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Dee Ex Do-over

BlahCade Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·53m 44s·held·Jan 23, 2018
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.031

TL;DR

BlahCade A A Pinball Podcast rebrands and migrates to Medium; hosts critique TPA's technical issues.

Summary

Chris (Shut Your Trap) and Jared return to the BlahCade A A Pinball Podcast after a hiatus, announcing a rebranding to "BlahCade A A Pinball Podcast" with a new logo and migration to Medium.com. They discuss technical challenges with the domain setup, Chris's MoviePass subscription and plans to write movie reviews, a guest history piece on digital pinball for This Week in Pinball, and dive into technical issues with The Pinball Arcade's Sorcerer beta—particularly graphics rendering problems with DX9/DX11 compatibility and frustrations with the save system architecture.

Key Claims

  • BlahCade is rebranding to explicitly include 'pinball' in the podcast name to improve searchability on Google and iTunes

    high confidence · Chris explains that the old microphone logo didn't communicate 'pinball' clearly, making it harder for search engines and iTunes to surface the show

  • Medium.com no longer accepts new applications for custom domain forwarding; only existing custom domain users can continue using them

    high confidence · Chris describes discovering this limitation after migrating 120 episodes to Medium, about two weeks of work total

  • Sorcerer table is currently in beta on The Pinball Arcade with lighting issues in DX11 where insert lights flicker and dim inconsistently

    high confidence · Chris describes testing the beta and identifying specific insert brightness problems, noting inserts should match a reference brightness at 50% bulb setting

  • The Pinball Arcade has fundamental architecture issues where DX9 and DX11 versions function almost as separate programs, causing bugs that fix in one version but break in the other

    high confidence · Chris explains the two versions are essentially independent, making bug squashing doubly complex, and notes DX9 performs poorly compared to DX11

  • The Pinball Arcade's save system is broken across multiple Steam devices—achievements wipe when playing on different computers

    high confidence · Chris describes losing achievements when playing on a laptop after playing on a PC, and notes this is similar to issues with Google Play Games on Android

  • Pinball FX3 handles graphics settings in-game with real-time preview, whereas The Pinball Arcade requires external configuration and game restart to test changes

    high confidence · Chris compares Zen's implementation (toggle ball trails, shadows, reflections in-game) to TPA's clunky external DX configuration menu

  • Chris purchased a MoviePass subscription for $90/year allowing one movie per day, having seen 15 movies in theaters the previous year at ~$10 per ticket

    high confidence · Chris explains the economics: 9 movies would break even, and plans to write timely movie reviews on the new Medium site

Notable Quotes

  • “A logo really does have to slap you in the face as to what you're about, and the mic was very cool in the way it was designed, but it really didn't say pinball. It said podcast.”

    [name withheld pending review] @ early in episode — Explains the design philosophy behind the rebrand—clarity and immediate recognition matter more than subtle design

  • “the fact that I had to write a user guide on how not to screw your save games up on Google Play Games is testament to a bad user experience”

    [name withheld pending review] @ mid-episode during save system discussion — Highlights systemic design failures in how digital pinball platforms handle user data across devices

  • “And the thing that I know that this works because my laptop which is not very powerful at all can then run Pinball FX3 when I have all those settings turned off”

    Chris @ graphics settings discussion — Demonstrates that in-game graphics toggles are both feasible and beneficial for hardware flexibility

  • “It's like, why is it that Farsight hasn't done the DX11 version of this program in such a way that we can get rid of DX9 completely?”

    Chris @ mid-episode during DX discussion — Core frustration: supporting two graphics frameworks doubles development burden with no clear benefit

  • “I feel like they've tied themselves into knots and there's such a simpler way of handling it”

    [name withheld pending review] @ save system architecture discussion — Assessment of TPA's fundamental architectural choices as overcomplicated and self-defeating

  • “I have Steam installed on my laptop. I have Steam installed on my PC. I usually play TPA on the PC. If I am on my laptop and I go and play TPA, it wipes it across the board.”

    Chris @ save system issues discussion — Concrete example of how the broken save system affects real users with multiple devices

Entities

Chris FriebuspersonJared MorganpersonNorman Stepanskiperson[name withheld pending review]person[name withheld pending review]personThe Pinball ArcadeproductPinball FX3productBlahCade Pinball Podcastproduct

Signals

  • ?

    content_signal: BlahCade rebranding effort including name change, logo redesign, and platform migration to improve discoverability and expand content offerings

    high · Chris and Jared spent ~2 weeks collectively redesigning logo and migrating 120 episodes to Medium.com; adding 'pinball' keyword for SEO; plans to publish writing alongside podcast

  • ?

    product_concern: The Pinball Arcade's Sorcerer beta has insert light brightness/flickering issues where lights dim significantly when transitioning from blinking to solid state

    high · Chris identifies specific insert lighting problem in DX11 beta, provides precise feedback (reference brightness at 50% bulb setting), fears inserts will be 'nuked' by final release

  • ?

    product_concern: The Pinball Arcade has broken cross-device save system where achievements/high scores wipe when playing on different Steam devices; scores can spike to billions of points

    high · Chris describes losing all achievements when playing on laptop after playing on PC; notes previous update corrupted local high scores; Jared calls system fundamentally broken

  • ?

    technology_signal: The Pinball Arcade maintains separate DX9 and DX11 versions that function almost independently, doubling bug work and causing cross-version conflicts where fixing one breaks the other

    high · Chris describes DX9/DX11 as 'two completely different programs'; bug fixes in one cause regressions in the other; DX9 has worse performance; requires external config restart loop vs in-game toggle

  • ?

    product_concern: The Pinball Arcade requires external configuration menu restart loop to test graphics settings, versus Pinball FX3's real-time in-game toggle approach

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.161

0:00
this is the blockade podcast with your hosts chris and jared you are listening to the blockade podcast i am your host chris freebus aka shut your trap joining me after a small hiatus.
0:30
Hello, everybody. Happy New Year, belatedly. You're right. We didn't expect to have this long of a gap between the two of us talking, but holidays and work.
0:47
Yeah, they really kind of do. And yeah, it certainly did play a part in us sort of delaying things, but there's other things afoot as well, which kind of causes us to sort of hang off a little bit, which we'll talk about later, right, Chris? Yeah, we sure will. But I just wanted to say thanks once again for Norman Stepanski for coming in last week and basically filling in for Jared, if you will.
1:13
I don't think he realized he was going to be the fill-in host, but I kind of turned it into that anyway.
1:21
Yeah, he did a great job. He's going to put me out of a job, I reckon. I it's okay. I think he's already got one. Um, I want to make one clarification that he made to me after, uh, the podcast. Cause, uh, he prepared, even though he tried to be prepared regarding my question with the Nintendo switch and the user interface, uh, what he found out the user interface that is in the Nintendo switch right now, that is the original interface for that. Oculus was using. And since then, they have a new interface for Oculus.

  • Chris wrote approximately seven pages of digital pinball history starting from the Atari 2600 for a guest article on This Week in Pinball

    high confidence · Chris notes the article is extensive and will be broken into bite-sized chunks on the new website under a dedicated 'History of Digital Pinball' section

    • Sorcerer
    game
    Medium.comproduct
    Farsight Studioscompany
    Zen Entertainmentcompany
    MoviePassproduct
    This Week in Pinballproduct
    blockadepinball.comproduct
    Rebrandlyproduct
    Nintendo Switchproduct
    Oculuscompany
    Atari 2600product
    Steamproduct
    Google Play Gamesproduct
    Pinball Arcade Fans forumorganization

    high · Chris compares: TPA = click game, external config menu pops up, change setting, restart game, load game, check result, repeat; FX3 = in-game settings menu, toggle on/off, instant preview

  • ?

    code_update: Sorcerer table is in beta on The Pinball Arcade with known lighting rendering issues in DX11 that require developer attention before release

    high · Chris tested beta, identified insert light problems, submitted detailed feedback to developers noting specific brightness threshold to preserve

  • $

    market_signal: Chris purchasing MoviePass ($90/year) to enable timely movie reviews as part of BlahCade's expanded Medium content strategy

    high · Chris explains economics: $90 pass breaks even at 9 movies vs ~$10 matinee tickets; saw 15 movies last year; MoviePass enables frequent theater visits on whim

  • ?

    community_signal: BlahCade positioning itself as primary digital pinball podcast resource; commissioned to write guest history article for This Week in Pinball (real pinball–focused site)

    high · Jeff (This Week in Pinball) reached out; Chris wrote ~7 pages of digital pinball history from Atari 2600 forward; Jared notes they are 'the number one resource on the podcast theme for digital pinball'

  • ?

    manufacturing_signal: Zen Entertainment (FX3) optimized for DX11 only, dropping DX9 support; Farsight still maintaining dual DX framework despite performance cost

    medium · Jared notes Zen dropped DX9; PinballWiz45D mentions FX3 is DX11 only; Chris frustrated that Farsight hasn't followed similar consolidation approach

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Chris and Jared distinguish between fully-rendered table infrastructure (Zen) versus digitally-scanned asset composition (Farsight), affecting graphics layers and performance optimization

    medium · Jared explains FX3 renders everything natively (allowing layer toggles), while TPA composites pre-baked assets, making graphics settings harder to implement without re-architecture

  • ?

    community_signal: Logo redesign vote was split between Twitter podcast audience (preferred Wi-Fi signals design) and Pinball Arcade Fans forum (preferred cleaner design); decided via graphic designer opinion

    high · Chris describes poll being 'split down the middle' with podcast people on Twitter preferring Wi-Fi logo, pinball fans preferring clean logo; tiebreaker was pro graphic designer's preference for cleaner aesthetic

  • ?

    regulatory_signal: Medium.com recently stopped accepting new custom domain forwarding applications; only existing custom domain users grandfathered in

    high · Chris describes discovering old KBase articles showed $70 custom domain option; after migrating 120 episodes, found new policy blocks new applications; requires Rebrandly workaround

    • 1:57
    So that was interface 1.0. Whether or not it's going to find its way over to Steam or iOS, that still wasn't answered. Okay. But that's kind of the deal with that one that I wanted to make sure I got out there because he got back to me about that. That's good.
    2:19
    Yeah. I still haven't seen the Switch version running. Yeah, it runs pretty dang well, I've got to say that. And like I said, the UI works right now because of the number of tables being small. As soon as you get over 25 tables, it's going to be a nightmare if it goes that many. But for right now, it works just fine. but I really, I don't know why, I think it's just because I hate looking at loading screens that are just the words loading but the fact that it throws up the actual flyers from the table that you're loading in I think is really cool and they were nice high res images you could actually read them it wasn't just some blurred out blob so it's such an often forgotten part of the TPA, they've got flyers for every single game in the game in TPA, but I never see them. I never actively go and seek them out.
    3:22
    And it's interesting to see how they sold pinball back in the 80s and the 90s. Like, it was very different to how they're doing it now. And it's almost part of the history of the table to actually see how they do that. So it would be nice if they did the same thing in TPA. Well, but the wording is also hilarious just because it's all about quarter drops. Oh, yeah. how to get the most sales out of your machine possible it'll have people lining up for quarter drops it's so mercenary and so much different than how Stern sells their tables today yeah it's kind of revolutionary operator features that will guarantee massive earnings in the cash box it's like that you know it's hilarious yeah it's funny um yeah so things that have been going on with us let's just jump right into this yeah let's do it uh we and i and i've we've hinted about it on the twitter feed that we were going with a new logo and so uh some time and effort was put in by ourselves to come up with something that represents the show, say, a little bit better.
    4:48
    So sorry if you were a fan of the microphone blockade logo, but the problem was it just didn't say pinball. And, you know, a little business insider here, it's when you don't have pinball in your logo or in your name, it makes it more difficult for Google searches and iTunes to find you. Yeah, really difficult, actually. Yeah. So we wanted to make some changes to maybe try and get us a little bit more traffic for our listenership. So one of those changes, and I even forgot to say it just in the intro here, we're going to try and start referring to ourselves as the Blockade Pinball Podcast. Yes. Just dropping that little word pinball in here and there. You know, just, yeah.
    5:38
    Kind of the same token that also then with our visual on the logo to put some pinball iconography. Jeez, that's a hard one.
    5:50
    Big words for this early in the morning. Or later. I was going to say early for you. Hey, man, it's after lunch for me.
    5:59
    But, yeah, we wanted to get something that's a little more identifiable quickly with the logo that says pinball as opposed to you having to stare at it and go, hey, look, there's this subtle little hole in the feed that looks like a flipper, and the other part looks like a ball, but they're not to scale.
    6:17
    So we came up with... A logo really does have to slap you in the face as to what you're about, and the mic was very cool in the way it was designed, but it really didn't say pinball. It said podcast. it is a podcast which is like half the battle right but yeah pinball not so much so that was step one and that took uh there was many back and forth sessions uh between me and jared with uh me learning all sorts of things on uh adobe illustrator and uh jared poo-pooing them really fast but the thing is that like the whole process of doing it though was was the way it should be done like just fast iteration then uh and the good thing that chris doesn't do is get critical about the work he's done which is really hard for some designers to not be um a lot of designers will go oh you know this is the design and lump it essentially but because chris is not an official designer it was just like okay well let's just try this and try that and you know we got there pretty quick we did we did and if you're wondering at one point we did a poll between two different logos. One of them had over the A of the blah signal radio noise things that we quickly, everybody started referring to as Wi-Fi signals. Yeah, the Wi-Fi signals. I rather liked it because I felt that that still said podcast. Jared rather hated it. And we threw it up to a vote. And man, that thing was split down the middle for quite a while. It was interesting. It was, eh? Yeah. What was funny was the people on Twitter, all really liked it, which included a lot of podcast people. And then the people that were on Pinball Arcade fans' website, they all hated it, or didn't hate it, but voted against it. And so it was one of those things that was like, oh, my God, we're not going to come to a consensus. But eventually we did, and I think the tipping point for me, Jared, and I mentioned this to you, was a friend of mine who is a graphic designer.
    8:23
    He voted for the cleaner look, and I went, okay. yeah yeah yeah he kind of knows what you're saying so that was uh that was that um the thing is a lot of the time where i work i'm working really closely with designers anyhow so i sort of by osmosis i learn what's right and what's probably not so right yeah so i had a feeling that it was going to be the non-wifi one but it's always good to get a second opinion particularly when you're not an expert in your field. Right. Yeah.
    8:54
    If you're wondering why all this effort to get a new logo, well, that falls into the next bit, which is we built a new website. Yeah. Well, we didn't actually build a new website. We switched over to Medium.com. Medium.com is one of the premier platforms for sharing thoughts about things. and the advantage with medium.com is that it's very clean it's very easy to use there's good you can even there's even an app for it so you can subscribe to the podcast with just a tap and get updates when new articles are released and it also allows us to branch out from what was just originally a flat list of episodes so there's a really strong archiving feature on the site so you can actually go back through past episodes and see things like interviews i've actually when i've been redesigning the site i've actually um separated the interviews and special guests out into a separate section because i know out of all the posts of course interviews are the most popular so we want to make sure that if you guys want to go back in time and see those interviews again you can see them really easily uh so i did that as well and um it just allows us to be a little bit more dynamic in what we offer on the site rather than the static site that I was using originally. It was fine when we only had 30 or 40 episodes, but now we've got 120. The Navigate, we were fast outgrowing the Navigation. And it's actually thanks to a couple of people on the Pimple Arcade fans forum that made us realise that because they were going, oh, I remember this episode. It was ages ago when I think it was a Zen interview with Bobby. and she goes, oh, yeah, there was this episode. I'll see if I can find it. And they shared their progress of trying to find it. Oh, yeah, I think it was sort of like episode 40, but I'm not sure. And it was – I could tell I went, okay. It was at that point I went, okay, our navigation is starting to outgrow us as a podcast. So eventually, sometime real soon, I'll need to fix that, and it took six months. so and on top of that there was uh me wanting to do some of my uh rambling writing if you will now that i like to write things and i had no way of uh posting it to the other uh site just because it was kind of tech heavy well it was it was it was using like the the way we used to do those posts is i would open up a text editor and i'd use a markup language called asciidoc and it was fine it's a little bit like markdown for those people who know what lightweight markup language is but chris was going bro and and i could have told him how to use ascii doc but honestly i thought no hang on i need to realize that this is a sign that i need to think for a minute because i could he could learn something but why should he have to learn something like all he wants to do is share his thoughts yeah on on movies why should he have to learn a markup language for him to do that and then work out how to use this static site tool to post an idea up and i thought you know you should just set up a medium account and post your um your thoughts up on a nice medium account it's really nice user experience so hang on a second we could all use that because it's really nice but then we ran into a problem though didn't we chris we ran yes we did a little bit of a hitch, which is the next part of the discussion. Yeah, we would like to tell you that you can continue to go to blockadepinball.com, but that's not going to work anymore.
    12:42
    Not to the top-level domain. We have to make a few changes to the way that we structure the site. The reason is, and this is totally my fault because I didn't read their KBase articles correctly, or Google dumped me to some old KBase articles with the old information. But Medium at one point allowed you to spend $70 and you could actually use your own custom URL like pinball.com. And I thought, cool, I'll go down the path of migrating 120 episodes over to the service and it took me about a week to do it.
    13:17
    And I thought, cool, well, I'll go and set up that domain now, right? So I go to the link in the settings that says oh use your own domain It like no can has We are not offering custom domains at the moment to everyone So if you got an existing one you can continue to use it, but no new applications being accepted. And I went, oh, that's a bit of a problem. And this is after we had loaded in all of our imagery and articles and gotten it all lined up and set up, you know, the way that we like it looking. I think together we would have spent probably about two weeks at this point on and off sort of total time between us getting it to the point it was. And then I worked out that we couldn't do the URL. And I went, oh, okay. So we're faced with two opportunities or two options. We tell everyone that the new domain is medium.com forward slash barcade dash pinball dash podcast, which is the actual domain name that Medium has given us, which is fine. or we think laterally. So what I've done is I'm using a service called rebrandly. And what it allows you to do, it's basically a short URL system that you can actually use a custom domain on. And so what we're going to do is we're going to set the custom domain of block8pinball.com and then we're going to make short URLs that redirect over to certain parts of the medium.com website. So it gives you the choice, dear listener. You can, if you like to use Medium exclusively, and you know that our website is blackade-pinball-podcast on Medium, fine, you can find us there. But if you're listening to the show and you want to get there quickly for the first time, we'll have links in the show notes that direct you to the front page of our website on Medium, and it'll always be the latest episodes there. So you'll see blackadepinball.com forward slash episodes in all our Twitter links when we do a new show and announce that on Twitter. And that will jump you to the latest episode. So it will give you an in to the website and you won't have to worry initially about putting in long URLs.
    15:32
    What we're saying is, again, go to blockadepinball.com forward slash episodes. Bookmark it. Yeah, because that's a new site, basically. That'll get you right in to the new site. So take a look at it. We're happy with the look. And also, like I said, there's going to be...
    15:52
    Well, part of the reason why I wanted to do the writing thing is I went ahead and bought one of those MoviePass things, which we talked about before. So it was, I spent 90 bucks and I get a year-long subscription to go see any movie I want, anytime I want, once a day. Once a day. That's a lot. That's 365 days of movies, man, for $90. Yeah. That's not bad.
    16:24
    Well, considering that for me, when I would buy matinee tickets, which is usually what I would do, or I'd buy them at Costco, the discount ticket, I was basically spending $10 a movie. Yeah, exactly. And last year, I went and saw 15 in the theater.
    16:40
    So, there you are. Completely makes sense. money and that's why you probably would have only seen 15 is because they're ten dollars a ticket um well it's ten dollars a ticket it's the time to go and it's uh well do i really want to spend the money to go see this or do i just wait for it to come out on video well now i kind of don't have an excuse because the money is already spent and all i have to do is see nine movies and throughout the course of the year and it'll have paid for itself so i'm more apt to go see a lot more in the theater on a whim uh you know it's 10 o'clock at night uh the kids asleep there's a showing at 10 30 i got nothing doing in the morning boom let's go i'm there done yeah done your wife is gonna see very much of you is she she'll probably be like yeah he's out of the house um all right 90 dollars well spent yeah Yeah, you know. So what I wanted to do was maybe start trying to, and again, this is just me honing my writing skills, that maybe I would start reviewing every single time I went and saw a movie. And since it wouldn't be me waiting until they come out on video, it would actually be current and timely and then make sense. So that's something that I'm planning on getting to and doing. The funny thing is I have not seen a single movie yet since Last Jedi. But that always happens. I never see any movies in January other than the one movie that I saw in December. So it's far from correct for me. I haven't seen Last Jedi yet. So I'm a terrible person. That's okay. Neither is my wife, and she's a big Star Wars fan. But hopefully we're going to go on Tuesday. I think I've guilted her into needing to sleep and not waiting. I can't actually believe it's still running here it's only been out a month but most movies here after a month you get like one show in a day but I guess it's a quiet season though isn't it so there's not a big volume of movies throwing through so they can leave them running longer no because January tends to be a dumping ground for movies that aren't very good yes either they're not very good or they're only awards movies that they released in December and then they're going into wide release yeah speaking of other writings just to give you guys a heads up there's a website called This Week in Pinball and he's always posting every week multiple times during the week different articles and stuff about pinball who's the Friday behind it? There's only one guy, eh? Yeah, Jeff, and I'm not sure what his last name is.
    19:30
    I'm sure I have it somewhere. But anyway, friend of the show, Jeff. He reached out to us to see if we'd be interested in doing... informing his audience a little bit more about digital pinball because his site is all about real pinball, as is most people's sites, and us being the rare breed of being almost exclusively about digital pinball. We are the number one resource on the podcast theme for digital pinball. That's right. So I decided, okay, sure. What the heck? Let me see what I can whip up, uh, as a, cause he kind of wanted a history of digital pinball.
    20:10
    Where do you start? Right where you start. And so I started just writing and before you know it, I had seven pages worth of history, going back, starting with basically the Atari 2600.
    20:25
    Wow, you really are going back through. Yeah, I went back. Here's the funny thing. To somebody that doesn't know anything about digital pinball, I'm sure this is more information than they ever possibly would want to know about digital pinball. To people like Jared and myself, it's like, okay, thanks for barely scratching the surface.
    20:48
    Yeah. But, you know, you've got to know your audience, right? You've got to know your audience. I mean, seven pages, which won't be seven pages when you publish it to the web, but that's a lot of information. Yeah, well, it's true. Yeah, it'll be a lot to digest. When I say seven pages, this is me typing on Google Docs, so like a Word document, just paragraph, paragraph, paragraph. Okay.
    21:12
    That's going to be brutal then. Right. so I he says he's probably going to post it as one big story which I he knows his audience but once he posts it I might wind up posting it on our site too if people want to read it and I'll break it up and do bite sized chunks we'll do it as a we can actually have that as a because we can have it as a separate part of our website the history of digital pinball and I can make that a separate node on the website because we have the flexibility now thank you me We have the flexibility. Yeah. All sorts of stuff going on on that front.
    21:50
    So let's move on to actual pinball. I know, scary, folks. Yeah, because there's been some stuff. There's been some things.
    21:59
    First off, let's talk about, briefly, the fact that Sorcerer is out in beta on Pinball Arcade fans. Or not Pinball Arcade fans, just Pinball Arcade. Pinball Arcade, yeah. Yeah. And I had a look at it, and I got to say, I forgot how cool the art is. It's a really good-looking table. Man, it looks so good. I've never seen this table ever. This is my first exposure to it. Oh, okay. It is beautiful. Yeah, no, it's a beautiful table.
    22:29
    The issue that we're having in the beta right now, and this is specifically with DX11, which I'm going to go into a little rant here in a moment about the DXs. but the insert lights currently the insert lights are all kinds of wonky in terms of this is what happens when you're dealing with previously baked in lighting and trying to then put in dynamic lighting you'll get things like the insert will be blinking as it will saying for you know this is where you want the ball to go and it'll be nice and bright then you have the ball pass through there and it now should be a constant blank or, I mean, a constant lit insert. And it is, but it's significantly dimmer than it was prior. Gross. And that kind of thing drives me bonkers. And I tried terming it bulb brightness, and that's when I realized it was just, no, this is an issue that they're going to fix. I know that.
    23:28
    But it comes into the, some of the inserts are the perfect brightness for how they are right now. that when you have the table, the bold brightness set to 50%, they're glowing. You can read what's actually printed on them. You can tell that they're not nuked. And what I'm fearful of is that they're going to get nuked by the end of this, which is what always happens. So I made sure that I pointed out when I put in my little notes for the beta of, hey, look at this particular insert at 50% bold brightness. That's perfect. now. Lock that in, match everything else to that one, and be golden.
    24:13
    What I was going to say, and I know you don't suffer for any of this, Jared, because you don't deal with DX. It's only on the PC that we have this. But we have DX9 and DX11.
    24:28
    And when we're dealing with the betas on these, it's amazing how many problems crop up because it works in one and not in the other. And it's almost as if they're two completely different programs. Because they'll fix a bug in DX11 or in DX9 and it'll cause a bug in DX11. Or vice versa.
    24:56
    And it's like... And even to the point that when you're... When you click on Steam and you select Pimble Arcade a little box pops up that says asking you do you want to play DX9, DX11, and then there's game configuration.
    25:13
    When you push game configuration, that's when it also asks you what aspect ratio do you want, all the anti-aliasing and stuff. So it's all outside of the game itself. Oh, okay. It really bothers me because now you set it, now you've got to turn that off, now you've got to start the game again, now you've got to let the game loads, the game loads, now you look at what happened and you go, oh no, I don't like that. Great, now you've got to turn the game off, you've got to go back in, restart, get that configuration box up,
    25:41
    reset your configurations. It's like, why can this not be like every other game out there, done in the game itself? Yep, so plugging into the DX framework and displaying the options in-game, and basically just toggling those settings on and off at the application or the code. I'll give you, because I was having this discussion this morning with PinballWiz45D where he goes, well, DX9 is no longer available in Xen because it's all PinballFX3, which is DX11. And I said, that's fine, but here's the thing that PinballFX3 does. I can go into graphic settings and I can turn off ball trails. I can turn off graphical detail. I can turn off shadows. I can turn off ball reflection. I can do all of that in the game and then it'll pop the little window and say, are you sure you want to keep these settings? Yes. Boom. Now all of a sudden I see what it looks like. If I don't like it, I can go right back in. It's literally a 10 second It's real time. And the thing that I know that this works because my laptop which is not very powerful at all can then run Pinball FX3 when I have all those settings turned off
    26:58
    So, I'm just curious to know, why is it that Farsight hasn't done the DX11 version of this program in such a way that we can get rid of DX9 completely, So they're only having to deal with one program per se and just have a, either have it a toggle switch where you're toggling between DX nine and DX 11 or do this very thing where you can just start dumping all the graphical settings.
    27:26
    Yeah, that's a good question. Um, it's probably cause the graphical settings, uh, I think probably kind of semi baked in. So you've got the whole concept of, if you turn off like with Zen, because their whole table infrastructure is fully rendered, you're essentially not overlaying components onto a canvas. When I say canvas, I mean like, you know, digitally scanned assets that are assembled. And, you know, it's sort of like a, what would I say, a composited version of a game rather than a rendered completely version of a game. So what I think is happening there is because if they want to turn off certain things, like if you want to turn off flash of bloom if you want to turn off reflections if you want to turn off all these things it's essentially a layer in the game that they need to then turn off like it would be alpha panes off alpha panes on so that might actually be too complex for them to actually layer like that with the current construct of the game i have a feeling that to make it work, they would have to re-architect their way to do the graphics in the game. And I think that's pretty non-trivial. And as you can tell, I am wildly speculating here because I don't quite know how it would work. But based on what I know of graphics and things like that, I suspect that that's the reason why they are going with two versions because it's either their on-off switch is DX9 or DX11. basically that's it that's the level of precision you have it's doubling the amount of work that they have to do in terms of bug squashing right off the top it's doubling and then it compounds so last time when there was the update I forget what the table was last time all of a sudden the high scores the local high scores went bonkers like we're talking hundreds of billion worth of points suddenly was the top score. It completely jacked up the local high scores on many, many tables.
    29:43
    Some people were worried that it was screwing up their achievements. We've gone into it before about the stupidity of how achievements are saved. If I have this on my computer right now and then I want to go play the game on my laptop and I load up TPA, it completely wipes everything. Which is absurd. It is absurd.
    30:11
    And the thing is, is that apparently they might have been, this might have happened, the score thing might have happened because they were trying to deal with the cloud saving, but it's DX9 saves data differently than DX11, apparently. But why would a graphics framework have any interplay with how the core game logic works. That's my question. I don't know. And I don't know if the whole idea of the local high scores is what's screwing up because they're localizing them to a computer as opposed to localizing them to the user,
    30:51
    which I would think would be the better thing to do is just localize it to the user so that those follow you, your high scores follow you that way. but because your leaderboards obviously aren't tied to the computer those are tied to whatever server that they're dealing with I don't know it's one of these things where it's like I feel like they've tied themselves into knots and there's such a simpler way of handling it there's definitely a simpler way of handling it but I think probably the way to get there would be weeks of rework to actually get it to work right and that's the punishment right Like, is the benefit of doing the rework actually going to make a big difference to the user experience on a day-to-day basis?
    31:39
    Because remember, this only really frustrates you when you have to reinstall Steam on a computer, which is not that often. No, no, no, no, no. But that's not what I'm saying. I have Steam installed on my laptop. I have Steam installed on my PC. I usually play TPA on the PC. If I am on my laptop and I go and play TPA, it wipes it across the board. So the next time I go on my PC, all my achievements are gone. So for those people who use more than one Steam device, then that is the problem. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, if you're playing on, say, a Surface Pro, and then you've got your main computer that you also have Steam on, then yeah, that's not very good at all. That's annoying. It's annoying. It's not good. and it's the same if it makes you any feel any better it's very similar on google play games as well for android like the the the fact that i'll keep on going back to this the fact i had to write a user guide on how not to screw your same games up on google play games is testament to a bad user experience right yeah so the the way that farsight is managing their saves could be improved and I think we've talked about this in a prior episode where they need to use the Farsight ID as the canonical save game system and that's all they need to do. If they did that and they're not having to plug into all these different ecosystems save mechanisms, that is the way to solve the problem. And then like I said in terms of graphic and stuff I just wish that it was load the game, go into the menu there under settings.
    33:30
    No, I'm not talking about the game stage. I'm talking about graphics. And that is in settings that I can set what is my screen resolution that I can set whether I have ball trails that I'm am I using post-processing or not post-processing? What's the anti-aliasing that's going on? Let me do it in the game so that immediately I can see the results as opposed to having to go in and out, in and out, in and out. Because for some reason, and this is where I'm just completely baffled, and this might just be with me trying to play the beta, but the DX9 version sucks performance-wise. It's like the ball's in slow motion. Oh, right. And there's no reason why the ball should be in slow motion in DX9 and working perfectly fine in DX11.
    34:13
    Well, they probably optimized for DX11 and DX9 because this older architecture is lagging. So really that's a good sign that they just need to cut support for 9. The biggest question is, versus 9 versus 11, what is the reason? Well, I cannot run 11 on my laptop.
    34:33
    Yep, well, that's fine. On those devices that aren't powerful enough to run 11, then they get flat mode. They basically get no visual effects. And that's what I'm saying. There should be that toggle in the game itself. There's no toggle. It's just this game, if you do not have DX installed, the DX11 installed, you don't get any graphical effects. You can still run it, but everything's flat. Yeah. So that's the tradeoff. Like, we'll let you play it, but your game experience is going to be poor. Just like on the old box product that you used to buy from the store. You'll need a minimum spec of 486 with two meg of RAM to run this game. but you should really be playing with a Pentium 1 and, you know, one gig of RAM and a video card to have maximum enjoyment from this game. We'll let you run it, but you're going to have a bad time. But you can run it because it's your choice as a consumer.
    35:28
    And that's what it comes down to, right? Like, that's been around for ages in computer software. Right, been around for ages, but it's not in the lexicon of Farsight. I know, and it needs to start becoming in the lexicon. Like you need to do, you know, as a product manager here, I would be putting my hat on and saying, right, so how many users are on nine and how many users on 11? Of those users, what architecture are they using? Like what is the reported PC architecture and processes that they're using?
    36:00
    Look at the averages, look at the amount of money these people are spending and then make a decision based on data to cut it. and just, or not cut it and work around a different solution. You know, there's, it's sometimes. My solution is, and this is, again, it's all coming back to rolling everything into the settings, is you only have the DX11 version, but you can turn off all the graphical things so that it works on your computer. I mean, look, when I was playing, if I throw in, you know, well, this actually happened before I had the computer that I have now, but when I threw in Tomb Raider for the first time, the new revamped version, it was like, well, I only am getting medium detail settings. I can't view the high detail, and I can't have the cool floaty hair that she has. Instead, I'm going to have to have the locked-in clump of hair. there's all these settings that every other PC game has there in the menu that allows you to even on a bad computer still run and play the game and you can kind of pick and choose your poison in terms of when you want to have slowdown you might say and because it's all under the same banner you're only having to squash one set of bugs and dealing with it that way you know I don't know I just, it's one of those things that makes me scratch my head. And clearly I wasn't going to ask Norman about any of that because I didn't want to do any gotcha moments. But it's one of those things that just, it baffles me sometimes where I, it's like, have you guys never played another game on a PC?
    37:49
    Yeah, I think there's definitely improvements that can be made there. I personally think that the way I would approach it if I was the product manager would be to look at the numbers first and then actually rather than trying to set one, remove the problem, which is the difference between DX9 and DX11. And that's known to be causing issues with production at the moment. So I would remove that issue from production first. And then once I have a stable backplane to work against, which is DX11, I then start to incrementally look at putting in those settings options into the game. But really, the problem, it really is the fact that DX9 and DX11 exist together, and that needs to be solved first. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I do. But I'm not saying that your idea isn't the way they should be moving towards, because it is. It makes absolute sense that they should actually be putting settings in game, like every other app and every other program on the PC. But there are things that they need to overcome first before they can do that, I think.
    38:56
    Yeah. I don't know. Just my two cents. What else has been going on with the pinball world? Do we have anything else that's timely? Yes. I do actually have something else that popped into my Android device the other day. You might remember ages ago we were talking about a little app called Snowball. Yeah. Now, Snowball, for those of you who aren't aware of it, is basically one of those top-down pinball games, which is over a really large playfield area. So the interesting feature with this game is you can get into multiple, and as you get into multiple, the game zooms out like a very far perspective so you can see all the balls in all the areas of the playfield at one time. And it's a very sort of casual game. It's themed with a snow theme, and you're basically shooting your snowball around a sort of arena with lots of different obstacles and stuff to do. I think as we described it back then, it's a pinball game in that the user interface uses flipper and ball mechanics, but it's not a pinball game in terms of being a typical rectangular shape pinball where all the action is happening on one single plane It this is your the flippers are your navigation tool You know you you navigating around So pinball, yes, but also no. It reminds me a lot, actually, this game, if,
    40:31
    and I know that some listeners will be going, oh yes, when I say this, but if you remember on Game Boy, a game called Revenge of the Gator, pinball, now the game was split up into different screens because of the limitations of the platform. But essentially it would behave like this game does now if it was actually laid out in one linear sort of a pattern. You could see all the screens in one. So that's essentially what they've done here. So the update that they did is they've put a few more different achievements that you need to do in the game. They've changed the play field slightly as well. So there are extra obstacles in some areas that were deemed a little bit too easy. So essentially they've rebalanced parts of the play field, which is very interesting but the biggest feature they've done is they put in night mode so you you've actually got now when you play rather than being super white everything's sort of got this bluer tinge to it and your ball and all the environments even on mobile have environmental lighting to them so okay so you've got the uh there's like these little um uh magnetic poles in the game yeah which uh which light up and spark now in the normal game they didn't really do very much in the daytime mode. But in the nighttime mode, they look really cool. Like you get all this environmental lighting flying off them as the sparks are flying, and they look really good. And there's also other things in the game, like the ball casts a slight amount of light as well. It glows very subtly. So as it's going around the play field, it's subtly lighting up the play field as it's going around. It's really quite nice. I've actually had a couple of games on it now, and I'm going, yeah, this is really neat. so if you've got the game go and update it and have a look and tell us what you reckon about it and if you don't have it the game is very inexpensive and look for the cost of entry for it there's no in-app purchases after you've bought it so it's fully unlocked and yeah it's a bit of fun if you like those sort of wide expansive sort of pinball games that are more casual rather than simulation yeah I don't no you're not a fan of this title I'm not a fan of... I don't know. I do like my pinball to be pinball.
    42:47
    That being said, I have no problem with the arcade-y or the pure video nature a la Zen. But I... These top-down... They just remind me of those little plastic pinball with the BB in it that you play as a kid. It has no weight. There's nothing interesting to it.
    43:13
    It almost goes back to why I'm not much of a fan of an EM, because I don't feel that there's much to do.
    43:26
    I do like EMS with drop targets. If it's nothing but lanes, they don't excite me, because I'd rather play a mid-80s to 90s, you know, a Ballier Williams table and then have awesome lanes and ramps and stuff like that.
    43:43
    So I don't know. Yeah, they don't – I get the kitsch factor, and I can enjoy them for maybe a day or so, and then I'm just like over it. I'm done. But, you know, for the cost of $1.50, that's exactly kind of the lifespan of the game, right? Like for $1.50, you've got plenty of enjoyment and a couple of days of enjoyment. Yeah, but that's where I say for $1.99, I can get a Zen table. And you can get a lot more depth. and I'm going to be playing it for a long time. So that's, you know. That's the other argument. Yeah, that's fair. Cool. Yeah. Like you said, at least there's no in-app purchases. Because when I was doing this digital pinball article, I downloaded a couple of games that I hadn't. I downloaded them a long time ago and deleted them off my phone.
    44:26
    And I was looking at them again. And it was just like, people, have you never played actual pinball? why are their right angles on the field everything needs to be smooth edged and then the biggest sin would be you'd end the ball and all of a sudden an ad would pop up and I was like oh come on I'm deleting you now because I don't want to deal with that I reckon that as part of our new website I should bring back pinball on Google Play you remember I was doing that Oh, yeah, the terrible pins. Yeah, the bouncy tits pinball. Remember that one? Yeah. Oh, jiggler pinball, man. Do you know that I actually got a note from YouTube about that particular video? They asked me to reclassify it because apparently it contained naughty things in it. Naughty bits. But I totally think I need to go back and do that again because that was also incredibly disheartening, but at the same time, quite a lot of fun to do. So you can do your movie reviews. I'll do pinball on Google Play, and we'll meet in the middle. Meet in the middle. Yeah. Wow. So last thing before we go, I wanted to mention this week's Zen tournament that Blockade was hosting, which was playing Portal, has been brutal. Oh, yeah? So it started off right away with Ksenia, a.k.a. Sven, immediately calling me out and going, beat your score, go for it. And I was like, ah, you jerk. And the problem was that I had never really played Portal pinball that much. And so it seemed very impenetrable to me. So I hunkered down and finally was able to not only beat his score, which I think he was at like 70 million or something like that. but I posted like 230 million. I was like, aha! So that started him trying to come back at me. In the meantime, somebody else wound up posting like a 650 million score. I was like, oh, geez, that's so out of my realm. So all this week I've been playing Portal. I got to say, I really enjoy it as a table. It's a good table. I'm having a bear of a time on certain angles that I'm trying to get the ball to in that I can hit them normally and then when all of a sudden it goes into timer mode I can't hit them to save my life and I was trying desperately to actually get to the wizard mode and complete it and the more I played the game the farther away I got from it it's like I hit the wall and bounced backwards so it's I wound up posting a score in the 700 millions and thought, ah, that's going to secure me. And then when I looked to check the scores today, because the tournament has now ended on Saturday here, somebody had posted a 1.4 billion score. And basically I went from first place all the way down to fourth place.
    47:42
    So it was a rather vicious week for pinball on that table. Apparently a lot of people really dig this particular one, and now I understand why they do. So if you haven't joined in on the weekly Zen tournaments, you need to do so. Just simply go into the tournaments page, and under search, type in Shut Your Trap. That's S-H-U-T-Y-E-R-T-R-A-P. And then you'll find the tournament that we host every single week, different table every week. I think this week we're going to be playing Deadpool, and I'm going to figure out what configuration. I'm not going to do the three ball again. I might do a one ball, might do survival. I don't know. We'll figure it out. But Deadpool will be the next table. And yeah, look for it. It's a lot of fun and we've gotten more and more players each week and it does not matter what platform you're on because they all speak to Steam. They just don't speak to each other. But Steam does get to see everybody else's scores that get posted. So it doesn't matter if you're on PlayStation, Xbox. I don't know if Nintendo Switch works yet or not because they don't have all the same tables that we do.
    48:56
    But there you go. It's a blast. We had a good time. Yeah, it would be fun. I really wish that the FX3 or features from FX3 would make their way into mobile sooner rather than later because I really want to get in on this action. But probably by the time they do it, it will all be old hat and it won't be any fun anymore. So that's a problem.
    49:16
    Yeah. I did get to play FX3 on the Switch, and I tried out their portrait mode, which is you basically only put in one of the Joy-Cons down at the bottom, so you have the rumble from that. And then it's just like a normal mobile game where you're using your thumbs to flip the flippers, which I'm not a fan of. but I've since noticed people have been making little cardboard boxes to put their, their switch into portrait mode on and then attach the joy cons to the side. So you can still use buttons for flipping, which I thought was kind of, kind of trick. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, there's, there's probably other options you can use, but using conductive, conductive foam and stuff. So you can actually like have little triggers below the table if you really want to get crafty. But yeah, it's a, it, touchscreens are okay. The thing that I don't like about playing with a touchscreen on pinball is just tilting is really hard. Unless the motion... It's very difficult and like I said, you don't play pinball with your thumbs. You play it with your forefingers.
    50:26
    It's all about your triggers. Yeah, definitely. Well, I'm triggered to end this podcast. How's that? Sure, let's do that. So folks, once again, why don't you go ahead and follow the show. That's the easiest, easiest way to get all the information that you ever need. And that is follow us on Twitter at Blockade.
    50:47
    You might as well, since you're already there, why don't you go ahead and follow myself? I am at ShutYourTrap and he is at JaredMorgs.
    50:55
    And then, most importantly, we will say it again. The URL you need to now type in is BlockadePinball.com forward slash episodes. that'll get you to the new website. Go ahead and bookmark us there so that you can laugh at me when I mess up on this next week as I want to do. Why don't you go ahead and... Yeah, always. Why don't you go ahead and fire off an email too?
    51:22
    You can get in contact with me just like Jeff from This Week in Pinball did. Blahblahblockade at gmail.com That way anything you have to say, comments, questions, requests, we can respond to you in that manner. Alrighty. Well, we do appreciate you for listening to us. And, Jared, I'll talk to you next week. No problem. See you then. See you, everyone. Alright, bye-bye.
    51:51
    WizardAmusement.com The site to visit for custom pinball shooter rolls. Easy to install. Totally unique. Mention Blockade Podcast for 10% off your order. WizardAmusement.com. Sales, restoration, customization. don't forget to leave a review on itunes or your favorite podcast hosting service that blockade is delivered to we can't improve unless you tell us how now stop listening and place it in ball uh after that yeah so uh okay speaking of crazy urls my son wants people to go visit his site. You sure you want people to visit your site?
    52:34
    You freak out last time I mentioned something about going and visiting your site. Okay. I'm going to give this out here. Folks, again, this is a 12-year-old and his beginnings of being a writer.
    52:49
    So, crazy, crazy... We're going to start somewhere. Yeah, yeah. So, crazy website action. So, it's the old HTTPS thing. sites.google.com forward slash view forward slash trash dash bwah dash central and that's all about my son and his friends they write stories about their stuffed bears cool you know what I reckon sounds like he could do with a rebrandly link oh my god yes right yes he could totally do with a rebrandly link service there Well, as the other day, he was trying to, over the phone, tell his one grandmother what the web address was. And I was just like, oh, my God, just email it to her. She's never going to write all this down and get it correct.
    53:40
    Exactly. So...