This is the BlahCade Pinball Podcast and I'm your host Chris Rivas aka Shut Your Trap. Joining me as always halfway across the world is Jared Morgan. Hey everyone, how are you going today? If you're wondering why it looks like Jared is in a smoke cloud, it's, you know, the world turns and the sun sets in different areas or rises in different ways, and right now it's blasting through Jared's window. Yeah, so even with the blockout blind down, it looks like I'm all washed out and I'm in a haze, which, I mean, I'm in a haze a fair bit, but it just happens to also be showing on screen today. Right. No, this is not the 420 episode. No, it's not the 420. No, it's not. No. So, I was having a good go of it yesterday. Yesterday was April Fool's. Oh, right. Yes. And I was in the park. Oh, yes. What a great job to do it. Right. I just thought I was going to mess with some people. So, there's two parks. There's Disneyland and there's California Adventure. And over in California Adventure, they have this theater that they, it's called the Hyperion. and they used to have an Aladdin show. They recently had a Frozen show that they've shut down. But it's like a 45-minute theatrical production, right, that people rather enjoy. But since coming back from the shutdown, that hasn't been up. So people have been wondering, oh, when's a new show going to go in there? So yesterday I was asking people if they were visiting both parks or just the one. and since I was over on Disneyland's side, it didn't really matter what their answer was. I was going to have the same joke with them. But if they said no, they weren't, or oh yeah, we're going there later, I was like, oh, you've got to understand, today they just installed in the Hyperion Theater, Hamilton. That's a good troll. Really? There was not a single person that went, shut up, you got no tape. Nope, I got no. Wait, really? And then I broke their hearts. It was great. And your approval rating went down. There was one gal who was super excited, and her boyfriend was like, no, really? And I thought, oh, they're both going to hate me. And so then I said, ah, April Fool's. And the girl was like, no, I got my little girl, little chick, then. And the boyfriend was like, oh, thank God, I hate that show. oh that would be fun so have you been walking around the Galaxy's Edge not yet I have one more week of basically being my normal routine and then the week after that I just got the new schedule and I'm four out of five days on a different planet wow that's wicked I can't wait to hear so I'm currently reading up on a comic book that was all about the land I've got some library books checked out that are based on the land just so I can truly understand the lore. So you can actually throw that through. Because even though you're taking photos of people, you're still in character. Yep. Everyone is in character there. Yep. So you kind of do need to know the backstory. If somebody asks me where the ride is, it's like, ride? The ride. Are you talking about, well, you have the Millennium Falcons over there, don't you? You can go over there and check that out. people understand, oh, that's what I'm going to, gotcha, you know. But yeah, you're not supposed to be like, because people... This is a theme park. Well, people will come up to you and they'll be like, where's Haunted Mansion? And you're like, I have no clue what you're talking about. There's nothing haunted on this planet. I've heard, though, if you go off-planet, that, like, that's a port over that direction, and you go off-planet, yeah, there's some big, like, white spooky house. Yeah, go there, you know. so alright so you gotta give the directions but you gotta stay in character alright you can't break the illusion you're not supposed to break the illusion yeah right if you're doing your job right there's some people that'll look at you and just be like dude come on just where is it could you give me a discrete directions I know you're in character could you please give me the info yes but then you gotta get people that are decked out head to toe in Star Wars gear those are the people you really need to mess with so Right. Yeah. Yeah. It'll be good. The fact that they come in cosplay to the actual park is pretty cool. Well, what I'm really looking forward to is, because I will be installed, I don't know if the, I should look real quick, see if the date lines up for me here. Let me look one second. Oh, it will. Sweet. May the 4th. May 4th. It's a Wednesday. I will be working that day, whether I'm in that land or not. I hope to God I am, because that day will be nuts. Huge. Yeah. That's going to be really cool, man. It will be. I'm looking forward to it. I'm very, very, very much looking forward to you sharing more about what that's like on the show. Yeah. So, what are we talking about today, Jared? Probably some digital pinball that's been released recently. Probably, yeah. We could talk about that. apparently people are really looking forward to hearing uh what we have to say because you and i have been kind of quiet on the socials yeah we we have i've been staying away from them um because one i've been busy like we always are yes you know we got we got those pissy responsibilities like work and stuff um but also because well i don't know i don't really want to get involved in the drama. But with saying that, I'm happy to talk about some of it now. Because I've been saving up my energy for the show, but I find I'm really running out of energy for drama on social media and stuff like that. It's just, it's really draining me at the moment, so I try and keep myself away from that as much as I can. Yeah. I, uh... You haven't eaten, though. So that's part of it. The other part, why we were kind of quiet. So we have had access to the early access beta. It's actually more like the alpha. Yeah, the alpha. Yeah. We were involved with it, what, first, second week of March? Somewhere around there? I think it was about then. Yeah. It was early. as early as they could give us access to a build that was stable enough to use. So to say the least, we've had to keep our mouth shut. We can't talk about it. So it makes it really difficult when everybody's speculating on the videos they've seen and everything to... I can't say anything until it actually released. And so obviously the game just released. Now we can talk about it. But then it was, well, we're just going to talk about it on the show. Why do I want to, you know, spoil us on the show? Yeah, that's right. You guys can wait and hear it from our mouths and do it that way. And come and visit the YouTube channel. Exactly. Visit our YouTube channel. We like people commenting on our videos and interacting. It's really cool. Yes. So that's what the primary bit of business is going to be today. Quick shout-out to our winners of the Roller to the Realm codes. Really appreciate you guys. man right at 9am I had emails you know with our two phrases driveway cheese and pinball is fun so appreciate those of you that entered and got the codes so enjoy those codes and you know it's a great game you're going to love it and it's got replay value the first one's got replay value I can't wait to see what they do with the second one yeah I noticed something the other day Jared the beta build that we have of Reunion, we got an update. I didn't... Oh, did it? Well, it showed there was an update queued. It didn't download for me yet. So I don't know if we're going to have access to that. I didn't try. I was kind of busy testing out something else for this show. Yeah. I haven't opened Steam for a while. Yeah. So, yeah. We'll have to check that out. That'd be exciting. All right. So I guess we'll dive right in. Let's do it. So what were we talking about? Obviously, we were talking about pinball effects, early access on Epic. That dropped on the 31st. Lots of people were waiting for the 8 a.m. my time release of it. And it was kind of funny because on Discord there was like, I'm at 20% right now and seeing who was going to be the first one to actually crack open. People actually having a download race. Oh, yeah, pretty much. It was kind of funny. So it was great on that aspect to see people hyped and keen to get into it. Right. I myself, I knew I wasn't going to be able to download it anytime soon. I mean, like that day I was at work by the time I got home. I had dinner, spent some time with my kid. I literally had time to download the actual game. And then I was too asleep. I didn't even get to fire it up. So, yeah. And by that point, plenty of people had already dealt with it. done it. I was from the future, so I was able to install it my daytime and get it all set up and loaded and all that. And have a couple of games on it. Just the free ones that were on rotation, because I hadn't got the entire one sorted out yet. But yeah, you know, do that. I felt like, though, having had the alpha build, for the most part, what you guys are seeing now is exactly what we had access to in terms of what functions are available and features were playable. It wasn't like there's nothing extra in there that we've seen. Yeah. No, there's none of that yet. The main primary difference is the performance optimizations that did transpire and some of the bugs that were very apparent. Yeah. Those are basically the main differences. So for the most part, it was like I already knew what to expect. So then once it loaded up, it was just a matter of like, hey, did this get tweaked? Did this get fixed? Is there anything new that I should be looking for? Yeah. Jared, I want you to just, I don't know, I could start even if you want me to, but a couple of words that just sum up your feelings about what you've seen so far. Do you want me to go first or do you want to take it? Yeah, you go first. I'll follow you. All right. My summation of the current early access of pinball effects. Underwhelmed. Disappointed. Right. Jared, your turn. Summing up in a few words is hard because I haven't thought about those words. But I'd say ring for improvement. A good start. Okay. So, you may be asking why those two words for myself. We're going to give you a whole bunch of reasons throughout this. But I think, underwhelmed, I quite honestly was hoping for some noticeable improvements, especially when it comes to playing Zen Originals with William Physics. I was expecting a big jump in how the tables play because there's a very obvious difference when you play William's tables with Zen Physics, William's tables with William's Physics. It's pretty noticeable, the difference. Yes. I literally on some of these tables was playing it and going is it different? Then loading up FX3 and playing that version going I guess it is? That wasn't the case with all the tables but a lot of them it was and that's where the underwhelming comes. I just kind of was like ugh why is it not more noticeable? A little bit also that went into that with the lighting on certain tables very much the case where I was just completely underwhelmed by what happened. I think in general, I was wishing that the fact that they were having to go and redo all these tables, I felt it was the perfect opportunity to correct some things, retcons some things that they probably were like, hey, it's not worth it for us to go back in and do this, But when you're doing a fresh build, now's the time when you have the resources allocated, so do it then. And I'll get into details on what I was expecting on some of those things. And who knows? Again, I keep reminding myself, it's early access. There's plenty of time for them to change things. You've got to keep saying this. I know it's sort of like we've been waiting now for a number of years now for this to come out. So I think a lot of people, potentially us included to an extent, are probably having higher expectations than what we need to really have for what is an early access of a brand new platform. Yeah. But it's really tough to actually filter out because, as you say, it's sort of been a long time and there's sort of expectations around time elapsed versus quality. And I don't think the problem with that analogy is that while a lot of time has elapsed, a lot of that time has been literally just negotiation time. trying to get the platform organised and everything, not active development. So there are, I guess, caveats when we're looking at, you know, time elapsed versus actual development time on the platform. Right. And I think to your point on the Williams physics being stronger or weaker, I've got a feeling that they're probably maybe they've got to the point where it's on all tables and it's finalised but I'd say it's probably not I would say that this is the first time we've seen the updated Williams Physics from Deep and as early access is I think that they're probably awaiting feedback to finalise the tuning on that early access Yeah, so I would say, and there's been this discussion where people are like, look, physics are physics. They can be universally applied across the table, and I think we've talked about this too before. We have. Where it's like, yes, but then there's table-specific things. Yeah. And the reason why I point this out, specifically with the physics, Star Wars droids, good lord, the physics are fantastic. love them just droids i had the reaction that i was hoping for where i went right yes that's williams physics on a zen original just played fast played bouncy um the the ball still had weight it was doing really ball as wild things yeah i was gonna say that's my impression of that table as well as balls wild everywhere like and that's legitimately that's what i'm after ball is wild. That's all I can... That's what, in my head, cues me into... That's what you're always asking for. Is the ball wild? Yes. Or not really? Yes. Or no? So, Droid's nailed it. Wild West Rampage nailed it. Yeah, that's vastly improved. Yeah, but then I go and I pop in, like, Han Solo, and I just kind of go, is there a difference? Yeah, that wasn't really apparent, eh? Like, I didn't get a lot of randomness to the ball on that table, Which makes me think they just haven't quite got the tuning in. Yeah. Maybe. But, yeah, you're right. It was like not seeing it there. Right. So that's where I agree that there's still, I think, some tuning that can go in and fix some things. I know we're diving right in, but we're going to dive right in. We can just discuss physics for a little bit here. The other thing that disappointed me with what I was saying was, flipper angle, it's still just as steep on Williams. No, no, no. Okay, so for those that don't understand, with Williams physics on Williams tables, the flippers have a shallower angle, the start angle, which makes catching the ball much more difficult. If you play with Zen physics, the angle is a little bit steeper. I mean, it's a little bit enough that catching the ball is relatively easy. On Zen original tables, they all take that steeper angle. Right. Even though they have the physics implied, the flippers haven't actually been changed yet. Exactly. Also, their flipper gap is quite narrow, as opposed to Williams, where the flipper gap was much wider. Now, I didn't expect them to widen the flipper gap because that would have changed physics on the table. Yeah, they would have completely redesigned the lower third. Yeah, they would have completely had to redesign that. So I wasn't expecting that, but I was expecting the flippers to not be quite so severe because that plays into the ball is wild aspect because you have a harder time catching the ball. Controlling it. Yeah, that's right. Exactly. So whether or not they'll continue to alter that, I don't know. I was kind of surprised that there's not an option to go play basic Zen physics on Zen Originals. Yeah, that's right. So it's only gameplay now that they've changed. Yeah, the only thing you can change is whether you do power-ups. Power-ups. But the actual physics are uniform across. the Williams ones, interestingly enough, I think that you can pick between the two, still. Hmm. I didn't actually experiment with this caveat. I only got real access to the game yesterday, so I had to race through playing the game. Yeah, me too. I was up until like 10.30 last night trying to squeeze in some gameplay, you know. So, I didn't really fully explore that. So, I'm going to have to go back and check that, eh? You'll notice also a podcast or two ago, we were complaining about the naming of... The naming of the modes? Yes. This is specifically why we were going into that, because I was so disappointed when I first loaded up the alpha. Where it's like, okay, so you can play Classic Physics, which is the name for Williams Physics, or you can play Arcade, which is the name for playing with the power-ups. Yeah. But if I was in an arcade, that would be the best. I'd be playing arcades. They're using arcade in terms of a driving sim, where there's arcade physics, which means more fun, versus sim physics for a racing game, where it's dialed into how a car actually reacts. And that's always bugged me, this flip-flop of terminology. And honestly, change classic to simulation, you solve the problem. Yes. Just change that word. It's easy to change. It makes it clear as a bell. Yep. Simulation. That's the word you want to use instead of classic. Yeah. Yeah. So that's kind of where my underwhelming aspect goes. The physics aren't what I was hoping for. Yet. Yet. and I hope that they can change. There is all sorts of little changes that I feel that can be made, but let's do a change of tune here. Yeah, from my end, there's going to be a lot of negatives, folks. But let's talk about some positives. Jared, let me let you start off with what are some of the key positives that you see that you feel are definite improvements that are like, yes, they put that in? Yeah, so I've definitely noticed the improvements to the environmental effects in the game. So, you know, you get in certain views now fully moving, interacting environments that are around the pinball table. They're not static anymore. There's life to them. And, you know, some people who are using cabinet mode, they won't care at all about this, and that's fine. But for those people who are playing it like a console game on their TV, on widescreen, there's a lot more going on around the table now, and that's pretty cool. Actually, in the play field, so the life on the glass aspect of it, there's certain effects now that have been upscaled. So one such example that really stood out for me was when you destroy the castle with the enhanced visual effects on. you've got particle effects now for the explosions they look like real explosions going off in the castle, not just animated explosions they look really cool another one was on Monster Bash where the two lightning sparks, yeah the arc that's going between the two balls, the flash bulbs, that's got some really good light casting on it now and it looks actually like the intensity of an electrical I was going to say, that's the key on that one. It's not just a white light. It is a hard flash. It's a hard flash, radiating flash. Yeah, it's the kind that makes you kind of wince, almost. And I love that look. That is fantastic on the look. I got strobe multiball on Attack from Mars. Yeah. You guys that have watched this show know that strobe multiball is a bugaboo of mine. Yes, it is. I've got to just real stick up the butt about it. Ever since Farsight put out Attack from Mars, it's been a point of contention for you. Yes, and equally a point of contention, which isn't yet in the game, Circus Voltaire, when you do neon multiball, it's the exact same. Oh, yes. It should be the exact same effect. and that is, especially with strobe, those are those intense flashers, and they should be intense. They should make you win. A little overwhelming. Yeah. Very good job. Oh, really? Very good on what that strobing is. Yeah. Excellent. But you knew this was coming. There's always a but. But the lower play field is still completely visible. I can still totally see the ball hitting my flippers. And anybody that has played a real Attack from Mars in a darkroom environment knows that is not the case. That is not the point of strobe multiball. Because what is the point? It's simply to hit the, you have kind of infinite balls for a little while, and you just hit the middle target. Why would that be difficult? Because you can't see your freaking ball because the strobe is pummeling your eyes and it's dark down by your flippers. Yes. No, flippers are, even though all the GI lighting is off, you can still see everything perfectly fine because the environment is still too bright. Now, interestingly enough, not all room environments for all the Williams tables are the same. If you load up Theater of Magic, the room is noticeably darker for Theater of Magic. You put up a side-by-side of the two, it's noticeably darker. All I'm asking is for them to, when strobe multiball hits, do what they did in Son of Zeus. Darken the crap out of everything. Turn off all the lights. That's all I'm asking. Once the mode is over, turn the lights back on. But make that mode what it is intended to be by the designers. That's all I'm asking. I would agree. It needs to be right. And as we've seen with all the effects I've touched on just then, there's more in there. But they have the ability to do it now. I don't know if they did have the ability to do it with the PX engine, but with Unreal, they can do it now. Something else, just a side note that relates to that that I've noticed, the ball, no matter where it goes on a table, maintains the same intensity. even though it might have true ball reflection going on and this is not on some tables the ball looks really shiny on some tables the ball looks kind of dull it's kind of weird how it'll shift yeah I've noticed that too sometimes it actually looks like a powerball as well it's got a real ceramic look to it which is odd but I was watching it as it passed through dark sections of a table where GI lighting isn't and the ball never loses its intensity. It just stays that white oil, not that silver oil. It doesn't dull when it goes through dark patches of the playfield. And I would... I get it for video gameplay, ease of sight. I understand that. But for simulation purposes and realism, I want that to be an option to be able to... I guess what I'm asking for is I want an option to just put on full room simulation. that would take out... So you're not going to have score pop-ups. You're not going to have ball trails. You're going to have environmental room lighting that affects what the play field looks like, and all of it is going to affect shadow of the ball itself. Yep. So would you, as part of that particular setting, would you also deliberately turn off enhanced effects as well? Or would you leave the option for those to be on or off to make a true simulation, like, I'm just playing this game as it would be in the arcade without any fanciness. For Williams' stuff, yes. Obviously, you can't turn him off for his end. But for Williams, yeah. Yep. Everything goes off. Room goes dark. Like, you're playing it in your basement. Yep. And you're just relying on the general illumination of the game to cast light. Yep. I think that's probably the way to go. I think it would definitely make the experience of playing at Williams' tables more immersive. And I especially want this when cabinet mode comes. Because for a cabinet mode, that is, again, there you're not seeing, like you said, you're not seeing outside the table. No. So it becomes entirely what's on the playfield. and if we're basing everything that's entirely off the play field, then I want that play field to look as good and real as possible, which is what all the... The name's slipping me. What are you talking about? I don't know. You know, the pirated PC game that everybody does. Or the... Oh, Pimax. Visual effects. Yeah. yeah is that right no pinball effects no that's the name god damn it you know what I'm talking about VTX VTX god something with X in it right jeez yeah yeah VTX those are what that's what everybody that plays VTX in cabinet mode is always comparing to hey look at how good this is that's what I want the comparison to to shine up against so yeah when cabinet mode comes that's what I'd be hoping for in general I will say the lighting though on these tables looks pretty darn good there's a lot of tables where it's absolutely phenomenal and quite noticeable again Attack from Mars there's a in motion in play there's a big difference between it and the X3 version yeah yeah one of the things that I notice that are good and improved I think the way the ball speeds up and slows down around the play field is definitely noticeable as well, but I had something weird in the alpha going on. Sorry, not the alpha, the early access, where it felt like on some tables it got a little bit too fast in points, to the point where I couldn't react fast enough to flip when I thought that on a regular table I should have been able to flip and get the ball. So that was a bit odd, and I don't know whether it's just my particular PC setup or whether it's got something to do with input lag or something like that, but I can't really put my finger on why it feels like that, but it just doesn't feel like it did in FX3. So, I mean, I do like the ball speeding up and the fact that it behaves differently as it starts to gain momentum down the playfield, but I think potentially it still needs a little bit of refinement to feel right. Yeah. But overall, that's like, while I've tempered that with a bit of, oh, it needs improvement, it's still a really nice enhancement to have in the game, like that sort of feeling of speed as the ball starts rocking towards you, you know? Yeah. It's good. So something else that I liked that I hope even gets more improvement. Both of us are fans of what they did with the fan cave. Oh, yeah, the fan cave. Yeah, the fan cave. Because we like what they did with Star Wars VR. And, again, we said this is very much what Star Wars VR looks like. Yes. They did make it in this build with early access. You select the table. it skins the entire table that's there in your room. Puts the backbox on. Yeah, it does. Puts the side art on. That's great. My one little wish is that the DMD would work. Oh, whilst in the track mode. What's that? Whilst in the track mode. Yes. In the room. I mean, like right now, the glass is over the top. You can't see the play-doh. That's fine because that's obviously why render all that. Yeah. Oh, no, they probably will do it. You think? They did it with Star Wars VR where you could actually see the play field beneath it. They had this sort of canned image running below the play field of lighting just going off. You could see it was clearly an orchestrated thing. The light was cycling in a very odd way. But it was still there, and I reckon they will do it. I just want the DMD to be true attract mode. Yeah, so cycling through all the different things. The reason why I'm saying that, there is hope, Jared, and we were promised that we might like this, for ROM carryover. So I scored a high score on Getaway. It put me at third place on my local pinball machine. Local. Yes, local score. I played a different machine. I came back and I went, hmm, I wonder. Because when you first hit the table to load up, the table goes and it's kind of doing the little flyover, right? You can see the DMD the entire time. Yeah. Sure enough, there was my score at number three. It remembered it. Ah. I did do that on FX3, though. Like, if you put your high score in, did it remember that in Ronsay? I don't know. I don't believe it did. It certainly didn't remember if you were loop champion or anything, and I haven't gotten loop champion on that or Medieval Madness. Again, I'm hoping it remembers those, because if it remembers those, that's great, because now you're competing against yourself. Yes. And you can get Valkyries. Yes. Oh, yeah, for Safecracker especially, then you can get vault keys. Yeah. Yeah. That brings me to a note on Safecracker, and something I've observed with a lot of the Williams tables that they seem to suffer a lot more from performance issues than the Zen tables. And in Safecracker, when I'm... So I was originally running the game at sort of 4K, and the Zen tables were played fine, but the Williams tables struggled at 4K. They were really chugging to the point where everything looked sort of blurry and low res, the playfields at least. And on Safecracker, things like ball movement was slowed or quite janky compared to Zen tables. like there's been originals even things like pop-up scores had aliasing around them and stuff like that which is really weird um i don't know why it was like that because i mean the pop-up scores aren't i would imagine an overlay over all the tables but they look different yeah um and yeah it just seemed like there was some texture problems i noted on on sadcrackers were like the pop bumper skirts and stuff. They were like donuts. They looked like little donuts rather than skirts. And there was some missing textures. So, you know, usual early access things. They're probably still patching the assets. But I did notice the thing that I would like them to take a look at is the performance of the Williams tables. So, yeah, again, so when it comes to what we were seeing in the alpha, we didn't have access to any of the Williams tables. No. Those weren't made available. So what we're seeing in early access is the same thing that you guys are seeing in early access. Yeah. So that's all new to us. With the alpha build, there were some tables. Curse of the Mummy, literally, if it was the first table I loaded up, it played it in slow motion. I only had one occasion where I loaded it up and it played at speed. um the other thing was i played say 10 tables other tables after that would now start feeling slow and janky and then i'd go back and play the table that i already knew played at a high frame rate and it was now slow and janky so i don't know if the game itself is keeping all the tables in a perpetual state, and so the more you've opened up, the more it clogs things down. Oh, yeah. I don't think it would, but there's something going on there from a performance tuning perspective that they're going to need to address. There's where another disappointment is. Oh, the performance right now is dreadful. It's not great. It's not great. It's playable if you drop your resolution down enough, but it's definitely a large room for improvement there, which is why my comment of room for improvement. So let's take this opportunity to just describe the rigs that we're running because this does play a factor. Yeah, always. System configuration is the thing. So you guys know what I'm playing on. My chip is Intel i5-8400 CPU at 2.8 GHz. I've only got 8 GB of RAM. The recommended is minimum is 16. So I was stoked that I'm able to play. I don't know how many of these issues are because of my low RAM. And I am... Yeah, this is going to force me to get more RAM. The debate that I'm having is I can actually purchase the same... Right now I've got two 4GB cards and they still make the same 4GB card that I bought. That's why I can just buy two more. Bought myself up to 16. But my friend was telling me, he goes, if they're not the same batch, it might cause you a bottleneck and not be effective So you're better off yanking those completely and just buying two 8s to get yourself up to 16. That's what I would do. So that's probably what I will do. Or do I save up and go for 32? Unfortunately, the price difference is quite large. Because I can get the two 8s for like 67. And then as soon as I go to two 16s, now I'm at 106 or something like that. So, unless I chop around a little bit. Well, the thing is, you know, 16 gig of RAM is now the lower end for new PCs. Like, 32 is now the standard of RAM, which is ridiculous. It is. You know. So, what's your video card? Okay, and then my video card is GTX 1060 6GB. Okay. So I'm running also an Intel i7-8750H at 2.20 gigahertz. I've got 16 gig of RAM installed. I'm running an NVIDIA RTX 2060 6 gig card. And then resolution-wise, I should point out that I'm not running 4K. I am at 2560 by 1440. I think that's my resolution as well. That's the resolution of the monitor. I've got like an LG monitor, big one. To go along with that, FX3, I'm running two monitors so that I have my backbox on one with the DMD and then my primary monitor. That DMD monitor, that's just at 1080. The primary monitor, that's when I'm running it at 2560x1440 and the game is rock solid at 60 frames, I'm actually able to unclock it or unlock it from the Zenith parameters, and usually I can get it up to about 105, which obviously is not a good, you want it in the nice multiples, so if I could get it to 120, that would have been ideal, so that's why I never really kind of stuck with it, but that's what I was capable of doing with that game. whereas this one in alpha yeah it was struggling to do 2560 if I dropped it down to 1080 then everything played just fine but it looked good no and maybe this is the problem I'm seeing in some of the willingness tables with muddiness and just general lack of clarity like it's probably the resolution playing a part here but the thing is that even at 2560 I was still noticing these problems like it was not clear in fact it looks a little bit like my haze on the screen at the moment. It's just not sharp at all, compared to the Zen tables, which look really, really nice and really clear, and the inserts are nice and everything. It seems like the Williams tables, essentially, because they weren't available in the early alpha build that we got, they may now be going through their first round of iteration in a while. So let me hit you with some info, because I went through with NVIDIA, you can throw up an overlay, the GeForce experience, you just hit Alt-Z, that brings up what you want to bring up information-wise. So in the corner of my screen, I was able to have frames per second displayed, CPU and GPU utilization, which by the way, my GPU was pretty much pegged at 95 to 100%. So it was screaming. It was screaming through the lungs out. Everybody is saying, regardless of what their rig is, is saying the exact same thing. That their GPU 100% G-Pen utilization is right up there. So there's where, again, performance issues obviously need to be coming to play, and I hope that Zen is getting the help they need from Unreal to do that. The reason why I'm saying that is, hi, Pinball Wicked, it's been running in Unreal for, what, three years now? It has the ability for you to crank settings this way and that way every direction that you want. Going full ultra settings. What are you turning on? What are you turning off in terms of particle effects? How detailed? All this stuff. I legitimately was and this is where a disappointment comes in. I wanted it in this. I thought we would have full control over what it is so that you can dial it into your rig. We have very little control over what the graphics are and what they're doing. Yeah, we definitely do. I've noticed that with the really neat thing, and I hope that this would become something in the future for Zen, for Pinball FX, is that with Pinball Wicked, they essentially allowed you to run a wizard that worked out what the best settings for your particular setup were, and then that was it. And then from there, you could dial in, you know what, I don't, I'm not really, I could care less about, you know, tessellation. I'm going to turn that off so I can turn something else up a little bit higher. Yeah, I want to sacrifice this so I can have more of the other. But it gave you a really good Performant baseline that you knew That if I just kept it like this I'm not going to have any problems running the game At the right frame rate And I'm going to have a good experience in the game I want that for FX Absolutely, I'm so disappointed That that's not available to us And I don't Get why, to me It feels like They're building this For what the console Is going to have maybe not what the PC players want maybe yeah they could be doing that and you know that that's it's fine to it's fine to like lock down settings for something like a known factor like PS5 or you know right Xbox One or whatever but I think for the PC hog wild you know next time we have no one we're going to have to press on that we'll ask them about that We're going to have to press on that because that was a huge... When I first opened up, that was the first thing I went to was, okay, let's go check out graphic settings. I went, what? Seriously? There's like three. Oh, boy. I get to control the gamma? No. The gamma, folks, that is not how you darken or lighten a room. That's purely a brightness thing. Yeah. You can get rid of gamma as far as I'm concerned. Yeah. I don't know why you would have gamma. Is it just for tuning how you monitor? Well, I was looking for the light slider. That's what I was hoping for. And no light slider, you know. Jeez. And again, if you're not going to do the light slider, fine. Just for specific moments on tables, hit me. Make it a, well, they have a, you know, one of the settings that you have to muck around with is, you know, the Williams feature camera, you know. For example, the feature camera control thing is like, you know, when you're in a champion pub and you go up to the jump rope, it'll zoom in on the jump rope. You know, have a similar setting, like a Williams lighting experience or something like that, you know, just to lay the darkened room environments based on what the situation is. And who knows? That might be the kind of thing, again, early access. Maybe they're right now just trying to lock down performance issues. That's the reason why they're doing early access. They're making it available to us. Once they've got game bugs worked out, once they've got performance worked out, then they can start adding in other things and then tweaking those, as opposed to having 5 billion things that people are saying in bug reports that I'm going to do, which one to be attacked first. Any developer will tell you that performance tuning happens in the last 5% of game development, or even writing commercial apps. Anything performance-related is always left to the very last minute. and not as an afterthought but because you need to get all the bugs resolved so you can actually get a true benchmark of performance in the game so it's very much like it'll be if we ever see it in early access before the game goes like regular GA and gets released to the consoles it will be probably the final build that they will address the niggling performance issues you know what they need to do when I loaded up Tomb Raider Rise of the Tomb Raider or Shadow of the Tomb Raider it does a settings check and it runs the most intense scene graphically that it can does this whole big panning around 360 and it shows you what your frame rates are and then it gives you, you know, it's the benchmark test right? Yeah, it's the benchmark that's what I want, I want a benchmark test for this game so that when you load it in, boom, we're on the benchmark Show me a six-ball multiball with flashers going off like crazy, the ROM going, the DMD going nuts, everything happening on the most intensive, heavy table. There's your benchmark. Now dial it in from there. Let us tweak. Let us do this thing. That would be exactly my expectation for first run of the game. You put it onto your hardware, you start it up, you get the welcome screen, and then it invites you to do a performance test before you even play a table. Because that's what I expect out of something using Unreal. Yeah. Unreal lets you do this. Yeah. It just needs to be in the game. They really need to give you the baseline. I don't have time. The one reason why PC gamers, people choose consoles, is because they don't want to futz around with the settings. they want to start the game the game tells you what the best performance levels is and then you start playing like you know the amount of time you've had to fuss around with settings with Fast Fight, Spin the Arcade to try and get that right ain't nobody got time for that make it easy make it easy, don't make me think right? That being said, again make it easy but then let me be able to tweak Yeah. So it's easy to start, and then if I want to deep dive, I can deep dive and then go doing things. But I want that ability to deep dive. I'd say don't make me think initially. Yeah, there you go. Delay the thinking. So the whole point that I was bringing up, though, about bringing up the overlay, I clocked frames per second on every single table. Yeah. So running on my rig, I had some tables that ran at 60 frames. I had a lot of tables that didn't. Right. What was the lowest frame per second that you had? Lowest frame per second? Safecracker. That would explain my problems. At 39 frames per second for me. That's why it's so horrible. Now, ET clocked in at 33 frames per second. However, that was after I'd been checking everything, and I think I finally hit that breaking point where, uh-oh, because then I loaded up the getaway, which would be running really nicely for me, and it was at like 36 frames per second. So clearly I had maxed out whatever, and it was now a crapshoot. I wonder if they've got like a memory leak or something in the game at the moment that they're trying to... Maybe, I don't know. So I'm going to have to load up the game again and check some of these lower tallies. Like go to Safe Cracker first. Although you can first and see what it actually clocks in at and see if it's having that problem. So, okay, I'm just going to tell you. So the Williams tables, here's another interesting thing. If you're in view 8, which that shows the DMD at the same time as the whole play field. Oh, view 8's not fun. No, well, but check this out. View 8 runs the best frames per second. Oh. For me, view 8 always had the best frames per second. So view eight, which is the DMD in view. Fortunately, view number two, which is my favorite view when I'm playing in landscape, was the second best frames per second. Oh, that's good. Yeah. So I was constantly just dialing in those. Every other view, the frame rate lowered. What I found, certainly in the Belly Williams tables, less so in the Zen originals, but in view eight, when you had the DMD and the play field in view, the DMD was a mess. Everything. Absolutely, like, missed frames, like blurriness. It's like someone's just dragging the dots over the screen, smearing everything. Like, in Safecracker, for example, and again, probably frames per second at play here, if it's clocking at 33 or 36, but you're trying to see the dice numbers flicking past in the board game. Impossible. You cannot see them clearly like you can in FX3. It was just a blurry mess. I don't know why. And even things like when things are scrolling across the screen, you're getting this drag of stuff going over the screen. I don't know why. I don't know if anyone else was experiencing that, but it is woeful for me. Just horrible. But if you go to Vue 2, DMD, top left corner, wherever you have it positioned, clear. So it's something that was viewable. This is where there's going to be disparity between everybody's rigs. And you didn't see that. I didn't see that at all. I wonder if it's an issue with RTX. Maybe. I mean, yeah. So, folks, if you guys are experiencing any of these kind of things where something that I'm experiencing or something you're like, well, that's not what I experienced, but I'm experiencing what Jared is experiencing, you can drop us a comment, but use the tab in the game to let Zen know. Yeah, I've already raised a number of bugs. For State Cracker in particular, I raised the issues with the blurriness of the DMD and stuff like that. In fact, across all Williams tables in PUA, they're all blurry and they're all weird. Amazing. So what I was going to say, though, the good performers, AFM, Attack from Mars, 60 frames, didn't matter what I was in. What about the reflection? The reflection. The playthrough reflection looks like it's been a recently refurbished table. It's gloss-like. That table has been performanced and tuned. Amazing. You could pretty much say, oh, yeah, so we know the tables that people are probably going to buy day one based on the purchase history of FX3. Sure. So let's focus out if they're making these. Absolutely right. Yeah. I actually think, I will say this, I think the reflections they've got on AFM at the playfield reflections at the moment actually do break the realism of the table. It's a little bit too shiny for me. Like, you can see the saucer in enhanced mode like reflecting off the playfield. I was going to say, you can see, because I wasn't playing in enhanced mode, I was just playing regular mode, but the red lights around the saucer, you see them reflected on the playfield. Yeah. And I love that. That's, no, I want more reflections. I mean, it's good, but I don't think it's realistic. that's... On Belly Williams' tables, it's not. I mean, maybe if you have a completely resprayed, clear-coded playfield like you old Scott, maybe you could get that reflection, but I don't know. Just my personal preference, it needs to be just slightly more match than that. Just slightly more. So anyway, AFM, solid. Monster Bash and Medieval Madness, both of them clocked at 55 in view 8 about 53 in view 2 very playable in that respect anything I think plus minus 5 frames a second is acceptable yeah so yeah I think those two I would agree are playing really nicely as well very playable then like Black Rose came at 55 to 51 Theater of Magic was 53 to 50 so those are fairly acceptable Getaway was 49 to 55 again very acceptable but then tables like Safecracker like I said it was at 39 frames Creature was at 39 to 41 oh really I did notice it was pretty janky something that was odd with Creature that I'd love to know if anybody else has experienced so when you're in the multiball mode and you're able to send the ball into the bowl I'm only getting one turn out of the bowl before the ball drains. And it should at least be two. Should, I would think. You should get two out of it. I mean, I managed... I managed to have a cracker of a game on this in Netherworld, and I think I got maybe two and a half spins out of that thing. It's not Farsight's four. No, it's definitely not four. Geez. I don't know how they managed to get four. But the one, it literally... It's not traveling very fast. He goes one, and they go... And then plunks in. I'm like, no, I should be hitting for a two. Yeah, it should be getting two. And then what do we got? So Champion Pub was 46 to 48. Party Zone, 43, no matter what view I was in. Junkyard, 45, no matter what view I was in. and then when we go to so you were saying that the Zen Originals were doing really well for you Rome 60 frames that was locked in I'm going to talk about Rome for a second though here comes again disappointment I'm sorry those inserts look like crap they just look like painted words like a photoshop slap on you compare that to Castle Storm where the inserts are glowing and light looks like it's coming through the bottom of them. Yeah. Guys, go back in on Rome and do something about those inserts. They're terrible. Also, on Rome... Just on Castle Storm. Is that one of the games they announced on release? What? Because I didn't see that in my collection. Which? Castle Storm. I thought it was one of the ones that they said they were going to do But I didn't see it in my collection of games Did you play it? Yeah Huh, I must have skipped it That's weird Okay, I'm going to have to go back and play that Because I actually really like Castle Storm Yeah It's a great table Yeah, so that's where it's at Go back and you guys got more work to do on Rome in terms of lighting Well, not only that, but just overall definition of the layers of the play field. Well, because it's all flat. It's all flat lighting. There's no contrast. There's no shadow. So that's where it needs that math. I'm really struggling. Put on it. I'm struggling playing that game. I lose where the perspective of the ball is on that game. I really do. The other thing, and this goes for quite a few of their early originals. But specifically on Rome, the call-out, the voice work is horrendous. It doesn't. I don't think they're going to change that. This cheery, teeny-bopper blonde is all I can picture telling me, ball out. This is freaking Rome. Give me a gladiator. Give me a Spartan. Give me something tough, gruff, or just British. Grab a voice. I don't care. Or just British. you know what it reminds me of Jared it reminds me of the voice work we did for the Zachariah table yeah that's right not good, pyre professionals yeah so anyway Rome, Castle Storm plays great at 55 frames Sun of Zeus plays at 56 frames the worst performers for me Sky Pirates 39 frames what was the other one? Oh, Mummy is at 40 frames. Yeah, it's struggling at the moment. Noir was at least at 44 so Noir to me played pretty good a little more mind-fitting will help. About Noir which you can go into after you've gone through your frame rating, but let's circle back to Noir for this. Yeah, everything else though was right in the 50 50 range 51, 52 range so not bad. The best performers were all the Universal tables. So Jaws, 60 frames. Jurassic Park, all three of them were 53, 54. Back to the Future was 60 frames. And then, like I said, VT I couldn't test because clearly I'd hit the limit. And then the Star Wars tables, New Hope and Clone Wars. New Hope was at 57 frames. Clone Wars was at 54 frames. Everything else was in the high 40s, except for Mando. Mando was at 43. for me. Right. So, again, I don't know if that will be corrected by me getting more RAM. I'll say this, that I'm enjoying playing Mando in pinball effects more than I am in VR. And obviously there are clear limitations between what the Quest hardware is versus my PC but just the resolution it just so much more easy on the eye than it is in Star Wars VR I really wish they, if it's possible, they'd go back and re-look at Star Wars VR with the lessons they've learned with Unreal, because that one was running Unreal. It was their first real-world attempt at running Unreal on a platform. I'd like them to go back and do a patch at some point on VR because it's hard to look at those games with the aliasing and the jankiness. And it's so much more fun to play it on PC, unfortunately. Because it's so... The experience playing these games in VR is the best. I would have it over sitting at a PC any day. But it's the resolution that just kills me. It's just unfortunate. Maybe I just had too high expectations. with what VR can do at the moment. But, yeah. I'm going to go into a couple of folks. This show is going to run long. Yeah, so strap in. Go get yourself a snack. Press pause, get your snack, come on back, because I can guarantee you we're going for another half an hour at least. Things that definitely need correction. so right now there's no PS4 controller support it's all Xbox 360 controller support which by the way neither have rumble there is no rumble option yeah that's right now you mention it I now miss it but thanks for that Chris in order to get my PS4 controller to work I had to use DS for Windows, a third-party app, to make it work, which obviously introduces latency. So that's not good. It's not like you can't use a PS4 controller on Epic because I was doing just that with playing Tony Hawk. And not only that, but it recognized as a PS4 controller and therefore changed all the buttons to what is on the PS4 controller. That's mean. so and we have the ps4 controller working in steam for when i was playing fx3 i let the team know at zen about the controller and they just kind of went oh that's interesting like buy a freaking ps4 controller and plug it in guys yeah i've been making this complaint since pinball fx2 by the way because pinball fx2 i had to use ds for windows to get that to work there so yeah well I'm surprised to bother plugging in and you might as well make it work for a PS5 controller because there's a lot of people that are trying to do that now too well I'm thinking if it's going to be released on PS5 aren't they going to have to sort that out anyhow so maybe we're going to see vast improvements when it goes to PS5 I really want well let's just start with this for the Williams Tables why are we going to the casino hotel lobby lounge carpet area when we could just have the machine in our game room like you do in the VR version of the game and you can have your collectibles there in the background it's your room why are we playing in suddenly some foreign environment get rid of that, make it so that we're playing in our room and honestly surely it's going to make an improvement to frame rate. You would think? If you're not having to render a brand new environment. And it's such a jarring experience having the Williams stuff. It's a disconnect. It takes you out of... It makes it look like they slapped three different games together. I'm thinking, though, devil's advocate here, I'm thinking of potentially scientific games that might have been part of the deal. They wanted more Williams branding in the game. Fine, so you know what? Put big Williams logos either side of the machine. No, yeah, yeah. Let us have a Neon Williams and Bally sign up on our collectibles thing so that whenever we play one of those, that's what appears on the shelf there. Simple solution. Yes, I agree. There is definitely a solution here, and I would love to wave bye-bye to that Williams environment. It was nice at the time, but when you're mixing all the other tables in with the ecosystem that is your fan cave environment, it's not right. It needs to go. Yeah. The generic table that's in the middle there, when you put up a Zen original, you get a generic wrap of pinball effects on the side of the cabinet and a woefully terrible back blast image. Yeah, it's pretty low res, isn't it? It's pretty low res and it's pretty basic. there are numerous people that have made feather back glasses, myself included. Take a look. Use one of them. They look so much better. Let us change the license on our set of back glasses, and please freely have them all, Zen. I understand doing the generic Zen pinball effects wrap on a machine. Fine. I'm fine with that. You don't have to go and, you know... Make a spoke art for each. Exactly. But the back glass, you really should. Because when I play in cabinet mode, eventually, I want a good back glass out of you guys. Yeah, that's right. Like an official back glass. An official back glass that takes account for where the DMD is. Yeah, that's right. Because that's the problem. So many of the back glasses that people did, then they slapped the DMD over the top of it, and it's blocking out art and blocking out words and everything. that's not a properly designed back glass or trans light. No. You know, so it's one of those quality of life things, call it, to the game, that would be the kiss of polish that Zen is known for. So I hope they get around to that. I think they will, Chris, and I think it will become more when cabinet mode becomes the focus. I think they're probably working up to that. Yeah. For sure. Now, I don't think these things should be locked into only cabinet mode is what my point being. I think... I don't think so either. This is where the next one comes in. Okay. I want to be able to play Xen Originals as if they were contained inside an actual cabinet. I want cabinet walls, I want cabinet artwork, and I want nothing else in the environment. Even though you guys went through all that, I mean... And again, I want this to be able to be... Pick your poison. You know? Do you want the original Zen feel, or do you want that simulation of what it would actually be playing like in a arcade cabinet? And I would have never known how much I missed it until I played Pinball FX 2 VR and saw games like Castle Storm contained within, or just any of the VR games they had contained within a cabinet. A cabinet. Yeah. It looks really, really good. Yeah. Yeah. I would agree. For sure, it messes with certain games, like... Sounds like Super White Buzzy's Star Wars. Well, I was thinking like... It literally goes outside. Yeah, Return of the Jedi. Return of the Jedi legitimately looked small inside of the cabinet, because it's like a square table, and all of a sudden it has to fit inside of the cabinet. So it's not going to work 100% of the time across all your tables, and I get that. But that's where it's like, okay, for this one, fine, let me flick the switch, and I'm back into that full room. But if we can do with the – so check this out. This is what my idea is. So just like on Williams tables, you can turn on and off the enhanced effects at the click of a button. For the Zen originals, I want that same feeling. Click on and off, it takes away the environmental effects and contains it inside of the cabinet. So instead of – because you can't get rid of all the animations. That's obviously not possible. but you could, boom, magic wipe of the button and now it's contained inside of a table. Let me have that. The other thing you could do really easily is take a very large leaf out of the Star Wars VR thing and promote some of those figures that you see in the play field to full life figures outside of the cabinet. I mean, that was a really good experience. Yeah, when you eventually go to make these all in VR, then you'll have already done the work. Well, yeah. I mean, it'll be ready to go. And honestly, I would... Like, having it... I mean, sure, that's probably going to be a non-trivial amount of work. I can hear the developers groaning as we speak about this now. But, you know, switching off the sort of, like, playfield effects and then promoting them outside the cabinet, making everything inside generic, I can imagine that's non-trivial to do. But... It's like that way of thinking. It's what we're expecting. This is supposed to be a next-gen game. Show me next-gen. Show me the things we've been wishing for and hoping for all the while playing FX3, going, well, it's not going to happen in FX3. But now we have a new platform. Make it really different. Yeah, and you're right. There's nothing wrong with thinking blue sky and going, right, so unicorns and rainbows, what would we want to see in this game as time progresses? and, without a doubt, changing up the environmental effects. And, you know, things like... One thing that they did well in VR, too, which they could probably take cues from for cabinet mode, etc., is for those really wide-body tables in VR, they actually did make a wider cabinet, and they made the cabinet square rather than rectangular as well. So they did adjust the, I guess, the playfield and cabinet dimensions for those games. It's actually a little bit similar to you. Because, you know, if you can blow up Safecracker to basically look like a full-size table, you can do the same thing with a wide body and... Absolutely, you can. You know, change the cabinet to make it handle it. Absolutely, you can. Especially if Zen ever happens to, and not that I think they ever will, but if they ever get around to doing those ultra-wide body valleys... Oh, like Future Spa. Future Spa and Embryon, you're going to need a square table. Yep, yep, yep, yep, for sure. They are weird. In fact, you know, Futurespa, as I was saying, that thing about going super wide-body was exactly the table I was thinking of when I was comparing it to what they could do cabinet-wise. You even see, like when you switch it between the System 11 games like, not System 11, the odd back-box games like Black Rose and Radio Zone. Oh, right, with the belly back-box. Yeah, it has a proper belly showcase, whatever that backbox style is called, with the speakers on the top and the DMD incorporated into the back. So that all changes up as well, and that's really cool to see. So I would agree. When we're thinking about things that we'd like to see, I think that the point that you're trying to make here, Chris, is not to be limited by the past. Right. Put the ideas out there and really try and expand what you could do with this platform. Because if you're trying to convince people to buy games that they already have owned on FX3, the best way to do that is to give them something that they haven't experienced in FX3. Correct. And these are the kind of things that I'm talking about. Yep, absolutely. It needs to be, like, what is the value proposition for people who are looking down the barrel of $150 going, why would I spend that now? Yeah. And it needs to be compelling enough. It's not quite there yet. That's okay. It's early access. I 100% get that. It's about finding the bugs, solving the bugs before they go to console. That's what we're doing here. Right. I want to know who's on the roadmap. I want to know that it's a target and that they are going to go there so that I don't have to worry about it and complain about it all the time, hoping that I complain enough that it'll make it happen. Be aware that I'm not the only one that wants this stuff. Yeah, yeah. All you out there want this stuff. And this is what we were expecting. This is why I'm disappointed because I'm not seeing it now, and I don't know that I'm going to see it. And if I continue to not see it, I'm going to continue to be disappointed. Yeah. So would you think So if they If they had your time again And they were releasing The FX day one Early access If they had hints Of things in the game that were Different but maybe underbaked Would that have changed your opinion About what your Would that have changed your disappointed underwhelmed Opinion to something a little bit higher Like optimistic but still a little underwhelmed, you know? Like, how would they have been able to change your opinion of the game by doing things differently? Sure. That's an interesting question. For starters, that clear roadmap. So, yes, again. So public roadmap is what you're after. We understand this is early access. Tell us what are placeholders. Yep. You know? Tell us. With no dates, but just what pieces are planned. Again, take the Williams Vegas lobby as an example. Folks, this is not the finished look. We are going to eventually have it be your man cave, your fan cave. It's going to be better integrated. Right. But for now, we are looking at purely performance issues and physics issues. This is what our concentration is. once we have those dialed in, we can change the aesthetics and those will be coming. Just like we know that Pinball Royale is coming. We know that clans are coming. We know that there's going to be network things and tournaments that they have yet to work out. We know those are on the agenda. Roadmen. So we're not even thinking about those until they come out. Right. Yeah. You know, so, Zen, tournaments. if you don't think people are going to be exceedingly disappointed if all that pops up in tournaments is exactly what we have in FX3, you've got another thing coming, because people are going to be really disappointed because they're expecting new and improved tournaments. All the things that they wanted, especially those that set up weekly tournaments, if those things aren't promised, they don't have to be implemented right off the bat. But if they're not promised and shown that we're going to get them eventually, those people are going to be very disappointed right off the bat. But if you can set my expectations and say, they're going to come, give us a moment, but for right now, then I'm not going to be disappointed. Then I'm going to be like, oh, okay, well, I'll concentrate on what's here in front of me and knowing that these other things are going to come eventually. Yeah. I think public roadmaps, I mean, I'm working in product teams all the time in what I do as a day job being a technical writer. And whenever the subject of public roadmaps come up or features that you tell the public, everyone gets jittery because things change rapidly in business. and you'd never know those publicly promised things become canon and people will hold you to the fire for them when you're doing it. Like Farsight Spinball After Dark? Yeah, exactly. That's a really good example of a public roadmap gone wrong. Right. So that is a good example of why public roadmaps are risky business. I'm sure Mel would probably confirm. They're risky business, but I hate to say it. Zen put themselves behind the eight ball on a bunch of things. We're about to talk about the biggest one. Yeah. But when you set yourself up for a tsunami of disappointments, it's nice when you can dangle a couple of carrots and go, wait, wait, wait, wait, so that people can at least go, oh, well, you know, give them the out. And right now we're not getting the out. Yeah. Yeah, it's true. All right, let's go into this. Folks, I hate tickets. There you go. Hate it. Hate, hate, hate, hate, hate. I don't like prices obscured by this system. it just infuriates me because you have to do so much math. And basically, and we've talked about this multiple times, especially we talked about it with the Williams Pinball app where it first got introduced. It's going to Dave & Buster's, buying 20 bucks and putting it on your Dave & Buster's card, and then going and playing the games, but they're not just one credit. It's, this one's $1.33, this one's 75 or 78 cents. It's all these weird numbers, so at the end of the day, you either have too few credits left on your card to actually play a game, or just too many that you're going to have a little bit left over. You're going to have, you know, 23 cents left over on your card. And so, you always feel like you didn't come out even. There's not a clean, even number to come out with. Like, you know, I had $20 if I had 20 games. Right. That sort of thing. Right. So, that's why I really despise tickets. The other thing is, now, granted, at least then did this part right. You pay $10, you get 100 tickets. So it's kind of a one-to-one. You know, it winds up 100 tickets is... So, like, in the case of a table costing 40 tickets, it costs $4, in other words. Yeah. Right? Yeah. So that math... You can do that math pretty easily. You can do that math pretty simply. Yeah. That's better. But if then you do what it is right now, which is as soon as this first week, all the tables are... Or not all the tables, the legacy tables are 33% off. Well, what's 33% of 40? Well, it's a decimal, that's for sure. Right. And so are we rounding up? Are we rounding down? And it becomes this weird thing. And how do we know that it's a weird thing? Because, folks, 1,200 tickets does not buy you every single table. You're shy by 13 tickets. As we found out. Yeah. So, again, because we like to be transparent about these, thank you, Zen, for giving us entitlements for all the tables except for Indiana Jones we're still waiting on. We got dumped 1,200 tickets each so we could go and experience what it was like buying the tables. And I'll say this, the actual act of buying, like if you go, right, I know how much, I've done the math, I know how much I want to buy, I need to buy this pack, or in our case, we've been given code to unlock that amount of tickets in the game, then spending those tickets in the game, that's not a terrible experience. No. It's actually quite good. Like the actual user journey from going to, I want to buy, selecting all the tables, like you just go, oh, select all tables, you view. And then we found out that we're 13 tickets short. And you can guarantee it was those decimal points that killed us, like those 33% off, that was 13 tickets out somehow. Because it seems too perfect for Zen to set up the 1,200 tickets for the exact amount of tables that they released. You would think that that would have covered it to the T. Boom, bam, viable. Yeah. So it would have been 1,213 tickets. Or if they did the gospel points right, should have been 1,200 tickets were necessary to buy all these tables. Now, they can correct this a little bit, I would think, which is saying how many tickets you need to buy ahead of time. Like if you were like, hey, I'm going to select all of these, how many tickets is it? And I think it does kind of tell you how many it is, but that should match up with a multiple of one of the ticket prices or packs that you can purchase. It's true. I mean, what you could do is you could go into the shop, you could select all tables, and then it tells you how much you get paid. Yeah. So it's easy enough to work out how many tickets you need to buy based on just going to the cart, filling it, and then working out... I mean, that's how I would have done it if I didn't get granted the tickets from Zin. I would have just gone, select all tables, what's the damage, how much do I have to pay the man, and then work it out from there. And it would have been, you know, go and buy a 1,200-ticket pack plus an extra one because, you know, at the end of the day, there's going to be more content coming out. So I'm going to be spending it anyhow, right? Right. But here's why I loathed the ticketing, though. Again, it's one thing if you spent $100 to get 1,200 tickets. It's another thing if you were like, well, I'm not sure what I want to do right now. I just want to purchase a couple of tables. well now you're paying more money ridiculously more money um to buy a small pack of things and this is where so i was expecting okay you pay 10 bucks to get 100 tickets a typical zen pack on steam at full price was three tables for 9.99 so 3.33 cents per table so I would expect to have gotten three tables for $10 just matching the full price of what you can currently buy an FX3 table for but unfortunately those then originals are 40 tickets so you need 120 tickets in order to buy three at full price I'm not talking about the 33% discount I'm saying just at full price because this is apples to apples to what it costs over on Steam Yeah. So right off the bat, I was disappointed in that we were told, hey, there's going to be a deal on legacy tables for you guys. We understand to try and ease the burden. Soften the blow. Soften the blow of switching over. Well, as I looked more and more at this, that blow is not softened in the least, even with 33% off if you buy it in that first week. So check this out. Currently, like you can buy the pack of Castle Storm that comes with Castle Storm and Wild Wilderness Rampage. You can buy that for $5. So that's $2.50 per table. On Steam. On Steam. That's full price. But there are 40 tickets apiece in this. That means there are $4 apiece. So let's say, though, that you buy it at the 33% off. well, if you only did it at the, you know, bought that 100th pack, that puts them at $3.08. So you're still paying more. So let's say you bought the 1200, though. Now what's it down to? Now it's down to $2.57. So you're still paying more than what you paid full price for FX3. Now, I understand, obviously, there is the development cost. And if this is to a new audience, they're not going to know the difference. No, they're not. But us that have been around a while, we know. And we've said, hey, you can't base prices of tables that were long ago made all these years ago. So I understand the price increase. What I don't understand, though, is this is not benefiting the early adopters or being a thank you to the people that were over. It's steep. But that's on the cheap end. So check this out. Your Williams tables, they were always basically $3.33. But here they're $4.50. Right. That's a jump. Because there are 45 tickets to purchase. So it's like, okay, I guess the math on that one winds up being $2.89. So, okay, you're saving a little bit on that one. Your Star Wars tables, which are 45 tickets. Because it's the way it breaks down. You could have gotten that for $2.50, and now it's $2.89 if you did the 12. But if you're doing just, again, that's with the 33% off. If you're going straight up pricing and you only bought the 100 tickets, it's $4.50. as opposed to the $2.50 that you paid on Steam. Yeah. That's why I just hate the ticketing, and I don't like the pricing. I don't think it's as friendly. I don't have a problem with them charging for Noir, which is basically $5.50, what they're charging for Mando, which is $6. I don't have a problem with the new tables costing that much. Yeah, but the Legacy ones, though? But the Legacy ones... They... Particularly, and I say this with, you know... I guess there's Legacy and then there's Legacy, right? So there's the Legacy licensed, then there's the Legacy Zen unlicensed. Right. Where Zen could have done something different here is they could have taken a larger hit on the Zen unlicensed. I get that they've got to pay the licensor a fee. And that's 100% fair that those are a little bit more expensive. And it's reflected in the ticket price. But when it's an in-house table, and to an extent, like Noir, Sky Pirates, et cetera, this could have actually been a lost leader as well with some of these tables as well for early adopters. Sure. Bump the price up to what it is normally after the promo ends. But as lost leaders, like, they could have actually dropped the price on those a bit more as well. Well, and again, here it comes with if these tables looked drastically different, if Rome looked drastically better, they'd be like, yes. Justified. Justified. But it doesn't. It looks the same, and it has bad insert lighting right now. Yeah. Where you're not appealing to me on that front. Where's my extra dollar-y dudes going? Right. You know, yeah. I know what you're saying. I'm trying to figure out what the mentality is here. With the tickets. I understand why Zen, to a sense, Zen is internalizing all the currency. It's now through them because you're buying it through them. You're not buying it through Epic. You're buying it in-game. you are buying it in game through Epic, Epic actually handles the purchase though, so when you purchase it goes through the Epic game store as the broker for the transaction okay, so like the currency is then, you know what I mean because I imagine this currency is going to be whatever the next iteration of VR is I imagine it's going to be you know, if they come up with a mobile app it's going to use the exact same currency I'd say same thing in consoles so there seems to be a unity there am I off base here? no I think you're right I think tickets are going to be a thing and I've got a theory about why ok tell me why so what is the when you see let's compare this whole ticket thing to other games that use similar you know in game currency ok think of those games like that are cross-platform, iOS, Android, even in some cases PC. I'm trying to think of a good example. I'm thinking like Rocket League. Yeah, Rocket League is a good example, right? So these ones allow you to play on any platform that you have an account for because the account is centrally managed, which it appears to be that way. At least at the moment it uses your Epic game credentials to provision your account automatically in the game which is nice by the way that it does that You don have to do a farsight login for example which was a total pain in the butt. So, I mean, that's good. So you've got the login that would follow you around per platform, but what is the rub with one of those universal accounts? it always comes down to the currency and how you buy. So to get around that problem, you introduce your own currency, which you can then have sovereignty over in the game. It's cryptocurrency. It's then crypto. No, it's not. It's not on the blockchain. So I have to say no. But I get what you're saying. It is something that once you've paid the actual physical currency for it out of your pocket, it's then available for you in the game on any platform, perspective. You could actually carry your 10 tickets from Epic over to Steam, over to Nintendo eStore. Well, not Nintendo eStore, but like Nintendo. You see where I'm going here? Like, once you've paid a dollar value through a store, it doesn't matter which one, those tickets are yours. Okay. And that ability to purchase anything on any platform and then have that reflected in your account that follows you around per platform is the thing. I think that's what they're trying to do here. So, let me ask you this. Mm-hmm. In Rocket League. Yeah. If I play on PC and I earn parts, okay? I earn different customizations to my car, okay? Yeah. Then I go and I flip on the Switch version of Rocket League. It knows what I've earned, and those things are now available in the Switch version of the game. Mm-hmm. Are you saying that you think that this is what Xen is going for? Yeah, I think that... To what extent? I think, and this is what I think is going to be happening here, I think the whole complaint that every single person gets on the platform is, oh, I've got my games on PS5, can I carry them over to Steam? Yeah. That is what this ticket system is going to solve. Okay. Because you might notice that when you fire up the game, it does a very quick entitlement check across all the different tiles in the game. You see a lot of little spinning symbols. Yeah. And every time it loads back the screen it does an entitlement check to see what tiles should be enabled and what tiles should be disabled based on your purchases. So if it does that on Switch, if it does that on PS5, Xbox, every single time it loads you've got yourself cross-platform play folks that's what it is which would make people happy because then it's i bought i i paid let's say i paid six dollars which is more than i paid on steam for a table but i can literally carry that everywhere i go on my mobile when it comes out of mobile on it's my switch when i'm on the go it doesn't matter it's my entitlement okay that would be cool that would go a long way to then helping me justify prices as they currently are. So I take it you haven't gone on Discord? No, I haven't. Okay. I'll keep it away from you. So Mel went on Discord and was answering questions, for which the community was very thankful to finally have some real interaction going on. Yeah, right. It's always good. We like it. Somebody by the name of The Clath asked, if that's the case, why not allow me to play tables I buy on any platform? I'd end up buying a ton more. And Mel responded, well, that's our intention. It's not confirmed yet, but the groundwork is there, and over time we think the industry will allow us to do this while still operating under platform TRCs. Wow. Okay. Okay. So, I mean... Well, that kind of backs up what I'm saying then, right? Kind of. I get what it... So, what it sounds more like, though, is they can't guarantee it to us right now because they've got a ton of work to navigate that minefield. But the infrastructure is there, and it's in place. And if I had to guess, they're hoping, I would think, to maybe have that dialed in by the time it comes to console? Console and Steam? Sounds like they are. I mean, yeah. I mean, for it to work, they would need to somehow link the platforms through a common login system that manages entitlement. So if they can do that across platform, there's no longer a problem with moving between platforms anymore on any Xen game. And I'd say, while Pinball FX is the first, that actually may pave the way for literally every Zen Studios game to be cross-compatible. You buy tickets and now you can use those leftover tickets to buy Operencia or Dreadnought. Yep. Exactly. It becomes the Zen currency across all their games, a universal currency across all their games that you can use everywhere. I mean, if that's what's going down here, then sign me the heck up because that is going to make a lot of people happy. Again, that would ease the pain. That would ease the pain. And it would help me justify the cost of all this. It still doesn't negate my requests, though, to amp this thing up. Give me better. Give me the promise that is Attack from Mars across all the Williams tables. Give me the promise that is Castle Storm across all the Xan Originals. That's what I would really hope for. Oh, absolutely. By the time it comes to the actual launch launch, that those things are in place and people will feel good if they waited. And I guess that's the ultimate question, Jared. What do you think people should do right now? Do you think that they die? If somebody said, should I buy now or should I wait? What's your what's your gut tell you? well look when it comes to anything early access my recommendation is to wait until ga to general availability of the game like you you enter into early access and you purchase things through early access knowing that it's going to be imperfect and you may not have a fantastic experience playing things and i think at the moment to some extent that is true of pinball effects measuring that though at the same time it's early access and if you want to get a heads up about what the game is going to become then you get in there and you get amongst it now if on the subject of buying and investing into the game now in early access um i My recommendation would be to go and get all the new tables that have never been made available in the game. I would absolutely wholeheartedly recommend getting Noir, getting Sky Pirates, getting the new Star Wars tables, begrudgingly even collectibles. But it's, you know, go and get all the new original tables. And to do that, you don't have to spend a great deal of money at the moment to do that. And maybe at the same time, pick up some of your favorite, like your absolute, I cannot not have this tables, like maybe some Belly Williams tables, like Attack from Mars, etc. Okay. And that's probably where I'd stop for now. and then when, you know, it's a tricky one because you go, well, then I will lose the 33% discount, right, if I don't buy everything now. But that's, you know, the price you pay if you're on the fence for these things. And, you know, down the track, you will get a chance to get tables again at a reduced price. It's guaranteed. Like, you can pretty much, I would assume that when they release all the tables on the other consoles, there's going to be another push. There's going to be a discounted price push. And the interesting thing is that if this cross-buy thing does come to pass, you can buy them on PS5 at a reduced rate, and those intelligence will just miraculously slide over into Epic Games. So if you're smart about this and you have the ability to purchase through multiple platforms, you may, and again, speculation, if they work this out and you get the ticket cross-buy thing working, you've got way more opportunities to get discounted games through this platform. And that's potentially a win. So what I would tell people is this. if you are purely just wanting to play pinball and get on leaderboards now's not the time no because you're going to not have a good experience it's going to leave a bad taste in your mouth and you're not helping the development you're merely there to play rather than further it along to get it into a state of good playing. That being said, yes, purchase the new stuff. Continue doing your leaderboard chasing on FX3, but the new stuff, purchase. Yeah. If you are, however, someone who wants to get their voice heard, wants to get their opinion about the state of the game and where you'd like to see it go, then by all means invest in it and not necessarily buy every single thing no, there is again go with what you really do enjoy playing that you know inside and out so that you can give a better opinion on that and get into that state of thing however, for also just the general public, feel free to download the game because right now And I think for the foreseeable future, there's a rotation of two-table games every single day. Yeah, for the entire early access. They're doing new tables every day you can play them for one-off. Yeah, which means you don't have to invest anything. You don't have to pay a single cent. Bug check. Two tables in any given day. Consider it a daily challenge. Right. And try them out, and you're going to quickly see which tables work on your rig, which ones don't. don't. So that then, if you invest money in any of them, you're at least buying the ones that function. So like for me, if I knew that Attack from Mars played at 60 frames, even on my rig that's only 8 gigabyte RAM, I'm like, hey, there's at least a table that if I purchase it, I'm going to be happy with how it's playing right now. Same with Jaws. I'd purchase Jaws because I know it's going to play good. I'm not going to purchase Safecracker at this moment because it runs like crap. Yes. You know, so if I'm testing that with what the daily table is and I have a bad experience with one and I have a good experience with the other, I'll make a notation and be like, okay, then that one is one that I'm going to go ahead and plunk some money into. Yeah. But I agree. It's kind of a wait. If all you're going to do is be angry at it, you're going to want to wait. If you want to help the cause. and help Zen and know that you're essentially being a beta tester and dialing things in because they're going to get a ton of data out of this. Oh, they are. That'll help things along. Then, by all means, jump in. Can I just circle back for a moment to the whole currency thing and the purchasing? So I just made the connection then when we're talking about, you know, buying things that you like and whatever. But what flashed into my mind is that the cost of tickets is set, but the discounts applied are in the platform. So this is another thing that I think plays into the whole cross-platform buying thing because the actual dollar value from the sale of the tickets is the set price, and it's handled in-app per platform, what the discounts are applied. So I think they have a lot more control because in Steam, you purchase a pack on sale. Yeah. Whereas now what you're doing is you're purchasing essentially the right to access the full version of the table at a reduced ticket cost. So the subtle difference, it still feels like you're getting a discount off the dollar value, but you're not. You're actually getting a discount off the ticket value that you pay. Which allows them to spread out the cost across every table. Yeah. Because they're getting the money, and it's them getting to allocate which one needs the funding and which one doesn't, more or less. One last aspect before we go to Touchpond, Jared. Yeah, okay. In the pinball show where they broke down all the pricing, They mentioned that the premium license, like Indiana Jones, are not going to be ticket. They're going to be $14.99. Yep. Which means a lot of those Williams tables that have yet to be made that are fully licensed, I imagine, are all going to be $14.99. Yep. How do you feel about that price? Too much? I think for Indiana Jones, justified. I think I will take it on advisement for some of the other ones that are coming through. I think, you know, some of the really big titles, we've seen the costs involved in the Adams family, Terminator 2. Like, we know those solar values. I think Indiana Jones was magnitudes larger than those, so the price is reflective of that. I don't think that if these more premium license tables come out, I don't think they're going to be at that $15.99 US mark for all of them. But having them exclusive from the teething system raises an interesting point if cross-buy is going to be a thing. Are those tables going to come with you platform to platform? or are they licensed differently in a way that prevents them from being included in the cross-buy, cross-license deal? I'm going to say it's the latter. I think it's the latter as well. I think that if you want those premium experiences, you're going to have to pick and choose what platforms you buy them on because of the extreme cost per license. Here's why I say that. Those tables. Here's why I think it's the latter. I have my suspicions that Indiana Jones is a true loss leader for Zen. I would back you up on that, too. What we mean by loss leader, folks, is it costs them more than what they're charging you. But the intent is to get you in so then you'll buy other things that are in the store. It's the $1.99 hot dog and drink. Yes. You know? Absolutely. It gets you in and makes you buy $400 worth of televisions. Right. Exactly. Part of that is that with licensing, these IP holders are getting a cut of each sale, a percentage. And that is the deal that's struck. It's per sale of table. Yes. So, if you absorb that into a ticket arena, they don't know how much of a cut they're getting. No, it's opaque. Obfuscated, yes. So that's why it's a clear dollar amount. I have a feeling that certain licenses are going to be more expensive than other licenses but it's going to be $14.99 across the board for all of them to help balance out certain licenses that are higher versus certain licenses that are lower so that all ships ride at the same level you know while I while I'm thinking do I feel okay paying well let's say $15, $14.99 or whatever it is in the US. It's actually more like $22 here in Australia. Would I want to pay $22 for the Addams Family for T2? I'd struggle with T2 at $22. Addams Family, yeah, $22 for Addams Family. yeah I'm not going to be like yeah Gilligan's Island yeah hard no Bugs Bunny no strangely enough roller games yes $22 for roller games done right see this is the thing would I actually the whole question of would I not pay $22 for Terminator 2 the fact of the matter is I eventually probably would you know so So, and, you know, for some people that's going to be a hard no, because that's a fair bit of money to lay out for one table. But I always have to relate it back to, would I spend $22 on that game if I had it in the arcade? Yeah. Probably. And I know I'd spend way more than $22 on it in the arcade. If they're spread out, let's say once a quarter. It takes a sting out of it. yeah if they're there once a quarter there's a premium one it definitely takes a sting out of it if you're getting hit with it monthly ouch yeah that's they're going to see like if they were A B testing that and was doing a premium release a month they'd see some terrible sales figures like on that so they would not do that it would be spaced out it might even be spaced out every half year actually and mixed in with all the other releases, which, you know, I think there's going to be a lot of stuff coming through the game. I don't think you're going to be bored for choice over the next year as they start to release more stuff. So, you know, not having a premium table experience every quarter is not going to really hurt you that much. All right. Well, we're going to have to wait and see. We're going to have to ask, maybe as time goes by and we see what happens when Epic customers who also own consoles, what experience they get when they actually go over to the console, that's going to be the real telling point to see whether they've sorted out CrossFly and all the other things that we've mentioned up to now. So I think the deal is here, like I said, my gut reaction said disappointed, and what was the other word I used? Underwhelmed. Underwhelmed. I think. Yes. My disappointment was mainly in the ticketing system. If what you're theorizing comes true, that will change my opinion of the ticketing system. Yeah. The underwhelmed, there's plenty of time in early access to change that for me. Heaps of time. Heaps of time. And I don't think anything that I was suggesting is out of the realm of possibility. Absolutely not. I mean, when I was doing testing on Star Wars VR, what I was playing first up versus what we saw released to GA was just chalk and cheese. Yeah. And that was over the course of a couple of months. And I think Early Access is running about the same time. So I'm expecting to see dramatic changes to the platform. I would think probably a release every week is what we can expect for an update. and with significant changes across the board every time the release comes out. So that would be my expectation. I'm not – I may be coming across negative right now, but I'm optimistic. I'm not just like – I'm still not – It's more tempering. I'm still not sitting there going, cash grab, and, you know, and all that stuff. I'm definitely not there. I see the potential, and I hope that it meets the potential. I also hear the complaints, and I want Zen to shut those people up with a fantastic product. And I think that Zen can get there. I have every faith in their team that they can get there. I just want the team to want to get there. I think there's no doubt that they do. That's the thing. I have no question that they probably knew going into this early access of all the problems they wanted to solve, but they probably just got to the point where they ran out of time. And it might seem funny to say that they ran out of time, given the amount of time they've had prior to releasing stuff. But again, we'll circle back to the comments we made in the show at the start. It hasn't been two years of development. No. So, you know, they get what they get. They release this iteration one. They patch it, let's say, every week leading up to the go live consoles. And based on their history, I have no doubt that we're going to see plenty of improvements in the game leading up to that point. So, folks, treat the early access like it is designed to. Just as that. It's early access. Like it's designed to. Give Zen as much feedback as you can. Constructive criticism is the order of the day, not just crapping all over them, but actually giving them, hey, this is what I noticed in the game. Even for me, just a quick thing to point out that I noticed. Some of the enhanced effects still appear even when you have that off. I was playing Theater of Magic. Ball came out of the tunnel with a cloud of smoke. I went, hey, wait a second. I turned off enhanced effects. I was playing Medieval Madness. The dragon was still there. You turn off and the catapult is gone, but a shadow of the chicken is still there. Yeah, right. There's little things like that that they need to point out. Hey, this is there. Zen will be able to do that. And they go, cool, let's fix it. And they just add it to the backlog. And that's what we're doing. Early access is a round-trip communication opportunity. And, you know, if you, I would say this as well, if you raise a request through their in-product ticketing system, I would not expect a direct response. No. And I would also help them out. Please, this is coming from a software guy and someone who works in software all the day. please make your bug titles logical and put some sort of clear indication that this is a FX EA for FX Early Access in the bug titles so they can actually start filling in because there is actually no category in their support system to identify what platform this relates to, which I think they probably should have put a custom field in there into their fresh desk installation because it would have helped them. But, yeah, like, and always, when you're doing this sort of thing, put your system specs in. Yeah. Every time. Every single time. No matter if you've raised 10 bugs, 20 bugs, 50 bugs, always put your system specs in. It should be, literally, have a text file. It's a template that you use and you can't paste into the report. It helps them out so much if you do that. And it's important, even if you don't have a system that's up to spec, at least it gives them a clue of what is the true minimum. Yeah, if they're getting a lot of systems running like video cards lower than a GT 1660 or whatever, and they're seeing a trend of these people submitting bug reports, well, maybe we actually performance tune down to that card. This is vital information for them. Yeah, because Mel even said in the Discord, somebody had asked him about the Switch. And he says, Switch performance, lots of optimizations needed. So you can read into that saying that it's not fun to play on Switch at the moment. Well, he's playing it on Switch. But, yeah, it gives you a clue of, hey, they've got to optimize. Maybe those optimizations wind up working their way into your PC build also. Potentially. Yeah. so folks look this is the longest show we've ever done oh I don't know Chris we've done some long shows in the past we've never gone this is up there if there's anything you guys want us to raise because we do have a connection you know direct line to quite a few of the Zen people and you want to if there's anything you want to raise to us fire off that email blahblahblockade at gmail.com or hit us up on Twitter, drop us a message. That way we can kind of collect some of your thoughts or concerns or wants. I think that's the big one. Wants that you want to see come into this so that when we eventually get Mel on, and yeah, we'll have Mel on again, don't worry. We can bring those things up directly to him. If we have them early enough, sometimes we're able to because Mel doesn't necessarily always know the tech aspects of questions. We can submit those. We can give him questions with notice. Yeah. And that way he can ask the appropriate people and come back to us with an actually informed response. With a succinct answer about the problem. Yeah. Yeah. So feel free to do that with us also. Include us in your kind of comments and stuff. We are going to be paying attention to this closely and seeing what changes through this. I'm even keeping notes of what build we're on just so I know when things change build-wise so I can go, okay, what's changed this time? And we'll keep you informed as much as possible that aspect. Particularly for those folks who aren't on PC and want to see the development of this. Essentially, I mean, obviously people who are on PC and have access to Epic, this is not going to be news to you, but there's people out there that don't have early access, and hopefully what we're showing you and what will prove to be law as time goes on is that through these episodes, you're going to see how Zen iterates and improves and does this sort of stuff. So it's going to be hopefully an on-record sort of thing about how the platform evolves in these early stages, I think. All right. That's going to do it for us. I'm sure there's a ton of stuff that we thought that we were going to talk about today Jared and we skipped and we'll save that stuff for next time because Jared always loves to talk about stuff and things it's our favorite see you next time folks see you later