Journalist Tool

Kineticist

  • HDashboard
  • IItems
  • ↓Ingest
  • SSources
  • KBeats
  • BBriefs
  • RIntel
  • QSearch
  • NName Review
  • +Health

v0.1.0

← Back to items

Tech Talk, Bugs, and Features

BlahCade Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 7m·analyzed·Aug 22, 2016
View original
Export .md

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.034

TL;DR

Blockade hosts cover tech troubles, Eight Deluxe critique, and Farsight physics engine concerns.

Summary

Chris and Jared discuss technical issues (Chris's Windows 10 failure, Blab shutting down), audio equipment upgrades, and detailed analysis of Farsight Studios' Eight Deluxe table in Pinball Arcade beta. They critique aesthetic and audio design choices, discuss physics engine limitations across Pinball Arcade tables, and report on a Farsight employee's unresponded AMA on the Pinball Arcade Fans Forum.

Key Claims

  • Blab was shut down without a landing page notice; they sacrificed 1.5+ million weekly users to pivot to an always-on chat model

    high confidence · Jared reports on Blab's closure as fact based on recent experience trying to log in; discusses the business decision rationale

  • Hangouts on Air is being discontinued September 16th and replaced with YouTube Live

    high confidence · Jared saw the official message when setting up a session; confirmed they already push Hangouts recordings to YouTube anyway

  • Eight Deluxe has metallic sound effects on all ball-object contacts, including rubber objects, which is sonically inaccurate

    high confidence · Jared played the beta and confirmed this observation; describes it as a consistent audio design flaw

  • Eight Deluxe's in-lane metal was glowing unnaturally white in beta, similar to DX11 lighting issues seen on Attack from Mars and Cactus Canyon

    medium confidence · Jared observed in beta but cannot confirm in final release due to computer failure; suspects it may have been fixed before release

  • Pinball Arcade's physics engine cannot be fundamentally adjusted for baseline behavior; only flipper physics parameters can be modified

    high confidence · Chris and Jared discuss constraints; confirm Wii U version has flipper physics free but no baseline physics control

  • Stern Pinball app will feature Physics Engine 4.0, representing advancement from the current third engine in Pinball Arcade

    medium confidence · Chris states 'apparently with that, they are going to have an actual new physics engine, physics engine 4.0'; hedged language suggests inside information, not confirmed

  • Physics 4.0 will require more modern platforms and won't run on older devices like iPad One

    medium confidence · Chris reports this as heard information ('what we've heard'); describes platform requirements

  • Doctor Who is the next Pinball Arcade table, previously announced for September release

Notable Quotes

  • “Microsoft Windows 10 decided to brick my computer. Yay, that's a feature. Not a bug.”

    Chris @ Early in episode — Self-deprecating opener explaining audio quality issues; establishes why Chris is using phone

  • “They sacrificed a million-plus users—I think it's actually a million and a half-plus users per week—for the sake of trying to take what technology they have and rejigger it into something else entirely.”

    Jared @ Early technical discussion — Key detail about Blab's business decision and scale of user base lost

  • “Why did you put it there? None of your other tables have that kind of thing.”

    Jared @ Eight Deluxe critique section — Criticism of Farsight's UI placement of 'Deluxe' text covering in-lanes in beta; shows player engagement with design feedback

  • “I wound up going into Photoshop and doing a real quick copy-and-paste job, did it in all four camera angles, and showed, 'Look, it fits.'”

    Jared @ Eight Deluxe UI discussion — Demonstrates active community feedback loop with Farsight; player created mock-up to convince developers

  • “Everything, when a ball contacts anything on the table, it's metallic. Everything has a metallic noise. So if you're shooting, like, into a rubber object, it sounds like metal. And it's just not right.”

    Jared @ Eight Deluxe audio critique — Core criticism of audio design choices; highlights how audio affects gameplay perception on simple tables

  • “The flippers are too powerful. But that's been our complaint all along with all these. They treat everything like it's a late '80s, early '90s pinball machine rather than era specific.”

    Chris @ Eight Deluxe physics discussion — Broader criticism of Farsight's physics approach across all tables; points to systematic design philosophy issue

  • “I think the underlying physics of how a table behaves as far as ball travel goes, I think that is the actual issue here. Like, they could pitch the table as high or steep as they wanted, but it wouldn't make any difference because, for some reason, that particular parameter isn't being interpreted with the underlying physics engine.”

Entities

Blockade PodcastorganizationChris FrebuspersonJared MorganpersonFarsight StudioscompanyPinball ArcadeproductEight DeluxegameBlabproductGoogle Hangouts on AirproductYouTube LiveproductStern Pinball app

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Blab streaming platform shut down without notice, sacrificing 1.5+ million weekly users, to redirect technology toward always-on chat model perceived as incompatible with podcast recording use case.

    high · Jared: 'They just turn the servers off, and we're done.' Business rationale: 'users that they had, they realized, wasn't going to be conducive to business—you know, generating more revenue.'

  • ?

    community_signal: Farsight employee 'Fredo' initiated unresponsive AMA on Pinball Arcade Fans Forum with no follow-up responses despite posted questions; hosts suspect corporate filtering of approved responses.

    high · Jared reported no responses from original poster by Saturday despite Friday posting; Chris predicts 'this is what we can say and this is what we cannot say' filter is active.

  • ?

    community_signal: Successful example of player-driven design change: Jared created Photoshop mockup demonstrating Eight Deluxe UI text could be repositioned; Farsight implemented the change in final release.

    high · Jared: 'I wound up going into Photoshop... And thankfully they took my complaining to heart and moved it to where it currently is.'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Farsight consistently applies late 1980s/early 1990s physics characteristics to all tables regardless of era, compromising era-appropriate gameplay feel for simple EM-era tables requiring slower physics.

    high · Chris: 'They treat everything like it's a late '80s, early '90s pinball machine rather than era specific.' Jared advocates for 'that would help capture the magic of that era of pinball.'

  • ?

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.203

0:00
This is the Blockade Podcast with your hosts, Chris and Jared. You are listening to the Black Ape Podcast. I am Jared, and joining me today is Chris.
0:38
Yeah, that's right. Today, Jared gets to host the session because my computer, not even my computer, Microsoft Windows 10 decided to brick my computer.
0:51
Yay, that's a feature. Not a bug. That is a huge feature. So you'll have to forgive the audio quality on my end if it's a little bit different because I'm doing this through my phone. Yeah, it actually sounds pretty good. The good thing about modern technology these days is that even if you are doing things through your phone like that, the audio quality is surprisingly good, particularly through things like iPhones. They do tend to have pretty good audio stuff built into them. So, yeah, I don't really see any problems here, so I'm sure it will be fine. Yeah, so... I noticed a bit of strange feedback happening last week with the podcast when I was doing post-production on it, and it turns out that it's because I wasn't using headphones when I was recording last week, and so there was a lot of cross-chatter between the speakers and my Samson mic.
1:40
So, yeah, I've just got a nice new set of in-ear monitor headphones this week by an Aussie company called Audiofly, and they're very good little units. They're pretty much the same as like having the big cans on your ear, but with just as much audio fidelity in them. So it's a very good little set. Very nice.
1:59

high confidence · Jared confirms via newsletter cryptic clue (squeezed font image spelling 'Doctor Who') and prior announcement

Chris @ Physics engine discussion — Technical diagnosis of fundamental engine limitation; explains why table pitch adjustments don't solve speed issues

  • “You know what, I really want to do outreach to the community. I'm going to let them ask me anything. Except for those questions.”

    Chris @ Farsight AMA discussion — Cynical commentary on Farsight's unresponsive 'Ask Me Anything' session; implies corporate filtering of responses

  • “He's going to find out why it's dangerous to deal with our forum. That's right. It's going to be an interesting test to see exactly what answers come back.”

    Jared @ Farsight employee AMA discussion — Hosts warn new Farsight employee about intensity of Blockade forum community

  • “They want to release it first and get it updated in Stern, and then see what they can retroactively apply in the Pinball Arcade standard.”

    Jared @ Physics 4.0 rollout discussion — Strategic roadmap for physics engine: Stern Pinball app as testing ground before Pinball Arcade legacy support

    • product
    Simpsons Pinball Partygame
    Doctor Whogame
    Audioflycompany
    Fredoperson
    Pinball Arcade Fans Forumorganization
    Attack from Marsgame
    Cactus Canyongame
    Big Shotgame

    leak_detection: Doctor Who pinball table confirmed for Pinball Arcade via cryptic newsletter image clue despite prior September announcement; will be pushed to beta soon with PC-level graphics testing on mobile.

    high · Jared decoded squeezed font newsletter image: 'it clearly says Doctor Who because, you know, they already announced it was coming out in September.'

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Eight Deluxe receiving high community marks on forums and positive reception despite technical criticisms; plays well but suffers from physics tuning and audio design issues.

    high · Jared: 'it's getting pretty high marks on the forum. People are loving it.' Chris: 'It plays pretty good' but 'Way too fast.'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Stern Pinball app will debut Physics Engine 4.0 with requirement for modern platforms (incompatible with older devices like iPad One); planned retroactive application to Pinball Arcade after successful Stern implementation.

    medium · Chris: 'apparently with that, they are going to have an actual new physics engine, physics engine 4.0'; Jared: 'They want to release it first and get it updated in Stern, and then see what they can retroactively apply.'

  • ?

    product_concern: Eight Deluxe exhibits multiple aesthetic and audio design issues in release: metallic sound effects on all objects (including rubber), potentially over-bright in-lane lighting similar to prior DX11 glitches, and UI text placement that required community mockup to correct.

    high · Jared detailed beta experience with specific examples: 'Everything, when a ball contacts anything on the table, it's metallic.' UI placement required Photoshop mockup to convince developers to change.

  • ?

    technology_signal: Farsight's physics engine has fundamental architectural constraints preventing baseline physics tuning; only flipper physics parameters are adjustable. This affects era-appropriate gameplay feel across all Pinball Arcade titles.

    high · Chris: 'I think they're kind of constrained a little bit by the underlying physics engine.' Extended discussion of physics 1.0/2.0/3.0 generations with limited modification scope.

  • ?

    technology_signal: Google discontinuing Hangouts on Air (September 16th) in favor of YouTube Live as consolidated streaming solution; represents decoupling from Google+ ecosystem into atomic app structure (Google Allo, etc.).

    high · Jared saw official message when setting up session; Chris discusses broader Google strategy: 'They're trying to break things down atomically into their own little apps.'

    • It's amazing how far we've come from, you know, back in the day when it was a transistor radio with a single earbud that was very, very, very tinny. Yep, exactly. Good for listening to a sports broadcast, and that was about it. Yep, that's right. until now you have like i could have this i bought like the entry level version of this headphone set and it was nearly 300 um but you could go up as far as like this one has two drivers built into the um the earpieces so you have like a what they call a dynamic driver and then a um another type of driver i think it's like a crossover driver um and you can get one of these brands actually has four drivers built into one headset. So it separates all of the different frequencies out into its own specific driver tune for that particular frequency. So the, the sound you get out of it is like having like a $5,000 stereo system right in your ear. So it's pretty amazing. You know what they need to work on though? They need to work on an attachment. They also just like, it's like a, you know, think of like a sticky patch that you would put on your chest and then have that just do nothing but the thump of bass because that's the only thing that's missing from these headsets you know they sound really incredible but you just don't get the thump of a bass yeah yeah that's right and you feel that in your chest i don't really miss the actual like the thump aspect of it i'm more about the the quality of the sound rather than the like the the passive effects that it gives to you so um uh yeah that's that's the thing that uh because i've got i mean it blows me away that it's even possible to have with my 5.1 headphones because it truly does sound like you know sound is coming behind you and all around you i think but you missed the thump of a bass and so no matter how loud you turn that up it just does not match if you had your home theater system cranked up loud and that exact same explosion or whatever you know when the floor is rumbling yeah true yeah i do remember that at one point when i had like a really big subwoofer the whole room did start to shake and that was kind of cool but you know you really the only time you can really enjoy that is if you're in like a dedicated home theater room right like if you have a decent sound system in your your lounge room uh it sort of doesn't really work as well as having it all in a nice enclosed space. Well, no, a nice enclosed space is definitely going to work better than anything else, but that's why you just turn it up louder.
    4:39
    So that's the solution, right? That's the solution. You turn it up loud enough that you cannot hear the person sitting next to you, and then you don't care. And then you just back it down one notch. Exactly. You just don't want it to be too overpowering, right? When the next time you see your neighbors and they're like, so that was a good movie you watched. You get, oh, right, so you did hear that. Good. Excellent. That's the right volume. Thank you for confirming that volume level. Exactly. Very much, yeah.
    5:10
    Gary, TikTok. So last week, we mentioned that we couldn't get Blab to work for us, and so we had to go onto Google Hangouts on Air Live. And it turns out that the reason why we couldn't log into Blab is because Blab is no more. No. So they've just sort of turned off the solution, and they didn't even put anything like a landing page for the service to tell, hey, we'll actually turn it off. It's like, nope, we just turn the servers off, and we're done.
    5:42
    Yeah, and it's really interesting the reasons why they turned it off was not because they didn't have a large amount of users. it's just that the users that they had they realized wasn't going to be conducive to business you know generating more revenue for them essentially that's right um so they sacrificed a million plus users i think it's actually a million and a half plus users per week for the sake of trying to take what technology they have and rejigger it into something else entirely. The thing that they said that they want to do is have it be on instead of it being a session that you turn on and off, that it's just going to be an always on session.
    6:29
    Which I don't think will work for our purposes, because how are we going to record our sessions? It's sort of more like just a essentially it's like a chat room that's always on now really, isn't it? That seems to be the sort of way they're moving. Which is interesting, because I mean it always was a beta site. So the site was always being beta. And it's interesting that that's how people were interacting with this service. They weren't wanting so much broadcast. They were just wanting to more talk and have like an open channel to talk at all times, right? Right. This might explain the angry lady that screamed at us that one day. Yeah. No, probably not.
    7:09
    That wouldn't really explain that. That's just the angry lady going nuts. So So, yeah, so now we're using Hangouts On Air Live, which the problem that we have with that is we can't just have random people show up into our show. We can't announce it on Twitter and say, hey, we're recording right now. Come join us because we have to send out an actual invite for you to be able to come and join our session. So that's kind of a bummer. You can make it public. So the session that we're working on at the moment is a public session. So if anyone wanted to search the Hangouts On Air site and actually go, there you go, gee, what's running on now? I wonder what's on. Well, then they could join our chat session as a viewer and listen in just like that. So the way that Hangouts On Air differs from Blab in a way is that when you set up your Hangout On Air, you do what's called inviting people. So inviting people sounds a bit weird because it feels like you go, well, if I want anyone to see it, I need to invite them. But it's not. You're inviting guests and guests are people who can actually speak on the channel.
    8:24
    So it's sort of like a little bit different way of referring to it, but it sort of works functionally the same as Blab.
    8:33
    Now, you then informed me that Hangouts is also changing. Yeah, that's right. When I set up the session today, I saw the message that on September the 16th, Hangouts on Air is being turned off.
    8:49
    But the good thing is that there is actually a replacement. It's YouTube Live. So at the moment, when you create a Hangout on Air, any recordings are actually pushed into YouTube anyhow. And then you can watch them, or what I do is download the audio after the fact. So I can do the podcast post-production. So all they're doing is they're just sort of taking one step away from that and allowing users to set up a session directly in YouTube and then stream everything in YouTube. And it just all goes, it sort of stays in one ecosystem, I guess, rather than being in Google Plus and then going over to YouTube later. It's what they're trying to do is decouple as much stuff from Google Plus as they possibly can.
    9:33
    So Hangouts is actually being decoupled into two new apps now. There's one called Allo and one called something else.
    9:42
    So they're breaking that down into two things. And Hangouts itself isn't actually going away. They're more focusing on the business market for Hangouts. So anyone with Google Apps for Business will be using Hangouts as, like, their own messaging service inside their organization. But for consumers, you've got Google Allo, like A-double-L-O, like, you know, the British L-O-L-O-L-O, what's going on here then? And then you've got one other service, which still eludes me, but it's basically the sort of functionality that you got from the SMS part of Google Hangouts, if you ever use that. So they're trying to break things down atomically into their own little apps now and get things out of YouTube. So that's the reason why they're doing it. what we're trying to say here is uh we're not sure exactly what format we're going to be recording this podcast in uh we may continue with hangouts on air we're also looking into using twitch uh yeah just because i know some of you are very familiar with that and it is gaming and that's what we're about so we're looking at yeah we're looking into uh how to how to work that in um i'm going to tell you about how windows totally screwed me uh in a little bit but first let's talk about the brand new table that dropped on Pinball Arcade. Quit talking and start talking. I still have not heard that call out, though. Oh, really?
    11:15
    It starts, I think, when you... If you just let the table sort of do its startup thing and then press start and then wait to plunge a ball, it will say it on mobile. Oh, see, why would I wait?
    11:28
    Yeah, just plunge a ball. Why would you wait? so you can hear the cruddy audio speech from all the looks. So this was an interesting one because I was able to play it in the beta. Yeah. And any of my gripes had nothing to do with the actual playing of the game and more to do with the aesthetics that Farsight was setting up that was just making the hairs on the back of my neck twitch. Okay. So, the version that you are playing now, if you're on anything but the mobile, let's call it that way, playing in portrait mode, or excuse me, it'd be landscape mode. Yeah, landscape mode.
    12:15
    The words of Deluxe are currently underneath the score on the left side of the screen. when we were in beta they had that directly dead center middle at the top of the playfield and it was covering the in lanes oh that's not good and it was the weirdest thing because it was like why did you put it there none of your other tables have that kind of thing i mean if you think about tables that could do this it'd be things like adam's family with the thing Whirlwind, which they for some reason only went with a single box that changes as you're getting it, as opposed to what it should look like, which is on Earthshaker, where it's a row, so that you know what you've already gotten.
    13:06
    Was it Cyclone? Yeah, Cyclone. I know there's other tables that do this, but they always put it off to the side. Yeah, they do. So why they decide to put this in the middle is beyond me, and then to have it cover up a little bit of the play field totally spoiled the illusion. And I'm sitting there looking at it, and I'm like, if you just raised it up a little bit higher, it would go into kind of an area that I don't even know why they have it displayed. It's basically this metal grill that separates the play field from the back box.
    13:41
    It was like, just raise it up and put it into that. I don't know if Farsight has what we call on TV a TV safe area, which means you don't go in or out to the very very edges of your screen because some people's screens uh would cut that off so you have a safe area with with which to play it in yeah but so i started complaining a lot yeah in the beta and nobody else was hopping on this and i was like am i the only one this is annoying or or what and i went and i was you know saying hey shrink it down and put it underneath the score thing. And we've gotten a message back saying, no, we'll have to stretch the score field or something like that. And I was like, why? The deluxe is one and a half times the size of a single row of the scoring. It doesn't make sense. Why don't you shrink the deluxe? I don't understand. So I wound up going into Photoshop and doing a real quick copy and pasting job, did it in all four camera angles and showed, look, it fits. It doesn't cover up the play field. Let's do this. And thankfully they took my complaining to heart and moved it to where it currently is.
    14:51
    So I was rather glad that finally in beta I was able to get something enacted. Yeah. Now the other thing which I haven't been able to confirm because my computer no longer works.
    15:05
    But in the beta, with the inlanes right before the bumper, it's metal. Yes. For some reason, they're glowing white hot, as if there was a light shining directly on top of them. Okay. That's unusual. There is a light underneath it, and just above it, there's a light in the slingshots, but there's no reason why the tops of those should be lit. And what it reminded me of was back when we first got – and this is, again, DX11 lighting, so you may not have even seen it in mobile. But if you look at their video of the table playing, you will see it. Now, again, whether that video was recorded before they made a fix or not, I can't tell from the actual release because I have no way of checking it right now.
    15:53
    But it reminded me back when they first introduced DX11, a bunch of the tables look like they've been dipped in nuclear goo and we're just glowing abnormally. Yes, I remember that. Attack from Mars and Cactus Canyon being the main offenders. Yeah. You know, when the coin door is glowing, there's – That's not right. And basically, the best I could guess was that they were applying a lighting filter that was, oh, anything that's kind of got a highlight, we're assuming is from a light, and let's just make it glow even more to simulate that the light is glowing. So we had coin doors that were lit like there was a spotlight on them, but meanwhile, you know, Bart on Cactus Canyon is completely dark. So things that should be lit aren't lit, and things that were metal were brightly glowing. So they wound up backing down from that and fixing it, and most of the tables look pretty dang good now. We don't have that issue. So all of a sudden when I see this on 8 Deluxe I like what the heck is going on with that Now Flippy Floppy promised that he was going to try and have the art department fix that
    17:04
    So hopefully in the actual release, I'm complaining about something that has been fixed. I don't know. But it was one of those things where I was like, why are we taking a step backwards? And it really frustrates me because this table obviously is a pretty simple build for Farsight. No ramps, no multi-ball, no toys.
    17:24
    It's drop targets and pop bumpers. That's the extent of it. That's all single-level play field stuff, like pretty much Britain Brother pinball layout stuff. Yeah, yeah.
    17:37
    So I really wonder why it got kind of the short change on certain aesthetics where you're just kind of like, I can't be the only one that was looking at that going, no, there's something wrong with this, can I? Or maybe that was just it. The table is too simple for anything to really stand out and bother people. I don't know. I think one of the things that frustrates me from an audio perspective is just that everything, when a ball contacts anything on the table, it's metallic. Everything has a metallic noise. So if you're shooting, like, into a rubber object, it sounds like metal.
    18:08
    And it's just not right. Like, it's such a simple table. Like this is what we were saying when they were beta testing the EM tables, like Fireball and El Dorado. I was saying, guys, you need to get this 100% right because there's no error margin here. People will only be looking at the table and focusing very much on the sounds that these tables make because they're so simplistic. you can't not do a great job yeah it's interesting that you say that because I've been playing on mobile the free table one of the free tables was Big Shot and since I am horrible at doing any kind of nudging or and my thumbs are too big because I'm playing on a iPhone 5 so it's small and I have a bigger screen so I hate covering up flippers or whatever. So Big Shot was kind of an easy table to play on the mobile. But what I noticed was, my God, did I hear that ball rolling sound louder than anything. And the thing that annoyed me about it was it's the same sound regardless of how fast the ball is rolling. That's right. It's not variable at all. It's basically just one can sound of a ball rolling up and down the table all the time. um i and you would you would almost think too that the sound of the ball rolling up the table would vary a little bit from the sound rolling down the table i don't know why i think that but it just i don't it was one of those things that i think you're right because there was not much else to focus on on the table and because you're very apparent yeah yeah it was very background music like there's no background music overshadowing it it's basically just the odd tone or bell and that's it yeah and it's it is so it's very apparent that effect i know what they were trying to do with it and it's kind of nice to for them to think that it was you know we need to actually add ball roll sounds in it but really the majority of the tables it can probably go really um yeah it it doesn't really add anything because you're right it doesn't if it was a dynamic sound that they had like maybe for you know like a an up table motion and a down table motion and then a side to side motion like a rapid side or something like that you know that would be probably okay um but it's just this one sound that thing gets cut off if it does something then restarts again it's it doesn't sound very convincing at all yeah um but enough about our complaints, let's actually talk about the table itself. Yeah, that's right. Which, all things considered,
    20:57
    it's getting pretty high notes on the forum. People are loving it. I think it plays pretty good. Yes, once again, it is fast. Way too fast.
    21:09
    That being said, though, the drains that are happening are the drains that happen on the real table. Ah, very good. See, I wasn't... I don't have that point of reference for this table because I haven't had enough hours on it. When you shoot those, when you shoot those, the drop targets that are all in a row, the multiplier drop targets, it is every bit as dangerous on the real game. Oh, okay. You know, you think, oh, yeah, let me hit those. Those are one, two, three. Yeah, but it'll go straight down the middle on you. Right. So that, they definitely got very accurate on it. I just found most of the draining I felt I was perfectly fine with is just the table is moving too fast or traveling too fast. The flippers are too powerful.
    21:59
    But that's been our complaint all along with all these. They treat everything like it's a late 80s, early 90s pinball machine rather than era specific. Yeah, they do. It's no good. It is just no good. You should, like I said in the last episode, it needs to be almost like you can't make that upper play field easily. Like it shouldn't just fly up there like it's, you know, basically you're playing the table flat, which it sort of feels like at the moment as far as the strength goes. It's like you've got the table pitched so flat that it's just flying up there, but yet it comes back down. As if it was pitched.
    22:37
    Yeah, that's right. So it's flat on the flip and then pitched on the return. Yeah, that's right. Exactly. Which means, in my mind, means that it probably has more to do with the physics engine that Farsight is running with, and less to do with how they're setting up the table, you know, the table pitch.
    22:59
    Yeah. And the light. Because I know they do have, like, discrete parameters for table pitch and stuff like that. They can adjust, which is sort of like a global setting. But I think you're right. The underlying physics of how a table behaves as far as ball travel goes, I think that is the actual issue here. Like they could pitch the table as high or steep as they wanted, but it wouldn't make any difference because for some reason that particular parameter isn't being interpreted with the underlying physics engine. Yeah. So something's going on. Now, according to the newsletter, this also happens to be one of the tables that they borrowed from Arcade Expo. Okay. Yep. Cool. And so they were – in the beta, they were mentioning there were certain kickouts and stuff where they weren't sure, hey, is that the way it's supposed to play or is it just because the machine is old? Yeah. And a couple of people actually confirmed how it was behaving. Mm-hmm. so it it all i always do find that worrisome for far sight where it's like how much guesswork are they putting into it going well but assume it was fresh out of the box how would it play as opposed to no but you don't understand fresh out of the box it played you know like this a certain way still you know it wasn't going to play like a modern fresh out of the box but that's right that being said it still is definitely a fun fun table oh yeah that's a lot of fun to aim for They are, and it really nails that, ah, I just got to get one more play in. It sure does. I'm just playing the game going, oh, I think during the beta I got some goals, but then they reset because it was a beta. And I went through them and got some of them again. But there's some good goals in there. You've got to, like, get a lot of extra balls, I think, as well. And they're fun to get in this table because you've got to just – it's all drop target driven. So you pretty much got to get the drop targets down enough times, and then you'll start getting extra balls and specials and lots of cool stuff.
    25:06
    And it's fun. It's a fun game to play. I think it would be much better if it was slower because you really get that feeling of dread as it came back down the table at you, and that's what's missing at the moment. If they could do that and sort that out, it would be a reference table for that era in the game. Oh, yeah. Well, just imagine if they were able to figure that for that, and they applied that kind of filter to Xenon, to Firepower, to Gorgar, to Genie.
    25:37
    Well, no, Diner plays pretty fast. Okay. No, Diner actually does play pretty fast. You'd think Diner came after Taxi, and Taxi was a pretty fast table, too. Fast, yeah. That's true. It's any of those single-level play fields, right? Yeah, it's the single levels. I'm talking tables that were from 82 and before, essentially. Yeah. Yeah, Firepower, for example, you know, all those ones. Even High Speed, that is a fast table, but it's blazing fast in TPA. And it's hard to make that upper ramp. Yes, it is very hard to make that upper ramp. It only squeaches around the top. Things like Pinbot, when you're shooting up the ramp to the upper playfield on Pinbot, You know, that's a tough shot, and it will reject a lot of times. So, yeah, these are the ones that could really benefit from that type of, like, baseline physics tuning, I think. Yeah. And, again, to me, that would help capture the magic of that era of pinball. That's right. Separate it from the modern era. You know, give you a different taste of, it's not just, oh, these were old tables, and the computer chips weren't good enough to give us all the wizard mode stuff. It was also just how they were physically built that made them play the way they played. So I do hope that one day they'll be able to get in that. I seriously doubt it, though, unfortunately. Yeah, I think they're kind of constrained a little bit by the underlying physics engine. Look, it'll be really interesting to get some comments about this from Farsight and actually have them comment on the current state of physics and what they actually can and can't do. Essentially, what are the known issues with the engine that they just can't fix?
    27:31
    Which technically we could ask, because on the Pimble Arcade Fans Forum, one of the Farsight employees came on and made an unannounced message saying, hey, ask me anything. I'll answer all your questions. It was like, ooh, an AMA session with Farsight. Fantastic. Yep. I didn't even notice it until he posted at like 1.30. I didn't even notice it until probably 7.30 that night, so he had already gone home for the day. I asked a question. I told Jared to ask a question. I posted to Twitter, hey, people ask questions. The next day, everybody was asking questions, and here we are Saturday, and we still haven't gotten a single response. Yeah, I know. That's the thing. I'm going, what are we doing here? Why even bother if they're going to be in there answering them within two hours if you're in business hours. It just doesn't make any sense. Right. Or is it the typical thing where we would have to, back when we were interviewing Bobby, we would kind of send our questions ahead of time so that they could get them filtered through the, this is what we can say and this is what we cannot say filter. Yeah, you can pretty much guarantee that was what is going on here.
    28:44
    It's like, you know what, I really want to do outreach to the community. I'm going to let them ask me anything. except for those questions.
    28:51
    Well, that was even my opening statement in the – my opening response was, oh, you're stepping into dangerous territory, but okay, let's go for it. Let's rub with it, shall we? Yeah.
    29:05
    So the Fireside employee that was asking it, I don't even remember the whole screen name. It's Fredo. I forget it now. It's definitely a Godfather reference. Oh, is that what it is? Okay. So it's Fredo's son of Godfather. Yeah. Yeah, whoever that is. At the time when he posted that, he had only had 11 posts to our forum. So either he's a new Farsight employee or he's a Farsight employee who just never bothered with our forum. And if that's the case, he's going to find out why it's dangerous to deal with our forum.
    29:37
    That's right. It's going to be an interesting test to see exactly what answers come back. I'm just looking through the thread now on my tablet, and I'm not seeing any responses yet from the original poster. So hopefully we'll get something on Monday.
    29:56
    Hopefully. But if not, well, you know, it's farsighted. There's some good questions in there. there's a lot of people just essentially taking, taking the thread as a reflection of what's happened with these threads in the glass and just putting random questions about rubbish in there. Exactly. Some of which are amusing, some of which really aren't. And I pondered actually just deleting them because they had, they had no value to the, the conversation, but I'm going to leave them in there for now.
    30:29
    But there's a lot of questions about physics, which is interesting. I think the Wii U has actually got physics free at the moment, haven't they? Because they were released and they applied everything. Flipper physics free. So whenever we talk about physics, we're talking about flipper physics because there's no, as far as we're aware, there's no way of changing the underlying baseline physics. They can only basically really affect how the flippers operate, which is great, but it's only one aspect of it, right? Right, and that's what we're looking forward to with the Stern Pinball app, because apparently with that, they are going to have an actual new physics engine, physics engine 4.0, because they are on their third physics engine right now in Pinball Arcade. so the the deal is is by doing flipper physics or not flipper physics but physics 4.0 that's it's going to require uh better platforms so it is going to you're not going to be able to play this on your ipad one you know it's you're going to have to be on more more modern uh processors and everything else like that um so we are it's one of those things that what we've heard is well if we can get it up and running for Stern Pinball app, some of the stuff might filter into the Pinball Arcade. Yeah, I think that's the idea. They want to release it first and get it updated in Stern and then see what they can retroactively apply in the Pinball Arcade standard. Exactly. That's definitely what they want to do. I mean, why wouldn't they? It's essentially the same code base except for direct emulation of Stern, really. Because they've got all the assets and they've got access to the emulation framework.
    32:23
    Interestingly enough, the next table, if you haven't guessed it, if you haven't seen... It's Simpsons. Simpsons Kimball Party, of course. Yeah. So the newsletter came out and rather than put a cryptic clue as to what the next table was going to be, they put one of these uh squeezed font images that if you hold it flat and look at it then all of a sudden you can read it and it looks like you know very long letters and it clearly says dr who because you know they already announced it was coming out in september so it's going to be dr who but uh they're going to have this thing pumped into beta really quick from what i understand all right because they've been working on it for a while and one of the things that i understand that they're going to be trying to do is they're going to be trying to put in PC-level graphics and testing it on the mobile and seeing how the mobile reacts to it. Oh, very nice. Bring it on. My machine tablet is ready. Yeah, it'll be an interesting test to see what they can get away with and how everybody's devices deal with it. Let's hope that the PC level assets includes sound as well, because 11 kilohertz sound, as opposed to 44.5 kilohertz sound, makes a big difference Yeah So yeah let bring it on Let just unload everything into it I know that some people in the beta testing forum are already going oh my device is going to chug
    34:00
    Because some people are still locked into two-year-old devices because of their plans. Right. You know? Right. Now, the big mystery is going to be, are we going to see Doctor Who regenerated?
    34:12
    That is interesting. At the same time. I don't think they'll be doing it at the same time. They'd probably do the main table first, and then they'd do regenerate it afterwards. Because it'd be hard to beta test two at the same time. I agree. Yeah. And then regenerate is going to be a whole mess of beta testing because basically Farsight created their own ROM.
    34:32
    Yeah. That's going to be quite interesting to see how much they've redone and what they've actually had to and how they've actually done it. I don't know. They're scripting their own table. They're writing their own DMD screen. They're scripting an entire DMD table. We know how that went with some platforms, some game offerings before. Yeah, but that was scripting while still trying to emulate, doing fake emulation. So this is Fireside creating their own rule set, more or less.
    35:06
    So I'll be curious to see how much of it is using the actual Doctor Who form and that they're just attaching things onto it, you know, taking out and attaching on. It'll be very curious to see what. Changing the assets maybe. So changing the faces of the doctor and all that sort of stuff. It'll be interesting to see just how different it actually is. Because it's supposed to have all new audio. Oh, that will be very interesting. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't even think I want to speculate on how that's going to be because we'll wait and see, I think. Yeah, that's a big wait and see. No doubt about it. But if we can get PC quality assets on mobile, I think that's a good test for how the Stern Pinball Arcade app may look on platforms that aren't Oculus. Right. Because, of course, we're still waiting for the embargo to be lifted, which is one of the questions I ask in the Ask Me Anything forum. When do we expect that to actually come? And I noticed that I think one of the forum followers, Andrew Driver, who follows us on Blackade, also asked Stern that in one of their tweets as well. It's like, when are the real reality people going to be actually getting this to play on every other device except for Oculus? and it would be nice if they just gave us a ballpark, like first quarter 2016 or something like that. Yeah.
    36:42
    Well, sorry, 2017. Now, speaking of VR, Zen announced that they have five more tables that are going to be made available for their Oculus version.
    36:55
    Again, these are more of their older tables being put in. They're selling it as a five-table pack. I believe it's $24 for those five tables.
    37:11
    But based off what people have said of Zen's VR versus Pimble Arcade's VR, Zen's VR is pretty dang nifty. It looks pretty good. I think you'd be getting a $24 value out of that. because let's be serious, if you forked out the $2,000 to get a PC and the Oculus hardware, I don't think you're really going to be griping too much about $24 for new table packs, right?
    37:40
    We can hope there is not too much griping. There will always be griping because it's the internet. Yes, exactly. It's just the level of disdain for the pricing.
    37:53
    Look, I don't know. I think five tables, $24. What does that work out per table? Five bucks a table. oh that's fine I think I can afford if I was yeah I think I'd be okay with getting a full immersive VR experience for five bucks I think yeah you know you pay less for a ride on a like a fairground rollercoaster so you put it in perspective and I think it's pretty good value yeah the sting probably is the fact that it's tables that have been out for years and years on Xen and so many people may just be like ah this table you know really paranormal then you know it's um so i think that i remember where the sting was playing paranormal at one point they actually accidentally left in 3d on mobile and i remember playing paranormal on like it was like my tf300t transformer tablet which had a tegra processor at the time but it really kind of struggled a bit with like rendering 3d um while keeping the frame rate at 60. But that being said, even if it was a bit choppy, I had a hell of a lot of fun playing it, even though it looked pretty terrible. Like, I was playing it going, wow, this is pretty incredible on the screen because it was one of those, I just had, like, a 22-inch, like, computer monitor that just happened to have, and that particular tablet had HDMI out. So, of course, when it detects an HDMI signal, it also sent the 3D stuff in it as part of the it was this accident, I shouldn't have told them about it I said, wow this 3D is awesome can we look at getting this done more on mobile, oh yeah that shouldn't be in, turn it off oh no no, don't turn it off this is why you can't have nice things sometimes when you report a bug it's not a good thing because it wakes up the kraken and they go, no you cannot have this warning the following contains little to no actual talk about pinball so uh my pc kind of wound up having a major bug yeah as in it doesn't start anymore yeah so i'm uh i've been a windows 10 user my uh computer is set up with a uh two hard drive raid configuration all right okay that explains it and uh you know i've had no issues um i've been getting more and more frequently though these blue screens of death yes um where it was almost to the point where probably once or twice a day i was getting some you know memory management loss or this or this loss or you know whatever and i was really worried that it was uh my computer uh something was going on with my computer. It turns out that no, it was something to do with Windows. Because apparently this was happening a lot. The deal with Windows 10,
    41:00
    Microsoft has pretty much said that they want this to be the last OS that you ever have to buy. And that they'll just continually upgrade it.
    41:09
    And they want everybody to be upgrading because obviously if everybody's operating on the same operating system, then they can handle bugs. It makes it easier for them to absolutely. Yeah. It's much easier for them to support. Exactly. So they've already phased out Windows XP. I don't know if they've completely phased out Windows 7 yet. I think it's getting to that point. We've got Windows 7 installed on our home PC that we don't really use anymore. I'm sure that if I turn it on again, it's going to be moaning excessively that I need to update it, like right now. Right. So about a week and a half ago, I turned on my computer, and I get a blue screen of death, and it says inaccessible boot device uh-oh that's not a good one that's a really bad error message and so it tries to boot about two more times and it goes we need to repair your pc i'm like what the heck we need to we need to repair your raid arise so um using a recovery system so yeah so so it gives me the option of doing uh a recovery point and i'm like okay and And I wound up finding a particular recovery point that I could keep on going back to. But then because Windows 10 does not let you shut off automatic updates, it kept on trying to push these updates through. And within a day or – usually within a day, I would get another inaccessible boot device, and I'd have to go through the whole process again. And it was really, really annoying. And it turns out that what it was trying to do was Microsoft Windows has what they're calling Windows 10 Anniversary Edition. This is basically a complete rewrite of Windows 10.
    42:53
    And they're pushing hard for everybody to do this. Migrate to it, yep. Right. So my computer was trying to migrate to it, and something was going on that it wasn't happy. and my computer guru wasn't, he was looking into it but he wasn't able to figure out what was going on. So two days ago I turned on the computer and it forced through the anniversary edition update. At which point it no longer had any restore point for me to go to. But when it updates a major release, it just toasts all that. It toasts all that. And so I absolutely positively could not get onto my computer. It was super borked. Mega, mega borked. It was brick city. So I took it to him last night, and we tried every which way possible to get back to a previous version. And we were downloading onto USB sticks, trying to boot from there. And what it wound up, we were able to, thanks to the magic of DOS and him knowing how to talk in DOS, which thank God because I don't,
    44:13
    we were able to safely grab all of my files and dump them to an external drive. That's fine. They just reinstall it. That's all you need to do. And that's what we were thinking. oh, we just need to reinstall, right? Just without RAID. But that's the thing. We couldn't separate the RAID because that's how it's set up with the motherboard. We would need to actually have Windows operating, and then we could go in and separate it. So you couldn't just go and format the disk? Nope.
    44:44
    I mean, there is a way of doing it, but I'll let you continue on your story there. No, but there wasn't a way. That's the problem, because what turns out is it no longer was recognizing these drives.
    44:56
    Yeah. The plane does not recognize that there's any drives there. We're sitting there, we're like, what the heck? We just in DOS were able to find them and dump to them. Yeah.
    45:08
    It was a serious, big mystery last night. We were up until two in the morning trying to figure this out.
    45:14
    What did you find out? Eventually, he threw his hands up in the air and was just like, give me some time. What we did do is we pilfered a hard drive from the computer that I had my son using that was still running XP and we're like, you know what, he's not using this much. And so we took the hard drive out of that, which was all of 75 gigs as opposed to the terabyte that I have with the RAID. And we loaded Windows 10 onto that with the intention of, well, that will allow us to then access the RAID drives. But then when we went to the device manager, nope, they don't pop up as a drive. that does recognize that they're there, but they did not pop up as a drive. So they're completely bricked. Yeah, sounds like they need to be reformatted.
    45:58
    So he looked at all sorts of various message boards today, got back to me. Turns out this is an oops by Microsoft. Oh, great. They bricked everybody that has RAID drives. Wow. apparently they were warned about this by somebody saying hey this isn't going to work and microsoft was like no no it's going to be fine and then it wasn't fine and microsoft went um we'll have to get back to you on that so they're now going oh great we've pretty much bricked half the world's computers um with this update wow well it's it's actually not half the world's computers because as he pointed out any business that is using raids they're not using windows 10 you know for the um for those people that are using it at home it's it's the gamers that have it set up now what the problem is is that i was we had it he had it set up that it was what do you call it striped so yeah both drives were being used as opposed to having one drive being a backup to the other drive yeah it was shared storage basically so right if it if it was set up the other way it wouldn't have been a problem, but because it was set up as shared storage, that's where the problem lies. Because it's set up as shared storage, it's glued or married to the motherboard, so we can't just pull it out and attach it to some other computer and make it all happy.
    47:26
    So, until Microsoft makes a patch, unless I want to lose absolutely every ounce of data that's on those things... You kind of just have to wait until they actually keep watching the films. boy, they better be working on something like that pretty quick because there's going to be Windows users raging about that.
    47:48
    Like nothing else. I mean, the other option is if it was a thing that you just went, you know what, I'm just scorched earth approach like I would probably be doing at this point. If I could get all my files off like you did, I would just go. Well, I hope I got all my files off. That's the thing. Like I know that I got all the photos. I know I got all the music. I know I got all my documents for the most part because I'm pretty sure I know where I save everything. But now and then you're not sure if something that you downloaded and you never migrated over to some other area or whatever. Who knows if we for sure got every last ounce of data off of there. The piece of data that I'm wondering and hoping that we did grab,
    48:27
    but I'm going to be rather annoyed if it isn't, yeah, that save file for Pinball Arcade. Yeah. Because if I have to go through and get all those damn wizard goals again... That'll be somewhere in the Steam directory on your computer. Yes, and that's where I'm not sure is because where Farsight had it saved, it wasn't where all the other Steam games saved their data. Farsight saved it someplace else. Yeah, that seems to be something they love to do because they do it on mobile as well. they put it in this inaccessible location that you can't back up unless you're rooted, which is why the save game location help article exists that arose. Because everyone goes, like, it's ridiculous. Anyhow, so what else? Is that near the end of the sorry tale? Yes, that's where we're at right now. So basically I'm going to get the computer back with a 75-gig hard drive, which will allow me to re-download Steam, and that's about it.
    49:35
    I'm not going to be able to store my photos on it. Everything's going to have to be on an external hard drive, which of course causes – I used to have all my music on an external hard drive, and iTunes would have a fit with it. It never wanted to update properly and would take forever and was just a nightmare.
    49:53
    And ever since I had it on the actual drive, then it worked perfectly fine, and I'm not looking forward to it being back to that. Yeah, that's not going to be a fun time. Yeah, iTunes is pretty strict where it stores media for some reason. It doesn't like things to be messed around. It expects everything just to be on the one computer, just like you would if you had a Mac, you know? Yeah. And even Macs now have things like Mac-specific external drives, you know? Right.
    50:21
    You would think that they'd actually have that sorted out, but clearly not. Yeah. So anyway, when we talk again next week, hopefully I'll be back on the computer and we'll see how annoyed I am or not
    50:34
    based off of what files I was able to actually attach back to it. But yeah, thanks Microsoft. Yeah, actually there's this, it's funny you mention that because there this thread in the Android forum at the moment about is there any way to merge the goals from different devices And one of the regular posters in the Android forum Spork 98765, was posting about it. And apparently he asked, you know, surely there'd be a way, if you're playing on mobile, of course, you might be playing on your phone or your tablet, right? So if you earn goals on one device, you would think that you could just save it on that device and then when it uploads it to Google Play, It'll do like a merge between your goals and sort of merge everything together and keep track of everything across devices. Right. Well, it doesn't do that at the moment. And he said, you know, is there a way? And I originally commented that, no, think of it at the moment, think of it as a snapshot of that device. There's no diff mechanism in Google Play services that can merge the data. And I said, I added to that, I said, you need to be quite vigilant when you earn goals across devices. Back up when you earn a goal on your primary device. Stick that to the other devices once earned. and then reverse when you earn goals on other devices. So you've got to, like, manage everything at the moment, and it's not ideal. Well, and it's totally legitimate. It's a legitimate gripe because I know many of the mobile game, well, I call them mobile games, but the games, the apps that my son has on his tablet, all the saved data is filed in a cloud. Yeah, that's right. It doesn't matter what device you go on to, so long as you log in, it knows everything. So he can even use a friend's device, and so long as he logs in with his username, boom, all of his saved data is right there. That's right. And this is a problem. I've played games like that too, like, for example, Skyforce, which is a great shoot-em-up on Android that I talk about a bit. It has a cloud-safe function where everything is saved to the cloud. So the problem with the way Farsight has done it is they treat the device as a canonical record of events. But what they really need to be doing is treating the cloud as a canonical record. Yes. and Spork corrects me in saying that when I said, think of it as there's no diff mechanism in Google Play Services that can merge the data, and he actually says there is. So I just saw that then, so I'll take a look at that.
    52:56
    And it does go on to the technical details about how to do it based on the docs in source, so that will be interesting. Then he goes on to add, after my quote about you need to be quite vigilant about backing up devices. He says, no, stop supporting this idea that the end user has to play along with Farsight's UI Explorer, a GUI-based pool design game.
    53:21
    Until you, referring directly to me here, until I and the beta team stop enabling these pool decisions, then maybe some changes can be made. As I showed already, the definitive answer you gave is not correct. There is a way to merge these snapshots and create a resolved final version. Perhaps Farsight doesn't know about this because no one has asked. well it's a fair question I guess so yeah let's ask and we'll see what we can find I do love the personal attack that he gave us there on a group of people that don't actually get paid to do this and do it in their spare time so yeah thanks mate we know that we're the ones responsible for all of the Farsight's bad decisions yeah me in particular because until I and the beta team. Because I actually lead the beta team because I'm employed by FartSight. Sorry.
    54:15
    The one bad thing about the cloud saves is that we discovered this with my son playing Plants vs. Obvious, Garden Warfare 2.
    54:24
    It was great because he was able to migrate from the PS3 to the PS4. All of his saved data, they were able to then open up stuff. That was great. The bad thing was that me as a user didn't get any of that. Like, it wasn't that it downloaded, you know, in the past it would have just, hey, any user on the PS4 will have all this stuff. Nope, it's tied directly into that user. So we had to be very careful. There was, he decided he wanted to pay the extra $10 for the deluxe version of the game.
    54:58
    Because it unlocked a couple of other things. Well, we had to be very careful because normally the PS4, all purchases are made under my account. So I had to find a way to be able to allow him as a sub-user and an underage sub-user at that to be allowed to make a purchase. So he made the purchase, and sure enough, that stuff attached only to his user and did not attach to my user. So it's a good thing that we didn't do what I initially was about to do, which was, oh, well, yeah, we'll just use my regular account. I had to gift him money into his account so that then he could go on to the PlayStation Store and download it properly. So that's the downside that, you know, it used to be, oh, yeah, you buy something and it's good for anybody that uses that particular device.
    55:50
    Nope, it's now you buy something, it's your user. It's not that device. So it's a give and a take, but I'm definitely more inclined to, especially with a game like Pimble Arcade, which you can play across multiple platforms, it would be so nice to not have to re-earn these things on every single platform. Yes. It would be nice if, like, I know that, like, it's interesting you bring this up because on some games, like I'll use the example here of a game developer studio called Butterscotch Shenanigans. What they have is they have their own, that they plug into things like Google Play and all that sort of stuff as well, but what they do have is their own, like, custom user management system in their game. They call it the Bscotch ID. and regardless of what platform you're on, Steam, mobile, iOS, like whatever, this system is available in every game that they produce. So if you are using the same ID on Steam and on Android and everything, all your achievements are synced. I don't know whether they're synced across platforms, but I know that I seem to remember that if you earn something in a game, it adds it to your butterscotch ID as like an achievement. So regardless of what platform that's on, you should still be able to have that linked in, if you know what I mean. So now Farsight have the same thing, right? They have a Farsight ID that you must create. So why wouldn't you actually have a master list of goals that are synced across every single platform? It makes so much sense. The challenge would be, though, that you would have to sort of go, okay, so like in, I guess, the minimum viable product, if we're talking of software terms, you'd have to go, well, do I push the assumption that everyone will use the Farsight ID website to check their goals? Or how do I actually mirror that information back through the apps using their different frameworks, using all that sort of stuff, you know? So how do I write essentially an API that every version of my app, i.e. Pimble.ik, can use to suck this information into it type of thing and then publish that information back up to the main Farsight ID website or tracking system? Well, because here's what I would love to see personally. I would like to be able to over and over again get wizard goals and standard goals. Yeah. And now maybe we only get the notification the first time that you achieve it. But you want to count. But I want to count. I want to know how many times have I achieved that particular goal because there are some of them that I achieve all the time over and over and over again. And it would be really nice if there was some kind of a – I know that Farsight a long time ago said, hey, we can't keep stats of how many times you went up a ramp, how many times you did this kind of a save or whatever. because you're in the emulation. But if it can keep track of, you know, because certain things are triggering the achievements, well, those triggers should happen over and over and over again. And I would love to know how many times I've triggered those things. And that way it's not so much, oh, thank God I've finished all the wizard goals. Yeah, that's good enough to get the achievement of, yes, you finished all the wizards. But then to see, hey, how many more times do you do it? And if you were doing it across all the apps or all the platforms you play it on, then it can even break it down to, oh, you've achieved it this many times on Steam. You've achieved it on iOS. You've achieved it on Xbox One, whatever, that it has a breakdown. So you can look at some of your stats and see how you're doing. And that way, yeah, your achievements – hey, if I achieved – if I got all the wizard goals on Steam, it automatically would show that I have all the wizards on all my other devices.
    59:53
    But that I can still look and I can still achieve them on those devices and still get those wizards and still have it show how many times I've gotten those because there is a bit of a thrill in getting some of those. There's sometimes when I've, you know, after doing Battle for the Kingdom once, the next time I did Battle for the Kingdom, it was kind of disappointing to not see the little badge pop up. You know, it was like, oh, man, but I did that again. You know, so it's one of those things I would love to see Farsight implement. And I can't see that it would be terribly difficult, again, because these are trigger events. They are. Just how many times it's triggered. All they would need to do is on every app, they just need to make an API, which is an application programming interface that's unique to all the apps across all platforms, and then just expose what they call the endpoints of each of these event triggers to the tracking system. And so every time something pushes in, it just goes, yep, updates the master tracking engine, and it creates a record, basically, in your database. So it would not be that hard to do. They just have to make an API for the app specifically. And I don't know why they haven't done so already, because it will give them so much more data on what people are doing as well. Well, you think about it too, because with the head-to-head, their eventual intention is that it doesn't matter what platform you're playing on, other than the consoles. Xbox and PlayStation have a locked community. Yeah, it's a walled garden for sure in those ones. Right, but the eventual plan is that Android users, iOS users, WIA users, and Steam users can all go head-to-head with each other. It doesn't matter what platform you're on. So if you're already planning on doing that, why would it matter? Why do you have to keep separate goals per platform? It should be a cloud-based save.
    61:48
    It should, and it should be seamless. This is the thing that's bad at the moment. And it could be seamless if they implemented their own API. And I just don't think they've done that. They're relying on the other systems, cloud-safe infrastructure to do that. Yeah. And I just don't think that's right, really.
    62:07
    So, yeah, I think that's something worth exploring further. And I might mention that along with Spork's feedback about the backup syncing in the beta form and see if we can get some traction on that. because like he says, and rightfully so, there is code available that will manage that for you without a problem at all. And if that's the case, it just needs it. I know the reason why they haven't done it is that initially when it was implemented, I got the line that, well, we want to give users the ability to control what data they synchronize and when they synchronize it. But I made the point right then and said, users don't give a crap. They just want it to work. So they don't want to manage anything. They just want their data synchronized so they know without a shadow of a doubt that when they earn a goal, it's recorded and it's saved in case it's catastrophic behavior. Yeah. Which pretty much is the reason why I made that Android user guide. That motivation and this whole thing around the Google Play Save thing is the reason why I made that user guide to start with because it was just such a disconnect from the way that everything else works on Android and mobile in general. I just went, no, this needs instructions because it's totally like unintuitive to the user. So that was the impetus for it. So there you go.
    63:28
    Well, this has been an excessively techie talk podcast this time. I'm going to – but since you did the intro, Jared, why don't you do the outro that I normally would do? Make sure you got to hit all the bullet points. Oh, yeah, all the bullet points that I don't know anything about. All right, let's rattle them off because we've had some changes recently, right? Let's see how well Jared does, yes. All right, so if you'd like to have a chat to us, why don't you reach out to us on Twitter? So I am Jared Morgz on Twitter. He is ShutYourTraps on Twitter. If you want to interact with neither of us and just go through the amorphous blockade service, you can do that too, at blockade. Also, check us out on our website, which is blockadepinball.com. That's where you can go and get information about show notes and timings and links and all sorts of fun things about every episode we do. So the other thing you can do as well is if you don't like to do any social media at all, you can just email us at blahblahblockade at gmail.com, and you can send us any email, which we did actually receive an email this week, didn't we? We absolutely did, and we responded and had a little conversation going on. It was great. It was good to see the feedback coming through. So if you've got any long-form suggestions that you want to give to the show, we'd love to hear those on email.
    64:52
    And I think that pretty much wraps it up as far as social media goes for us. Of course, if you'd like to support the show, there's a number of ways you can do that. You can buy a T-shirt, which are available at any time and produced rather quickly, usually within a week of ordering, because that's where we've got the campaign set up. You can do that at represent.com forward slash blockade-shirt. And you can pick a range of colors and sizes available to your particular requirements. The other thing you can do if you want to support the show and don't like T-shirts, you can go and support us at Loot Crate, which is trylootcrate.com forward slash blockade. Aha, yes. And then, of course, the code you need to use to get your 10% discount off your crates is bridge10. That's bridge10. So check that out as well. It's great to see people supporting us in any way they can, but a little bit of money coming our way helps keep the show up. So thanks for your support, whether it's just contacting us via social media or sending us a little bit of money here and there. I mean, we have both a PayPal as well, so if you prefer to just not buy anything and just give us a direct donation, that's fine as well.
    66:02
    So, yes, we do actually have a proper PayPal account for BlackAid, So you can give us a little tip here and there, buy us a beer, and that would be awesome as well. So if you want to do that and you don't know how, just let us know, and we'd be happy to help you out.
    66:16
    What are we going to talk about next week, Jared? Lots of stuff and things. See, you have learned. Yes.
    66:26
    That's exactly what we're going to talk about next week, stuff and things. And things. Yeah. All right. Fantastic. All right. Well, I guess we should probably wrap it up. I am Jared. Thanks for listening.
    66:40
    I'm Shut Your Traps, a.k.a. Chris Brevis. Talk to you next week. See you later, guys. WizardAmusement.com, the West Coast leader in classic pinball. Makers of custom pinball shooter rods and buyer specifications. Swap out your standard ball plunger with something themed to your specific table. Installs in less than five minutes with no custom tools. Even if you don't own a table, it looks great as a pimple memento to admire. Prices start at $39, but mention Blockade Podcast and receive 10% off your order. WizardAmusement.com. Sales, restoration, customization.
    67:18
    Don't forget to leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast hosting service that Blockade is delivered to. We can't approve unless you tell us how. Now stop listening and place it in ball.
    67:31
    Here, Jared, this is for your outtakes at the end. Acapella version of Jared Tech Talk.