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Steam Saves and Managing Friends

BlahCade Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·47m 46s·held·Oct 24, 2016
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.032

TL;DR

Blockade podcast covers Steam save issues in Pinball Arcade with technical guide, Doctor Who gameplay impressions.

Summary

Chris and Jared discuss personal updates including Chris's high school reunion, then pivot to pinball topics: detailed feedback on Doctor Who vs. Masters of Time (formerly Regenerated), concerns about Farsight's audio creation capabilities, technical discussion of Steam cloud save issues in Pinball Arcade with guest Sven providing a detailed restoration guide, and a tangent about the new Ghostbusters movie's presentation as an example of how Farsight should approach UI/feature design.

Key Claims

  • Masters of Time (formerly Regenerated) is not coming out this month; it will release later than when Bonebusters launches

    high confidence · Chris states: 'I do know that it's not coming out this month, folks... At the end of the month, when we get Bonebusters, we're not getting Doctor Who. It's going to be a little bit longer than that.'

  • Farsight does not have a good handle on creating original audio from scratch, though they do well with existing audio

    high confidence · Jared expresses concern: 'I don't feel, personally, that Farsight has a good handle on audio, like uncreated audio. They do a pretty good job. They do the best they can, but if they're creating audio from scratch, I am dubious from the outset.'

  • Pinball Arcade's Steam cloud save feature does not work as intended; it prioritizes local saves over cloud saves, causing data loss

    high confidence · Sven explains the technical flaw: 'TPA doesn't take any advantage of the cloud save... it will create a local to be synchronized file... and then TPA looks at the cloud, sees okay there's a save, I have a local save, the local save is new, oh well what do I do? I take local save, which has basically nothing in it, copy it to the cloud.'

  • Farsight is aware of the Steam cloud save bug dating back to at least January 2015

    high confidence · Sven states: 'There's a steam post from, I think, January 2015, which is sticky, so Farsight must know about it already for a long time. I can confirm they know about it, and they know about that very thread, because when I contacted Farsight and asked for help regarding this problem, they went, here, look at this, and they sent me the link straight to that steam thread.'

  • Chris has significantly more enjoyment of Doctor Who after playing it multiple times and understanding the combo-heavy flow mechanics

    high confidence · Chris reports: 'I've actually put in quite a few games of Doctor Who. And I definitely am enjoying the table much more. once you get the hang of the flow and get off of having to catch the ball every time I realize that that's kind of essential to the table itself just by how the scoring is that it's combo combo combo.'

  • Farsight's head-to-head feature had internal bugs that were not caught because developers were only testing in-studio on stable networks

Notable Quotes

  • “I need to quit treating these people the way I remember them because they're not that person at all. I need to accept them for who they are now.”

    Chris @ Early in episode — Personal reflection on changing relationships and identity over time; not pinball-related but sets conversational tone.

  • “Farsight, take notice. When you put forth a UI, when you put forth a head-to-head, when you put forth anything new, knock our socks off. We want to show this off.”

    Chris @ Mid-episode — Direct feedback to Farsight on how to create media-worthy feature implementations that drive community excitement and adoption.

  • “Why is everything being done in your little bubble? Step outside that bubble and come to where the real people are.”

    Chris @ Mid-episode — Core critique of Farsight's software development methodology, emphasizing the importance of real-world user testing outside the studio environment.

  • “You need to convince Steam that your local file is newer than the one in the cloud so if you have a backup like Chris fortunately had, you need to manipulate the last change date.”

    Sven @ Technical explanation segment — Key explanation of the workaround for the Steam cloud save bug in Pinball Arcade.

  • “Backup is something what you probably only think about when it's too late, like burst control.”

    Sven @ Near end of technical discussion — Practical wisdom about preventive data management.

  • “If it's programmed properly, you would never have to look at it.”

    Jared @ Technical discussion — Commentary on poor software design when users must manually navigate file systems that should be abstracted away.

  • “If one person does it, it's going to benefit so many people when they run into the same problem, which they invariably will.”

    Chris @ Conclusion of technical segment — Recognition of the multiplier effect of good community documentation.

Entities

Chris FriebuspersonJared MorganpersonSvenpersonStephenpersonFarsight StudioscompanyBlahCade PodcastorganizationPinball ArcadeproductDoctor WhogameMasters of Timegame

Signals

  • ?

    product_concern: Pinball Arcade's Steam cloud save feature has a critical bug where local saves overwrite cloud saves, causing total loss of wizard goals, standard goals, and high scores when players rebuild machines or reinstall. This has been a known issue since at least January 2015 and affects multiple users.

    high · Sven's detailed technical explanation and Chris's personal experience of losing all high scores; a sticky Steam thread from Jan 2015 confirms long-standing awareness by Farsight

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Jared expresses doubt about Farsight's ability to create original audio content from scratch for new pinball games, noting that while they handle existing licensed audio well, newly composed or created music and sound effects may not meet quality standards needed to carry thematic weight.

    high · Jared: 'if they're creating audio from scratch, I am dubious from the outset about how that's going to sound' and references concern about theme song reworks for Masters of Time

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: Doctor Who real pinball's scoring is heavily combo-dependent, requiring continuous ramp shots (especially loop ramp) rather than ball catches, which affects both strategy and learning curve for players unfamiliar with the mechanic.

    high · Chris: 'it's combo combo combo combo combo there's if you catch the ball then the combos run out... it's all about that the loop ramp it's pretty much the shot to take'

  • ?

    product_launch: Masters of Time (formerly Regenerated) Doctor Who digital pinball will not release in the current month; it will come after Bonebusters. Farsight prioritizes quality over speed.

    high · Chris: 'I do know that it's not coming out this month, folks... At the end of the month, when we get Bonebusters, we're not getting Doctor Who. It's going to be a little bit longer than that.'

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.143

0:00
This is the Blockade Podcast with your hosts, Chris and Jared. You, yes you, are listening to the Blockade Podcast. I'm your host, Shut Your Trap, a.k.a. Chris Frebus. Joining me as always, my co-host, Jared Morgan.
0:40
G'day, Chris. I am suffering from a late night last night because I went... A late night, like, you know, too much downing of the pints, or... So, if only. No, not where I live, because I have to actually get home from the pub to North Lakes. But no, I went to the reunion last night, my 20-year high school reunion, which was quite interesting. The place to go see people that you have not talked to in 20 years and suddenly discover that, hey, they're not the same person that they were 20 years ago or, oh, God, they're the same person they were 20 years ago. There was plenty of that going on, but there was also plenty of the other going on as well, which was kind of good to see. it won't mean anything to people listening because they don't know any of these people but one of the guys actually ended up working for Weta the guys who do Lord of the Rings all the graphics for Lord of the Rings and various other things and yeah one of the premier effects houses these days in New Zealand and he's apparently working on Guardians of the Galaxy 2 at the moment so yeah it's very interesting it's good to see he made it for himself which is great so yeah that was just an interesting highlight from it all i find it interesting i uh you know throughout the years various people from my high school have connected with me via facebook and you know when you first get there in your start doing that interaction or whatever it's very hard to separate you know this is the person the person that you used to know versus the person that you're seeing all these postings on.
2:20
At some point, I finally realized, I kind of went, I need to quit treating these people the way I remember them because they're not that person at all. I need to accept them for who they are now. And then the scary part on that is some of the people that you realize who they are now and you go, how was I friends with them back then? What happened to them?

high confidence · Chris explains: 'It turns out that internally at the studio they were having no problems and they couldn't figure out why we were all having problems... connect with us players... Stephen... has connected with a couple of people and played head-to-head. And now he actually has a database with which to figure out what the heck was going on.'

  • Chris's Pinball Arcade high scores were overwritten with placeholder values of 314 quadrillion after Sven restored his wizard goals

    high confidence · Chris describes: 'Notice there was something funky about the high scores. On every single table, all my high scores had been overwritten and there was new high scores in there... 314 quadrillion, 885 trillion, 530 billion, 817 million, 690,000.'

  • BBC likely provided Farsight with audio files from the Doctor Who show for use in Masters of Time

    medium confidence · Jared speculates: 'I have a feeling that's what they're going to do. I think BBC probably went, here, here's a whole bunch of files. Have fun.'

    • “Masters of Time. I still... I don't know why they called it that, but I guess it's sort of better than Regenerated.”

    Chris @ Mid-episode — Commentary on the name change from Regenerated to Masters of Time for the Doctor Who digital pinball machine.

  • “If they use the theme song from that particular doctor, they'll actually have its own sort of leitmotif for each Doctor, which would be pretty cool.”

    Jared @ Mid-episode — Speculative comment on how Masters of Time could leverage Doctor Who's multiple doctor themes for audio design.

  • “Take your time to get it right. Don't rush it out just so that we have it, because then we complain, and I'd rather have it be awesome.”

    Chris @ Mid-episode — Philosophical statement about quality over speed in Farsight releases, positioning patience as the right expectation.

    • Bone Busters Inc.
    game
    Regeneratedgame
    Ghostbustersgame
    The Addams Familygame
    Big Shotgame
    Steamproduct
    BBCcompany
    Terryperson
    Coreyperson
    Kimperson
    Wetacompany
  • ?

    operational_signal: Farsight's head-to-head feature suffered from bugs that only appeared in real-world conditions (4G/3G networks, external connections) and were not caught during in-studio testing on stable networks. This led to developer Stephen engaging with community members for real-world testing.

    high · Chris: 'internally at the studio they were having no problems and they couldn't figure out why we were all having problems... Stephen... has connected with a couple of people and played head-to-head. And now he actually has a database with which to figure out what the heck was going on'

  • ?

    community_signal: Sven created a comprehensive, sticky-posted guide in the TPA fan forum for backing up and restoring Pinball Arcade save files, including step-by-step graphics and instructions. This addresses a long-standing community pain point and demonstrates high community engagement.

    high · Sven's guide titled 'guide high score and goals backup and restore in TPA' is sticky and was linked by Chris in the show notes; Sven notes the one-to-many effect of documentation

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Chris's opinion of Doctor Who real pinball has improved significantly after multiple plays and understanding the combo-based flow mechanics, shifting from neutral to enthusiastic about the table's design.

    high · Chris: 'I've actually put in quite a few games of Doctor Who. And I definitely am enjoying the table much more... definitely am enjoying the table much more'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Chris advocates strongly for Farsight to invest in impressive UI, head-to-head implementations, and visual presentations that create 'wow factor' and drive adoption through word-of-mouth, citing the Ghostbusters movie's presentation strategy as a model.

    high · Chris: 'Farsight, take notice. When you put forth a UI, when you put forth a head-to-head, when you put forth anything new, knock our socks off. We want to show this off. We want to go check this out and have people go, holy crap, I need that now'

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Jared speculates that BBC has provided Farsight with audio/music files from the Doctor Who television series for use in Masters of Time, allowing for thematic leitmotifs based on each Doctor's era.

    medium · Jared: 'I have a feeling that's what they're going to do. I think BBC probably went, here, here's a whole bunch of files. Have fun. Which makes it cool that each doctor, when you select your doctor, if they use the theme song from that particular doctor'

  • ?

    code_update: Farsight is aware of the Steam cloud save bug but has not yet implemented a fix. Sven recommends that the fix should prioritize cloud saves over local saves in the synchronization logic, and suggests this could be a quick fix.

    high · Sven: 'Hopefully, this guide won't be necessary for too much longer and they can just do a quick fix and make it so that the cloud is what is looked at first with Steam and not the local file.'

  • ?

    rumor_hype: Community has speculated that Masters of Time might play substantially better than the original Doctor Who table due to improved audio, but Chris and Jared temper this by noting it depends on code implementation quality, not just audio assets.

    medium · Chris: 'if it plays the same as Doctor Who does, but has way better audio, then no, seriously, I probably will play that more' and Jared's concern that Farsight's original audio creation may not meet quality threshold

  • ?

    content_signal: Blockade Podcast receives fan emails and social media contact that generate discussion topics, including specific game feedback and critiques of host perspectives.

    high · Corey's email critiquing Chris and Jared's comparative opinions on Doctor Who vs. Masters of Time; Chris and Jared discuss reading listener feedback on air

    • 2:42
    Can I uninvite that friendship? Because I'm a little weirded out by this person now. yeah exactly it's uh people do change and uh i went there sort of giving everyone the benefit of the doubt and um which was always the right way to go when you go to something that you haven't seen anyone for for like 20 years um but yeah overall i was pretty happy with our alumni for that year i think we all did pretty well um found out a bit of information about one of my mates who I completely lost contact with shortly before I met Kim. He said going back to school. I think at the time school really wasn't the right thing for him, so he's going to do that now, which is good. I'm glad to hear he's getting back on things again. I think everybody would be surprised by how many people, whether it was either that case or just the opposite where it's like they were all about school and stuff and then college happened yeah that's right and so we went off the rails yeah it was like screw that i'm having fun that's right yeah um you know now and then time and time we get to various communications via twitter um you know people just kind of pointing us at stuff or making a vague comment um but we've We've started to get now and then the occasional email.
    4:10
    And we then like to respond to that email. Yeah, we do. Sometimes via writing. Sometimes we bring it up here on the show. Just in case you want to drop us an email, that's blah, blah, blah, Kate, at gmail.com.
    4:23
    Just so you know, I'm usually the one that opens it first. Yeah, Jared may or may not. Usually he notices it if I respond and then kind of carbon copy him into it. But anyway, we love hearing from people. And this one that we just got recently I thought was kind of rather amusing.
    4:45
    And I'm too. So, yeah, we got an email from Corey. And Corey writes, I assume you both have played the real Doctor Who table. The sounds are exactly the same. I play one on location a lot, a couple of days a week for the last three years. Jared, in my opinion, you have way more knowledge about these pins, but continually just agree with whatever Chris says, as it should be, Jared.
    5:09
    Saying that y'all will play Regenerate more than the original is nonsense. There's a couple of things we're going to dissect there for a moment. Yes, I do absolutely agree. Jared has more knowledge about pinball than I do. I'm the guy that goes, well, there's that ramp thingy, and then Jared will bust out the technical term for what it actually is called. And we're perfectly happy to let Jared have that cherry on top of the sundae. but I'm more of the don't you well as I put it in my email response back to him for anybody that's watching South Park this year I'm more of the member berries guy oh member roller games yeah that was really great remember that theme song awesome so but no my expertise is definitely more in the film and TV and I can you know There I can get nice and technical with you if you'd like, but Jared and Leslie go technical on movies and TV.
    6:10
    Or if he does, he puts it in the back room. Yeah, I go, yeah, it was right in the back room. Jared's like, wait a second, not pinball? What? We're going to put that to the test in just a tiny bit there, Jared, though.
    6:26
    It's going to be an interesting post-edit as well. The other thing is, since that last podcast where we were mentioning Doctor Who and all that, you know, what we'd play more, I've actually put in quite a few games of Doctor Who. And I definitely am enjoying the table much more. once you get the hang of the flow and get off of having to catch the ball every time I realize that that's kind of essential to the table itself just by how the scoring is that it's combo combo combo there's if you catch the ball then the combos run out so they do they time out quite quickly it's all about that the loop ramp it's pretty much the shot to take in a game Yeah, and as for Regenerated, although it's now called Masters of Time, so I've got to get that in my head.
    7:20
    Yeah. I still... I don't know why they called it that, but I guess it's sort of better than Regenerated. It doesn't really say anything. So, yeah, Masters of Time. It doesn't really say anything, and based off the little picture with all the enemies that they were displaying,
    7:39
    you know, I mean, I can see it making sense. for a title of Masters of Time. I mean, like I said, regenerated,
    7:48
    I don't know, it's six to one half dozen of the other, so I'm not too concerned about that. But like I said, if it plays the same as Doctor Who does, but has way better audio, then no, seriously, I probably will play that more. Just saying. Yeah, it all depends on how they've, the thing that I've been withholding my judgment on until I actually get my hands on it is I'm concerned about audio in this.
    8:18
    I don't feel, personally, that Farsight has a good handle on audio, like uncreated audio. They do a pretty good job. They do the best they can, but if they're creating audio from scratch, I am dubious from the outset about how that's going to sound. Based on why? well i'm listening to all the like the the theme song reworks and stuff that they had to do for the game and you know the the new pinball wizard and stuff like that yeah um i guess it's okay but that's just one song that out of probably what would be if you think about a a pinball game the amount of different music tracks that are in a pinball game they're gonna have to really pull out their own game if they're going to sell the theme convincingly because a lot of the like the modern day pinball machines that like need to carry a theme really do so in music and i'm not saying for a minute that you know it's system not system 11 or system 12 midi music is wonderful on the ear but it was in the original doctor who game it actually conveyed a certain theme to the game.
    9:34
    But why couldn't they just take the actual audio from the show? Well, they could. I have a feeling that's what they're going to do. I think BBC probably went, here, here's a whole bunch of files. Have fun. Which makes it cool that each doctor, when you select your doctor, if they use the theme song from that particular doctor, they'll actually have its own sort of leitmotif for each Doctor, which would be pretty cool. That would be a way of doing it.
    10:06
    I think that would be pretty cool all the way. It'll be interesting to see what they come up with. I do know that it's not coming out this month, folks.
    10:17
    I shouldn't say this month. Well, yeah, at the end of the month, when we get Bonebusters, we're not getting Doctor Who. It's going to be a little bit longer than that. Which, again, I'm... I'm fine with that. I want... This is my case with everything that Farsight does. Take your time to get it right. Don't rush it out just so that we have it, because then we complain, and I'd rather have it be awesome.
    10:44
    Take a thin approach to releasing tables. When it's done, it gets released. This one isn't really one of those ones that you have to have the DLC pressure to release it every month. It's ready when it's ready. and yeah you know people argue probably right now when they're listening to the podcast that oh well they said this in the kickstarter um you know briefing for it and i said yeah since when has anybody ever delivered to the kickstarter um estimations that they put on the um on their little spiel it never really happens unless they're a big company and they get like you know um they have a previous experience with doing it like something like pebble um get the smartwatch um people they're pretty good um but they're still running behind in over their estimation so if they can't get it right then you know what do you expect so jared here comes your your moment where you're gonna go oh i'm gonna move that but i want you to ride with me on this. Okay? Okay. Trust me, I get around to pinball Okay last week as we were heading out I mentioned that I was going to be watching the new Ghostbusters movie and both of us just kind of went eh it probably kind of okay, whatever.
    12:06
    You know, who cares? You're right. So, I went ahead and watched it in the 2D version, and let's just put it this way.
    12:17
    I have a copy of it now in front of me. that's how brilliant it was wow okay very interesting so regardless of how good the movie was or not I found the movie to be enjoyable I didn't think it was fantastic and basically my point with that is that the original Ghostbusters surprised us you might say just with the silliness you never knew you know it had the comedy it had the horror then it had you know the terror dogs but they were being created it out of Kooky Accountant and Zool in the Refrigerator and then you got the Safe Off Marshmallow and it was such a surprise at every turn. That's what made it what it was. Now, when you watch it today, obviously it doesn't have those surprises anymore, but you get that fond memory feel, right? So, watching the new movie, it doesn't have any of the surprises because it can't. We already know what to expect. So, what you really, what I really kind of base it on is, well, is it as enjoyable as if I watched the original Ghostbusters. And for that, with that first viewing that I had, I'd say, you know what? It did its job. Yeah, it wasn't half bad at all. And it's nice little light touches to kind of say hello, nods and winks to the original, but it also created its own version of the story. The funny thing was my son kept on going, well, where does this fit in the timeline? I'm like, just ignore the previous movies. It's its own thing.
    13:47
    It's the massaged ultimate reality like they have in South Park. I'll also say it's way better than Ghostbusters 2. Oh, right. Yeah.
    14:00
    See, that was my first introduction to Ghostbusters, you know. I'd never seen the first one. And then I came right into the franchise when I was about 10 or 11 into Ghostbusters 2. And so it scared the crap out of me then. No, where it became an instant buy for me was the presentation.
    14:21
    And what the presentation, I'd heard that this was supposedly really, and I, again, mentioned this last time, it was a really awesome 3D movie. Well, so it's letterboxed 2.4.0. So widescreen, you got the black bars top and bottom. Yep. But every time it went to go do something 3D, the images would break past the black bars and really sell that this was a 3D moment. And I thought that was so cool watching it at home, not in 3D, just in 2D, because it gave you that pseudo effect. And you understood what it was going for. It was. That's cool. All throughout the movie. It wasn't just like a scene here, a scene there. It was just all over the place. And I was so blown away by that presentation. It reminded me a lot of times when they're advertising the 3D movies coming out in the movies, they'll sometimes do that very effect in the commercial. But obviously they're not going to do that in the movie theater. Well, it turns out that they actually did that effect also in the movie theater if you're watching on an IMAX screen. Oh, really? The reason for that is if you're watching on true IMAX, not LIMAX as I call it, but True IMAX, where you've got one of these six-story tall screens, they don't have curtains.
    15:39
    So when they air a regular movie on that screen, it's letterbox by default, although you don't notice the letterboxing because you're in a completely dark theater. But then what would happen was, in these moments, it would break and fill up the entire six-story screen. That's really cool that they think about that. Yeah, so it's got to be awesome. It blows me away they did not advertise that in the least. I would have totally made an effort to go see something like that if the 3D was that good because how often most of the 3D it's all 3D conversions and very rarely is it stuff coming out of the screen at you because everybody goes oh that's a cheap gimmick but there are certain movies where the cheap gimmick is going to work out perfectly you kind of want that cheap gimmicky thrill it's like yeah poke something in my eye please that's genius in the way that they actually made it go outside the frame because this is almost like 3D when it's not 3D. So you could watch it and still get the idea, the concept of what they were trying to do with the 3D but not have to wear glasses. And for those that really are still scratching their head, I'll give you one frame of reference that maybe you've seen or not. If you've seen either of the Despicable Me movies or the Minions movie, during the end credits, they do that very thing. Now that's a movie that was normally a 1.85 or 16 by 9 movie, and then all of a sudden they did fake letterboxing and did that exact same trick because it really enhances that pop of what's coming out at you. So that would be your best idea of what it was. So I got the movie home, knowing that it's just going to be full-on demo material.
    17:23
    Reference movie. I'll have to add it to the list, mate. I threw it on and put it in 3D and holy crap is that good 3D it is fantastic looking on your TV and I'm watching it in broad daylight which usually doesn't play very well to 3D so I'm sure when I watch it at night and turn off all the lights it's going to be phenomenal looking here's where I swing it back around to pinball in case you were wondering the very presentation of this movie sold me on it to the point that I ignored what the actual movie was and it was all about, holy crap, this is what you show people when they come over to my house and they go, oh, you got a 3D TV? That's the movie I'm throwing in. That's what I'm going to go look at how awesome this is, right?
    18:14
    Yeah, right. Farsight, take notice. Yeah. When you put forth a UI, when you put forth a head-to-head, when you put forth anything new, knock our socks off. We want to show this off. We want to go check this out and have people go, holy crap, I need that now regardless of what it is. You can somewhat do that with showing somebody an actual table.
    18:46
    You do it on your mobile. Unfortunately, without the dynamic lighting, it doesn't get as much of a wow factor.
    18:53
    I did happen to show somebody just the other day Adam's family. They had no clue what the program was, but I knew that if you're going to show off any table to an adult, you might as well show off Adam's family because you know that they're going to probably have that in their memory banks as having seen it in real life.
    19:10
    I showed it and I got the appropriate, wow, that's awesome. Are you kidding me? But I didn't work my way through the opening screen and everything. I had it already loaded up for them to see. yeah and so it's with anything new that we get please take your time make it get right because right now we're still having issues with the head-to-head and turns out it was one of those things where internally at the studio they were having no problems and they couldn't figure out why we were all having problems and like well play with us yeah exactly get outside actually physically go outside your office, connect it to 4G, and then have a go. And see how great it is. Well, and don't connect with us in the studio. Connect with us players, and then you'll see what we're all saying. You know, if we keep on complaining about it, that's where you're going to have it. So, fortunately, it turns out that Stephen, who I think is heading up the head-to-head thing, after I made that suggestion on the forum, he has connected with a couple of people and played head-to-head. And now he actually has a database with which to figure out what the heck was going on and making things wrong.
    20:23
    So it's just one of those things where I go, why is everything being done in your little bubble? Step outside that bubble and come to where the real people are. Exactly. Yeah, you got to do it. I see it all the time when software development, like where I work, where I've worked previously. if you don't actually physically talk to your user and interact with your user you're just going to miss it it's going to you're just not going to get it when you're developing software you actually physically have to go and test like a user would test in a real world setting yeah yep you've got to and this is the hard thing i know that when on android they first trialed a very, very early head-to-head, like this is about a year and a half ago now, I think, they were having all sorts of trouble with 4G and 3G back then.
    21:23
    And they just couldn't get it working right over mobile networks. It was the mobile networks that was just causing no end of trouble trying to get the handshake when you actually join up together right. They just couldn't get it working. and you know they kind of had an inkling that it was like that but until we actually started trying to connect and trying to start sessions they just didn't know we can't even remotely release this even as an alpha because it just fundamentally does not work but it sounds like they're kind of still there so jared something else that uh i'd mentioned last time was about getting my restore files back up and running.
    22:05
    Oh, okay. Oh yeah, that's right. You're having all that trouble with Steam game restores, right? It was just a trip. Exactly. So then Sven came in and Sven is joining us now. Say hello, Sven. Hi. Howdy. So Sven came to my rescue and I gave him, I ceded control of my computer to him, which could have been a dangerous thing. He didn't go snooping around files that I know of. You haven't seen what I have done in the background. There's massive amounts of malware now installed on my computer.
    22:38
    Anyway, he mucked around and lo and behold, restored all of my Wizard Goal stuff. Like magic. And I watched it happen on my screen and I had no clue what the hell he was doing.
    22:56
    So Then I went to go play Pimble Arcade after I'd verified, oh yeah, I've got all my wizard goals back, that's great.
    23:05
    Went and I started playing Doctor Who because I was like, good, finally now I can collect goals on this.
    23:11
    Notice there was something funky about the high scores. On every single table, all my high scores had been overwritten and there was new high scores in there. but this is basically what the fifth place high score was on everything.
    23:30
    314 quadrillion, 885 trillion, 530 billion, 817 million, 690,000. I'll say small. So that was on Big Shot as well. Oh, yeah. Well, no, no, no. On certain games it couldn't go quite that high. It was trying to use the exact same numbers. So instead of being quadrillion it might have just been trillion or billion But point being not even Terry would be able to knock those scores off Yeah, right. So I got a hold of Sven again and was like, you want to take another crack at this? And Sven did.
    24:08
    So, Sven, why don't you tell everybody about how you managed to save my hundreds of hours of playing. Yeah, well, first of all, what we need to understand when we talk about Steam cloud saves is the purpose of it, of course, is when you have a save in the cloud, you install your computer new or you install TPA on a second device like on a laptop. it's supposed to pull the cloud save and take that as your actual save when you play on the laptop you get a new high score it gets transferred in the cloud when you go back to the PC you see that high score again and so on which is what we were saying happens with every other game and should be happening in TPA that's what you would expect and now you have the surprise when it comes to TPA because TPA doesn't take any advantage of the cloud safe it's therefore no purpose at all at the moment to be honest so what's happening once you install TPA new on on a machine it will create a local to be synchronized file which is basically having only the standard high scores and only the no wizard goals, no standard goals and takes that as to be synchronized. So then we launch TPA and TPA looks at the cloud, sees okay there's a save, I have a local save, the local save is new, oh well what do I do? I take local save, which has basically nothing in it, copy it to the cloud, and then... Right, so it's Datestamp. Right. Yeah, exactly. It's Datestamp. And it creates a Datestamp file without checking whether there is already a cloud save available.
    26:22
    So that's what happened to Chris and to myself in the past as well. So I had quite some... And quite a few other people based off of the steam postings regarding this.
    26:35
    Yeah, there's a steam post from, I think, January 2015, which is sticky, so Farsight must know about it already for a long time. I can confirm they know about it, and they know about that very thread, because when I contacted Farsight and asked for help regarding this problem, they went, here, look at this, and they sent me the link straight to that steam thread. which I had already looked at, and it's kind of confusing as to what to do. It's not exactly... It's more if you want to play on two separate machines, if you want to synchronize between a PC and a laptop, that's more the purpose of this thread.
    27:24
    What's about restoring your progress from a complete restore? Yeah. The problem with that is once you have installed everything and everything is gone, it doesn't help you. Right, yeah. So the important thing is TPA uses two safe locations. one is in the local users path, in users, my games, something like that, where you have all the settings and so on and you have a high score file there but it doesn't seem to be used and then you have the standard steam save which is in the Steam folder, then user data and the user ID of your Steam account, and then 238260, which is basically the ID of the Pinball Arcade. There you have a file and a folder. A file is called remote cache VDF. This file is basically saying which file is going to or which files are going to be synchronized and this file also has timestamps in it. Timestamps in Unix format which you are probably quite familiar with. So in the folder which is called remote is the actual file which is going to be sent and what you need to do is you need to convince Steam that your local file is newer than the one in the cloud so if you have a backup like Chris fortunately had, you need to manipulate the last change date. Right, so just an easy, let's just manipulate a date stream to get the system to think that the files are, you know, that's wonderful. Yeah, nice and easy. And I thought, and that's where the high score problem for Chris came, I thought it would be easy just open the file with an editor, save it, and you will have a last latest change date of the current time. But this is a binary file, lots of it. And once you open it in the editor, something messes up with the numbers and therefore you can't do it. So you need some kind of software which you are able to change the last changed file date. I know in Linux it's a bit easier. can I think use a command named touch I think where you can just update the file date but that's not as far as I know not possible in Windows but there is a software and I explain later there's a guide for it I've written up where you can see that all so what you need to do is you change this file which is called pba.prg.dat and then you need to go back to the remote cache file and set the UNIX time to the file date. So you need to translate first the file date from your standard time to the UNIX time and which is important, the UNIX time is UTC time zone. So it's quite a few steps to get the correct timestamp into that. but it's all explained step by step in the guide I wrote up in the TPA fan forum. Yeah, so we're going to post that guide in the show notes. Jared, I don't know what his plan might be. He might even copy it over as he's done with his Android guide. He could also possibly transfer that over, but it's over in the Pinball Arcade fans forum. it's under PC and it is titled guide high score and goals backup and restore in TPA it's also sticky right there at the top yeah I'll be reading that definitely this show it's good stuff yeah he's put all sorts of graphics and made it a very visual guide which is way better than what the trying to interpret what Steam was doing. I mean, it's a guide that I, me being a non-techie when it comes to the computer, I would even be able to follow this guide. So it's definitely good stuff. And hopefully,
    32:59
    Sven has already reached out to Farsight and pointed this out and let them know. Hopefully, this guide won't be necessary for too much longer and they can just do a quick fix and make it so that the cloud is what is looked at first with Steam and not the local file. Yeah, that would be the right way of doing it. I hope this can be unstickied very soon. Yes. But, well, I don't hold my breath for it. Yeah. Yeah, in the meantime, we should also, I'm imagining, maybe go to that Steam thread and go, hey, look at this. Yeah, we should probably put a redirect on it or at least a link to that one because it's much better. I already did. Boom! See? Someone else had a problem and couldn't fix it with this guide and I said, well, let's try this one. There are several guides to do that. And this one is what I have written up is one when you have a file available, but you don't have a second live install which is still working.
    34:15
    If you have a PC and want to transfer to a notebook, you can go a different way, but I don't need to explain that now. This is more the emergency rescue, I would say. Yeah, that's right. The most important thing is backup your data. So, you know, backup is something what you probably only think about when it's too late, like burst control.
    34:43
    Yeah, that's right. Always, always backup your data. And here's the problem, because unfortunately, Pinball Arcade doesn't save where all your other Steam files save. So real quickly, where are the two files that you need to go and save just so that people can quickly get to those? Okay, the files are in the Steam folder where the Steam games are installed.
    35:08
    So usually it's C, Program Files, x86, and then Steam, and then subfolder User Data, and then you have the user ID. and if you only have one user, that's just one folder.
    35:33
    Just copy that whole folder and then you'll be done with it. No, no, no. And then you need to go to the 238 260 which is the pinball arcade If you copy everything in the user ID folder you have backups of all games It does.
    35:57
    Yeah. I love how they numerically number it. Sorry? I love it how it's like a numeric file name and folder name instead of something human-readable. It makes it really easy to find, right? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Good on you, Steam. We're not robots. Yeah, the thing is you're not supposed to look at it. Right, you shouldn't have to. If it's programmed properly, you would never have to look at it. Yeah, that's a valid point.
    36:28
    Yeah. So this is also a part of the guide. The first part of the guide is talking about the backup, where you have to go to backup your files, how to find out your Steam ID, which you need if you have several IDs, so you find the right one. Everything is there. And if you have any further questions, don't hesitate to write in the thread. I'm happy to answer anything or give even life assistance. because I know it's a pain in the ass if you lose the progress of maybe 200, 300 hours later or more. That's a really bad time. A really bad time. That one right there. Mate, thank you for taking the time to write this up. Yeah, no problem. In the process, have a... The thing about this type of documentation tends to have a one-to-many effect. If one person does it, it's going to benefit so many people when they run into the same problem, which they invariably will because, you know, on Windows you have to rebuild fairly regularly. So, you know, it's going to be good.
    37:48
    It's going to be very good. All right, Sven, thanks for stopping in again. I always appreciate hearing from you, man. Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me. See you later, Sven. Bye. so I also ran into another strange issue that I never was privy to before Jared recently I got Pimble Arcade fully on iOS and so I was all like yay checking everything out and then I was like I need to add friends well turns out that when Apple upgraded to iOS 10 on all their phones and mobile.
    38:29
    They got rid of Game Center, or at least Game Center as you can access. Now Game Center is only accessible via the game that you are playing. Right. So it's embedded inside the game, right? How do I add friends to Pinball Arcade now?
    38:47
    You're asking the wrong guy. I know I am. So I'm putting this out to our listeners. If you know how to add friends in iOS 10 through, I don't know, through what method, how do you go about doing that? Because I looked all throughout the game. I couldn't see anything that was, you know, how to add friends in the app.
    39:10
    It didn't look like there was anything of that nature. and on the actual Pimble Arcade fans, or not Pimble Arcade fans, Pimble Arcade website, you have the ability to enter names, but then it kind of, I guess, eliminates everything else. I'm not sure if that's where you need to enter in a name. I don't know. It's really kind of odd. It suddenly has become a thing that I think Farsight may just need to program it in. Yeah, sounds like a thing, too.
    39:40
    Because the game still connects to Game Center. It still connects to it, but I'm not able to add or contact anybody.
    39:48
    Yeah, because there's now no longer any interface. The interface is all supposed to be catered for in-game now. So, folks, if you know how to do that, please contact us, gmail, or not gmail.com, contact us, blah, blah, blockade at gmail.com, or hit me up on Twitter, at ShutYourTraps. I'd really love to know how to add some people, because right now my leaderboards, if I click friends, it's very lonely. because I'm the only one there. If it makes you feel any better, it's not really that easy to add new people to leaderboards on Android either. I had to actually guide people through how to mark me as a friend in Google Play games. And it's far from intuitive. Like, you can't do it in-game. And at least we actually have a management app in Google that allows us to do it. But it's all tied into Google+. So you have to go into Google+, and add them to a circle, and then they have to add you to a circle, and then only then will they show up in your leaderboards. Yeah, wow. It's really, really hard to do. You can't even do it in the app. You can't say, hey, I found a person. Add them to my network. You have to sort of do some sort of crazy business on them to get it to work. And who knows? Maybe that's one of those things with as Farsight builds head-to-head, that it becomes, oh, did you like playing with that person? Add them. I don't know. It just seems like we should be able to just add whoever we want to add right away. And, again, when I was with Game Center, you were able to do that, but I don't have Game Center anymore. This goes back to linking all this functionality. Stop relying on third-party frameworks. Put it through the Farsight login and be done with it. I'm thinking back to how, again, I'm using Butterscotch. Again, there's a reference point here because they do it really well with their Butterscotch ID system, and it's easy to discover people that you want to discover. It's easy to join them. It's all done in the app. It's all done with a controlled interface that Butterscotch implement into all their apps. They have total control over the ecosystem. It just makes it easy. They should just start thinking about doing that.
    42:01
    Okay, and last bit of business today, Jared. This is something I've thought about, and I think about it only in one place, and that's while sitting on a commode in a public restroom. All right. Okay, that's a very interesting place to think about it. What are you thinking about? Or do we need to know? Okay, so here's my question to you. You're in a public restroom. You walk in.
    42:25
    You go and use the sit-down toilet and make a rather large noise as somebody else walks in. Do you sit in the stall until that person leaves so they do not know who you are? Do you finish before they are finished if they went into a stall so that, again, they do not know who you are? Do you just go, I don't care, and leave? And if they see you, they see you. And then the flip side is if you walk in and you hear somebody doing that kind of business, do you try and exit before they leave?
    42:58
    I'm just curious to know, what is the proper etiquette on this situation, or does anybody really even care? because me personally, I'm of the nature of I don't want to see that person because I'll think differently of them. Yeah, that's right. Well, there's certainly – it's probably not so much of a problem in a public toilet, but in a work toilet, it's a problem. Yes, that's what I'm talking about. Yeah, if you're in a work stall and someone is firing off in the cubicle next to you,
    43:27
    you just go, oh, boy, what do I do? Do I download a fart generator on my phone and make them feel a little bit less sort of embarrassed about it by blasting off a couple of fake farts and just, you know, help people along? I usually, if I'm the one in the toilet first and I hear someone, like, firing them off, usually what I do is I wait until the person leaves. Or if I see they're setting up camp in there, I usually take the initiative and step away and just, like, be the guy that actually leaves first so that they can leave. Otherwise, it's a stalemate. You can stay in there all day. there's been times when I have heard people finishing up at the exact same time as I'm finishing up and there's a pause and it's a race and it's wait who's going to go it's kind of like a traffic stop when you're at a four way stop sign who's going to go first and also you'll hear this real quick shuffling of the belt and then if the other person hasn't moved they're barfed out and then you know hang back but then you like you open the door and also they'll become eerily quiet and wait for you to wash your hands and leave and then then presumably they left but it it always makes me kind of laugh when i'm uh when i'm in the bathroom because it's new things this is uh it's in some of the public places that we have there they've done toilets in the way that they're not you don't actually go into a room it's just like a row it's like this building and then it's a row in the unisex toilets and you just whatever whatever hopper becomes available first that's the one you use and i think in some ways those ones are better because there's no sort of confined space that you're in you don't have to it's like each hopper is its own separate little room so it doesn't matter i think the the the feeling of like uh the the toilet obligation to let people escape unseen. Doesn't matter because each door is separate. You don't know who's firing off from where. So it's like, oh yeah, whatever. It takes all the stress out of it.
    45:40
    And that's the last place you want to be stressed at. You don't want to be stressed out in there. On that nice and filthy note, we're going to end this podcast. We're going to do it off now.
    45:51
    Yes. We're off to go fart around and do some business. Thank you want it all for listening. We certainly enjoy providing content for you to download and listen to.
    46:04
    We didn't give out Jared's tweet handle because, you know, why would you want to talk to him? Oh, maybe you do. He's at Jared Morgz. Be sure to follow us at Blockade. That is where all of our pinball nonsense goes. That is also where we post, hey, if you want to stop in and chat while we're recording this, we get people logging in and posting messages for us to laugh at and try not to lose our concentration. Unfortunately, I was losing my concentration a wee bit today.
    46:35
    And that's because... Troll us. Totally troll us while we're recording. It makes for a fun session. It makes my life hell when I try to post-produce it. Great fun.
    46:46
    Alright, well we will see you all again next week and thanks for listening. Sayonara. WizardAmusement.com The site to visit for custom pinball shooters. easy to install totally unique mention blockade podcast for 10 off your order wizard amusement.com sales restoration customization don't forget to leave a review on itunes or your favorite podcast hosting service that blockade is delivered to you can't improve unless you tell us how now stop listening play some ping ball the interesting part for me With any of this releasing is... I don't know where I'm going with that.
    47:31
    Something, something, something. I was expecting you to keep on talking, Joe, because I was gathering my thoughts, and then it just went straight out the window. There. It's not my fault, is it? It's your fault. There's your end credits bit.