The ball...

[Richard B]

I saw a recent article on IGN, where the developers of a major franchise (I think it was God of War) claimed to have developed, by far, the most accurate pinball physics system ever seen, though the game ended up being cancelled.

 

[superballs]

The bottom line is, the slight lag between the controller and what you see on your screen will always force you to adjust the way you play. This is one of the reasons why video pinball will never play as accurately as a real machine because there's no way around the slight lag. You can't program a game to predict when you're going to hit the flippers to compensate for this slight lag. I'm able to do just about everything on TPA that I can do on a real machine, but I had to adjust the way I play to do so. Sorry, but there's no way around this.

Some of this is true, however, Zen and Pro Pinball both make it (frustratingly) easy to perform a drop catch. The lag on the 360 is basically non-existent (<5ms, basically the same delay you get when someone speaks to you and you hear it from 3 feet away). The lag between hitting a flipper button and having the flipper react wouldn't be much different and percievably no different.

Regardless, even if there is a delay, it would be pretty uniform and the idea when isolating balls in multiball is to release the flipper and press it again before it's had a chance to return to rest, thus not allowing it to achieve full momentum/velocity on it's upswing, that way the ball closest to the tip will just ride up a little bit, giving you just enough time to perform a post transfer. I've gotten close a few times but the best result I've achieved is that the inner ball flies up the table and the other one will actually stay on the flipper, most times both balls just shoot off in slightly different directions.

While "bounciness" might play a part in this, it would be a small part. I believe this is more a question of flipper mechanics than physics (or flipper physics maybe). Since the flippers in TPA are not bound by physical constraints, i will wager that no matter where they are in their downswing, they will reach the same velocity in their upswing. Meaning that even if they only move up a few millimeters, they are still moving the ball at the same velocity as they are on a full swing. This means that those delicate maneuvers like soft tap passes and multiball passes aren't exactly possible.

I'm thinking the drop catch might be a similar problem. I'm pretty sure that the flippers have a pretty set return rate, or maybe an instant return rate with some graphical cheating (which would also probably help cause the 'through the flipper bug'). This would mean that they don't cradle the ball (speaking of sounding dirty) the same way as they would on a real table, where if the flipper is released at the right time, the ball will hit it during the downswing and move it down to its rest position faster than what it would return on it's own. Due to the way the point of contact rotates around the ball during this nifty event, it absorbs most of the kinetic energy and allows the ball to stop dead on the flipper for that brief moment before it starts to roll down toward the tip.

As far as the live catch...the physics of that may as well be witchcraft.

 

[Kaoru]

The people complaining about drains have never played much real pinball. Real pinball will drain like a ...er...um...drain. ^_^

I'm not complaining that balls go down the drain but rather how they go down the drain. It sometimes just happens too fast to even grasp what just happened (quite often it seems like it perfomed a teleport or something), and it seems to come out of nowhere.

BTW, I now watched a few gameplay videos with real machines on youtube... and the ball really does look real fast, just like on TPA. However I just never felt the ball being that fast when I played those tables in real life, and I don't remember ever having a problem of following it with my eyes. I think the reason for that might be that the table gets "compressed" in those videos/video games and you have to look at it in a completely different way. When you're right in front of a machine your eyes wander across the playfield, maybe you're even moving your head up and down and from left to right and etc. Something that isn't really possible in video games. So the speed could very well be the same as on real life tables... but you perceive it differently because some outside factors don't come into play. Well... virtual and physical things just aren't the same after all. X/ (I mean, I even have trouble reading ebooks. I just can't get into books for my life when I'm reading them on a computer screen, I need proper paper in my hands to look at to really dive into the story.)

 

[Rudy Yagov]

I saw a recent article on IGN, where the developers of a major franchise (I think it was God of War) claimed to have developed, by far, the most accurate pinball physics system ever seen, though the game ended up being cancelled.

It was Insomniac Games, the creators of Ratchet and Clank, Resistance, and the original Spyro the Dragon trilogy.

 

[Animator_pin_fan]

I agree too, if only the flippers would allow for subtle twitches, so much more would be possible.

 

[Richard B]

BTW, I now watched a few gameplay videos with real machines on youtube... and the ball really does look real fast, just like on TPA. However I just never felt the ball being that fast when I played those tables in real life, and I don't remember ever having a problem of following it with my eyes.

Many of those machines have had their incline adjusted to the maximum, which has a big impact on the ball's speed. If the video is of a tournament, then this is more than likely the case. If it's a PAPA tournament, then it's definitely the case, as it is written into their official rules.

 

[Richard B]

It was Insomniac Games, the creators of Ratchet and Clank, Resistance, and the original Spyro the Dragon trilogy.

Yep, they were the ones. The overall tone on the message board when I saw it was sarcastic, along the lines of "oh, no new pinball game. What a tragedy . . . NOT!"
I wonder if it was mere hyperbole, or if they really made major innovations in pinball physics.

 

[Brian Clark]

Yep, they were the ones. The overall tone on the message board when I saw it was sarcastic, along the lines of "oh, no new pinball game. What a tragedy . . . NOT!"
I wonder if it was mere hyperbole, or if they really made major innovations in pinball physics.

Me too, but I heard good things about their games, so it would be interesting to see how it would have turned out. It seems every pinball game, no matter how good the physics are, hypes up the physics, though.

 

[PiN WiZ]

I'm actually enjoying the speed of the tables on TPA. If FarSight would add an option to increase/decrease the slope of each table (something you can do to a real machine), ball speed would be a non issue.

 

[Richard B]

Not quite a non-issue: while increasing the slope causes the ball to fall faster, it has the opposite effect when going up-field. Sideways momentum, such as hitting slings and bumpers, would also be effected minimally. Still, even with it's flaws, Farsight has one of the best physics system around, second only to Empire Interactive (Pro Pinball). With a few tweaks, Farsight could be number one.

 

[Brian Clark]

Not quite a non-issue: while increasing the slope causes the ball to fall faster, it has the opposite effect when going up-field. Sideways momentum, such as hitting slings and bumpers, would also be effected minimally. Still, even with it's flaws, Farsight has one of the best physics system around, second only to Empire Interactive (Pro Pinball). With a few tweaks, Farsight could be number one.

Empire Interactive was the original UK publisher of Pro Pinball. The designers were Another Cunning Development. They now work at a company named Silverball Studios.

 

[Richard B]

Empire Interactive was the original UK publisher of Pro Pinball. The designers were Another Cunning Development. They now work at a company named Silverball Studios.

I see. I got the developer and publisher mixed up. Nice to know the creators are still around though. Are they making any new pinball games?

 

[Brian Clark]

I see. I got the developer and publisher mixed up. Nice to know the creators are still around though. Are they making any new pinball games?

Last one they made was Frogger pinball for iOS and facebook. They used to be Fuse games and released Super Mario Ball GBA (which doesn't look that great), Metroid Prime Pinball DS (awesome!), and Pinball Pulse The Ancients Beckon for DSi and 3DS (which I heard is awesome).

 

[xNiCeGuYx]

Is it just me or is the ball a tad too small in TPA? I've noticed that, while watching the PAPA RBION video.

 

[Jeff Strong]

Is it just me or is the ball a tad too small in TPA? I've noticed that, while watching the PAPA RBION video.

You read my mind. I was going to post the same thing today....is it possible TPA's reflections/lighting makes it appear smaller? It definitely seems to be a bit smaller than a real pinball.