lighting slider:

"We don't have the tech on mobile devices to do this without at least quadrupling the number of textures per table which would make the size of a table download huge.

On console, we can start looking into this now that we have been training more artists to tune lighting. Adding this feature is not trivial. Altering the lighting involves changing many light sets. It's not just a global setting."

So, adios to the lighting slider.

 

[Sean DonCarlos]

On console, we can start looking into this now that we have been training more artists to tune lighting. Adding this feature is not trivial. Altering the lighting involves changing many light sets. It's not just a global setting."

So, adios to the lighting slider.

Not trivial does not imply not possible. Bobby's just saying "don't expect it tomorrow, or even next month".

 

[tripleplonq]

ASK Homework's pinballs look much better and they also use just one static set of textures. And the lighting is not affected too much by altering the camera angle.