What the heck are you guys talking about? Who is being negative and a naysayer here? Sounds like several excited people here including me.

i thought the same thing. this is one of the most positive threads on Pinside these days.

This just posted on Spooky's fb page, look at that detail!

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That thing looks great.

Many apologies to those that thought I was saying this thread was negative. Its more a general statement to much of what is on Pinside.

Still bummed I somehow missed the big release announcement for this title. I would love to be in on the preorder list.

If any one bails I'm happy to grab your spot.

Dumb question .. but what is it? I know Captain Spaulding from the movies ... but wasn't there a Captain Spaulding commercial for fried chicken? Is that what this is supposed to be? A bucket of Captain Spaulding's chicken?

And gasoline!

You must not have seen House of 1000 Corpses lately... Capt. Spaulding's chicken makes multiple appearances.

No, not lately for sure, lol. But I did recall the Captain Spaulding's Chicken commercial ... just not actually seeing a picture of a bucket of chicken like the one pictured, and that sculpt/pic doesn't exactly look like fried chicken, lol.

I was referring to the post that ended with 'so nervous..........' And Pinside in general.

I knew what was meant. My only goal is to make sure its better than Avengers j/k

avengers biggest flaw wasn't the code, it was the horrible callouts and the 2 areas where balls got jamed up

Lol shots fired

Let's start with better than X-Men.

You guys are killing me, I love both Avengers and X-Men!! If RZ is close to either I'll be ecstatic.

If it's better than Xmen it'll be the most awesome pin ever made.

rd.

Well, that's ONE endorsement. And an odd comparison may I say.

I'm watching you Chili....

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Ok, I guess that does make sense and this is indeed coding quality. Still, any examples of a game with bad coding and one with exceptionally good coding, in that regard?

I'd say good coding has balance in scoring and using all of the playfield and features. A game that is all about 1 multiball or exploit for points is coded poorly IMO. Flintstones is a good example of this...that game (points-wise) is about playing the multiball well. Everything else is peanuts in comparison.

Right, but again that's not exactly coding. The traditional model for programming is that you have an application expert that comes up with functional specifications, then the programmers translate that to code.
Again in the example of Lyman Sheats Jr, from what I understand he's probably wearing both hats, and comes up with good specifications with his application expert hat. He's probably a good coder too, but I don't think that's the part he gets most of his praise for. Now I'm sure on the coding part there's also some subtleties that a seasoned veteran like him does to make the machine feel right, but for the most part the examples I'm getting for what makes a good or bad machine are mostly functional specifications.

Where I'm going with all of this is that I'd be surprised if the programmer who's new to the pinball world is asked to come up with the bulk of the rules himself and I wouldn't be too concerned about this.

Coding, not too worried about. I think it's great to have fresh meat. A new coder may have fresh ideas and is going to be more willing to listen to feedback. I'm sure there will be updates/tweaks to make sure we get the most out of the playfield. Just as with AMH. Really excited to see the art though! Such a great artist working on it!

I have faith in fawzmagames. Ive been following his Facebook and he is definitely putting in his dues.

I too am very impatiently waiting for the unveiling of the artwork. Sound package should be sweet as well. Is it expo time yet?

bottom line, if the coding isn't up to charlie's expectations, they'll figure it out (or pull Ben in), but I have faith.

I may or may not have played it 5 minutes ago.

Hmm, note to self: time to move to Wisconsin...land of cheese, and boo-tique pinball.

moo-tique?

Well, I was up at the world headquarters of Spooky Thursday. I was getting some first class customer service for some upgrades and tweaking to my AMH #14.
Got to see the whitewood and flip a few games. No pictures allowed sadly. I will say this, we will be having a tasty treat on this one I think. The DMD graphics were stunning. I just can't wait to see this one with a fleshed out prototype.
Spooky continues to impress me with how much they accomplish!

well...

give us some details binks

Now was that an LCD "DMD" like the MMr uses?

Well, on the whitewood it was just the standard Xpin led Spooky green. I was just kinda impressed on how the images were crisp and clean.

I would imagine that the magical $5999.99 price point would not hold with an LCD. But I have no first hand knowledge on what cost differences are.

The difference is that LCD is potentially cheaper, but I don't know if the pinheck board is purpose built for DMD output only. If it had video output as well, then LCD could be much cheaper (even if you only ran DMD type dots).

Met Sid Haig (Captain Spaulding) yesterday! He told me the machine is going to be really cool!

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As other's have noted, if this really is going to be just another monochrome DMD I think that will be a bit disappointing. I don't understand why a color DMD would not be implemented at a minimum. As many of the homegrown custom projects are showing, implementing an LCD with a fairly simple graphical interface is not all that difficult (and it's really not more expensive than a DMD.) It shouldn't be a cost issue.

Doing a (relative to DMD) high resolution and color LCD is far more costly than a DMD in terms of production cost. It isn't even debatable.

The physical cost of the LCD is very comparable to a DMD. Developing the UI on an LCD? Yes, a bit more involved. But if you follow any of the home-grown projects doing it right now , it's not as involved as you would think. I'm not saying it has to be overkill like JJP's Hobbit, but you can do a lot with fairly minimal effort. The payoff is more than worth the effort IMO.

I think it's easy to lose sight about what makes pinball what it is. It's NOT a video game. It's NOT just something you can slap animations on and emulate. It requires real world physics to play out and for you the player to try to wrestle those physics and come out ahead. Owning a "real" arcade cabinet is pretty underwhelming, especially when you can get (as far as your average person is concerned) an identical experience on an emulator or multicade running all 1000 of your favorite games, essentially for free.

Owning a real pinball machine is a big deal.

Pushing for more "video game" methodology seems like a waste of money, and ultimately going to push more money towards things that don't actually make the game better. Jersey Jack did this to the Nth degree. What a colossal waste of cash, but it may take a couple of these vegas slot-type expenditures before people course correct. Personally I'd rather see a pin be 500 or 1000 cheaper, or have a cooler mech/toy or a better game mode, than see the emerald city guard bumbling around on a giant LCD screen, lmao.

I don't find myself pining for more colors or more pixels. It's the last thing I find that I even think about in the list of things I wish a given pin had more of.

Have you been able to include some interesting characters in the code?

It's not about turning a pin into a video game. The DMD era is over. LCD displays are keeping pins modern. It's pin evolution... Score reels, numeric displays, alpha-numeric displays, DMDs, Color DMDs, now LCDs.

If it gets a color LCD consider that a huge bonus. If not, then you don't have to buy one if you're disappointed

"fairly minimal effort" I'm sure. Spooky can just spend a couple extra hours this weekend and implement a color DMD, yahoo!

Thanks for sharing your opinion but I think you're very much in the minority. Even Stern is moving to LCD apparently. Now why would they (and every other manufacturer except Spooky) be moving in that direction if nobody cared?

Yes, the best part of pinball (IMO) is the physical interaction. Agreed. However, I do love the ability of the LCD to capture some of the classic scenes/moments of the theme (at least in themed games based on a TV show or movie) versus trying to convert those scenes into pixelated and hard to see animations (like on IM for example.) Nobody here is asking for a "video game". That's not the function of the LCD in a pinball game. Plus, the LCD just seems to draw in more people and that's just good for pinball in general.

It's fairly minimal in the grand scheme of things and certainly when considering only the additional effort required over developing the UI on a DMD.

I bet if you ask DP they'll tell you the LCD animations and UI were the least of their worries/effort. That was knocked out of the park long ago.

You seem to speculate a lot on here. Do you do that in your daily life as well? People that speculate without concrete facts drive me batty.

I stated a fact. "IF" it's a DMD I will find that disappointing. Period.

Do you nitpick and attack others constantly in your daily life as well?

And if speculation drives you nuts you might want to stay off Pinside because I can go point you to a thousand threads on here speculating on everything from what "Pat's next game might have" to "When will Hobbit ship" to "What might Stern's next title be?". Go attack them tiger.

You might be right. I mean, at the very least LCD's can look like DMD's. I'm less concerned about that as I am about the ridiculous degree jersey jack has taken it to. Do I really need real life actors or movie clips playing? It's preposterous, really. The only reason I think they are getting away with it right now is the novelty of it. It feels convincingly like "the future" (oooooooooooooo).

The big lebowski seems to get it a little more right so far... and I think that's a more realistic direction to take things. They seemed to get basic game design concepts. I don't have to wonder what my score is, and the focus is where it should be. This is probably realistic, especially for more expensive games. Compare that to something like WOZ... I don't know who was behind the wheel on their video/UI design, but i don't think they came from the pinball world.

In the meantime though, for a pin under $6k? I think I'm okay not having the full $10,000 game experience. Especially when you consider what you're getting in the big lebowski is repeating backgrounds, which while pleasant, isn't adding to the game play. It's making it more attractive. What about when the theme isn't a movie with all those wonderful filler clips to just cut and paste in whenever you need something wacky to happen (JJP?).

Now lets say Spooky decided to slap one of those LCD's in and made everything high resolution color animations. They pay an artist or team of artists to produce everything (because you've now gone beyond Ben Heckendorn's capabilities, he was definitely stretched doing low res art). Where I live that's a good 100k, maybe 150k in salaries, and it'll probably look like super cheesy flash animation. Spooky initially thought they'd sell 100 games I believe. That's $1000-$1500 extra cost per game. I just don't see how any of that makes sense.

On the other hand, Pin2000's put video-game type stuff in their pinball games. I found it tacky and offputting, although clearly it was keeping pins "modern". I suspect people who were into that "innovation" will also be into heavier focus on LCD's.

If ColorDMD increases BOM of each game $100 x 250 = $25,000. The price of the game is same as AMH but they have a license and I can just speculate ~$500 per machine x 250 = $125,000. So if they add ColorDMD they would already be in the hole ~$150,000 over the run of this pin compared to AMH. My opinion, but I think they'd rather pay the artist and have that package then a ColorDMD and I think the majority of people would prefer that too..

Guys, it's cool to get little insider updates from people who've played a super early whitewood, but just keep in mind that it's a super early whitewood. I wouldn't spend too much energy debating the various merits of anything before it's revealed properly.

And take it from someone who's developing graphics for a high rez pinball display, it's not a trivial task that you go "lol, that's done, now let's start the real work" over.

PinChili,

You'd prefer a ColorDMD over a better art package?

or

Maybe you'd prefer the pin with an LCD for $7000?

I'm not quite clear what point you're trying to make..

But to be fair, they haven't really showed anything that parallels well with current pinball DMD's... animations, characters, and so on. It seems to be largely repeating/scrolling backgrounds.

It remains to be seen what the real meat will be, if any. The only real direction to go with something like lebowski is movie clips, which to me is tacky and cheap. I hope they don't go that direction, because right now it's a classy machine.