The most helpful thing we can do is make suggestions for Stern's next major software system. My wish list (which is probably naive):

1. Make the "application layer" open source. It's OK to keep the OS and "game engine" proprietary.
2. The application layer uses a scripting language, like Python.
3. The software can be updated via USB in less than 2 minutes.
4. Better yet, the game runs from a high-speed SDHC card - no "flash update" needed.
5. Non-programmers can add and replace sound clips, regardless of length.
6. Non-Stern programmers can modify the rules, and add their own.

See, step #1 is much more complicated than one thinks. When you license tech like say, Unreal Engine 4, or develop for iOS, the system has been designed for this and you have to write code and build hardware to balance what you lock out and protect vs what you allow for "open source" changes and alterations. It would take Stern time to build a system (SAM 2 or whatever) that would balance their investment in hardware and development with allowing for user modifications. This is also not open source - it's a development platform which frankly I don't know how Stern would benefit from except for spending even more time and troubleshooting on with end users.

What you are describing is what the P-Roc already does, and actually it's even more open source. Why Stern and JJP don't look at it as a viable platform I don't know - ultimately both companies seem to be as interested in developing hardware and software as they are releasing pinball machines. The irony is, Stern and JJP don't make money on hardware and software - they make it on a fun to play pinball machine, regardless of what brains drive it. Ultimately I don't give a crap how the machine works, just that it does work and is infinitely fun.

Have we forgotten how many other companies survived the last 10-15 years of Pinball drought? Stern was forced by market conditions to do what they did to survive, and they did. Barely. What we're all asking for is not at all "the right thing" in these market conditions. I could release a cardboard box with AFM painted on the side, call it a limited edition and bam, 8 million in the bank! haha

These market conditions encourage everyone to get machines out the door ASAP, and unfortunately(or fortunately if you care about them surviving thru the rough times ) since private equity is involved with Stern, the consumer won't see much in terms of accessability to new ideas or open source concepts - they will protect their investment at all costs.

Until they start losing market share nothing will change, and so far I don't know many people who are picking JJP or PPS OVER Stern, they are picking them in addition to Stern.

Greed / Not invented here syndrome.
They think they know pinball best and would rather design in house.

Has to be it. My direct question to them would be "Are you in the hardware and software industry, or the pinball industry?"

Like really what pays the bills, people playing the hardware, or the pinball machine?

Open source and business just don't mix well in the case of manufactured products. You can call proc open source all you want, but at the end of the day from a business perspective the hardware is proprietary and not under the pinball manufacturer's control. Companies don't like not being in control of their own destiny and it's just not worth it to bet the farm on the hope that the people that made Proc or whatever else will still be around a year from now. That and even if it was open source, what would that accomplish? I want the game to be what it was designed to be by a professional pinball designer, not what joe blow decided it should be.

Anyone that doesn't realize by now that Stern is deeeeep in development of their next gen platform that supports all the goodies we want is not reading between the lines. It's all there, the changes in the cabinets starting with Avengers LE thru ST... the main board in 'the pin' etc.. it's all in front of us if you put the pieces together.

Just my opinion

Tell that to Google, Samsung, etc.
Android has proven that it is possible. Poll your friends - how many Samsung Android phones vs Apple iOS.

I agree tho; generally biz does not embrace open source due to the fear of not being in control.

8 out of 10 of my friends have apple vs any other phone.

And I'm not exaggerating.

But my daughter has the S4, and it is sweet! But for me, when I get a new phone in the next few months, it's still going to be an iPhone.

Well then I will have to go on record as being the first person in the world to pick JJP and PPS over Stern. I cancelled my STLE and am done with NIB Stern games unless they fix this mess. Its too bad that they care more about getting their first $$$ in the door from you and then slam it shut when you want their product to work properly. We have been complaining to deaf ears on this problem for years. Maybe they will miss the sound of their cash register ringing when all they hear from it is crickets.

http://www.iclarified.com/34464/ios-gains-15-in-us-market-share-android-and-blackberry-drop-08-charts

The common misconception is that Android vs iOS is that same as Samsung vs Apple.

Despite Android having a 52% market share in PLATFORM, Apple phones are still in 40% of peoples pockets vs Samsungs 24%

Here's the irony in the "fear of not being in control" - most of the components of these very phones we talk about aren't inventions of Apple or Samsung... they buy the touchscreens, the CPUs, the memory etc... then package it with their software into what we buy, which is where the money is. Look at the new XBox and PS4 - they are practically identical PC based gaming systems with GPU's, CPUs, and memory sourced from third parties. Microsoft, Sony, Apple, Samsung arent in the hardware business in most cases, they are in the consumer electronics business.

The differentiator is the end user experience.

We've shown a willingness to work with many of the new manufacturers, even offering exclusive and/or custom deals to some, but as our experiences have gone so far, many consider the P-ROC/PDBs in retrospect. Unfortunately at that point, pride often gets in the way, and R&D time/costs seem to be largely ignored.

IP escrow is one way to solve that problem, though most of our P-ROC IP is already available to the public.

I don't want to derail the original thread. So I'll just say this once and then be quiet. If any pinball manufacturer wants to use our stable, mature, and feature-rich hardware platform and the complete game-development framework that works with it, please contact me, even if you've previously opted to go a different route. I can practically guarantee significant money will be saved versus rolling (or trying to fix) your own platform, and game development times will almost certainly be significantly shorter.

- Gerry
http://www.multimorphic.com

Hey Gerry It's exactly what I rambled on at you about at Expo (it's Steve here) and it's frustrating for me to watch three companies build components and framework from scratch that realistically add no actual value to the end consumer, they are simply a means-to-an-end for building a pinball machine, which is what we ultimately all pay for, not the hardware.

By the way I'll be putting in my P Roc order in the coming weeks

This is why I don't buy any Xbox games anymore. "hey lets release parts of the game later and make it cost 20 bucks per update hehehehhe" as the mofos lolly gag to the bank with MY MONEY

Iphone only, the rest is crap!

Did anyone else figure out if the OP meant internal or eternal? I'm confused.

Rule sets should be standardized not open to change

I think he meant infernal.

Stern typically has 1 team per game, games take 1 year. Not sure where you get 4 months?

I don't even understand what this means. Tools to facilitate software development do nothing more than suck money from companies under the false pretense that they make development faster. All one needs is emacs/vi and a code library built up over the years. There's nothing a third party tool can do that provides more efficiency than Stern's existing libraries of rule templates, SAM drivers, DMD renderings, etc. Most software effort is and always will be in the design and testing stages.

LOL, I love iPhones too. I also Love my iMacs. I've been able to make a pretty good living for the past 19 years using a Mac.

iOS only runs on Apple. Apple neither offers nor supports their hardware on other OSes (except macs on windows).
Samsung can't run iOs... so it's either Android, Linux, or Windows.

The only point I was trying to make is the Android is open source (for most of the part); and it is a commercially viable platform for the smartphone.

Do I think our market is big enough for active Google-like open source? Probably not. We'll see tho... if P-Roc ever encourages one of the players to come to their side.

I can tell you if I had the source code for STNG, DE ST, or Bally ST... I'd be programming the sh1t of new rules and/or features... and I'd be providing said source in some open license. But alas; I'm a minority.

Here's the rub.. Android is open source, but what about the bastardized version that you find on your phone when you buy it from whatever carrier? Is it still the android you think it is that you can upgrade whenever you want or has it become some proprietary mess that prevents you from doing what you want? So many people confuse open source with being automatically used for good. Sometimes it is, more often than not it's used to try and make money without actually doing any real development. I like what open source projects stand for, but reality is it's not necessary and sometimes detrimental.

Great cause, but don't be blinded to the real world by it. There's a time and place for everything..

What about missing rules? I'll use CSI as an example...if I ever get to the Wizard Mode, it sure would be nice if one was there waiting for me. I do agree that we don't want to see 50 different versions of the same game on location, and rule changes will make it impossible to compare scores. But we sort of have this already: I can make most of my Sterns easier by adjusting the number of hits to start each multiball.

This is so incorrect, IMO.

Maybe if you are writing shell scripts or small websites you can more quickly prototype things, but you can't realistically say the modern tool sets provide no advantage over freaking notepad coding.

Visual Studio's design tools have matured by several generations even since VS2008. TFS is very quickly turning into source control of choice, and I used to be a diehard SVN fanboy.

I completely disagree, you are saying that issues with proprietary add-ons imply the core open source system isn't good. Android is solid, and if you get a Nexus device you don't have all the proprietary limitations or lagging upgrades, i.e., the things that Apple customers enjoy. Apple is successful primarily because they limit hardware choices, so they only have a few variations of anything to troubleshoot. That's all any proprietary company has the resources to do, even the size of Apple, Microsoft, or Google, and why Blackberry is struggling to survive.

Going beyond that, if you want your software to go beyond a core competency and live forever, you have to expand the contribution ecosystem to the world as a whole and you wind up with something as successful as Linux. It has every feature you need, is supported on an ungodly amount of hardware from the largest to the smallest you can imagine, becoming the most secure, flexible, and scalable operating system we've ever seen. Every server company of any size, companies that historically made all their money with proprietary solutions, has had to scrap their own operating systems in favor of Linux, no matter how much effort they put into them because, and this is the key, even the most minor edge cases are continuously being taken care of by people who needed *that* fix. That's how software code is brought to completion.

Is this thread over yet?

Since this thread is about systems development, specifically a pinball machine, a UI design tool doesn't apply, and Stern doesn't use Microsoft technology in their systems. Visual Studio works great for Windows programming but just don't apply to the rest of the world.

Somewhat equivalent to Visual Studio one can use Eclipse to facilitate code templating, API calls, debugging, builds, deployments and source code integration. I don't really call those modern toolkits, just fancy code editors, and vi/emacs are just as capable. Most large scale systems don't actually rely on tools like VS, everything is scripted, which is the exact opposite of your assumption about code editors only being good for shell scripts and small web sites.

See this is what I think most people want with their 'open source' thinking. That Stern release their 'tools' to the community like game developers do for mods and hobbyist level designers (ie GtkRadiant for idTech).

I think the hard reality is these tools are not in existance for pinball software. I don't think theres some magical GUI and scripting language being used to drag and drop and tweak things with a nice simple script. It's programming folks, not an app development suite. I'm sure for handling animations and lightshows theres something being used, but the actual core gameplay is going to be code driven... maybe in C or C++, maybe at a lower level than that - I personally don't know. I know the older early SS games were basically assembly language... I'm sure we're higher level than that now, but how much higher I don't know.

Now, I would question whether is HAS to be done without better UI's and simpler setups, but Stern isn't going to develop a software platform just for us to use.

Yea this may be part of the misconception. In a hypothetical world, if Stern open sources game software, it would be released as is, meaning C and ASM skills required. There is no reason for Stern to make it easy for a novice programmer/hobbyist to tweak their game, as they would not profit from it, most likely cost them more support calls.

That effort, to make it easy for the novice to modify games, would either be taken up by external enthusiasts in the open source community, or not, it's not a trivial amount of effort. There's vibrant ecosystems built around firmware hacking on phones, modems, routers, mp3 players, and all the vendors state they do not support "uncertified" software on their devices...it's fair, and completely understandable. You brick your device, sorry, you voided your warranty.

Thread hijack. How do your Iphones affect the Stern's software "bottleneck"? Will they get Stern's to update their code?

There should be a standard tournament rule set that is given that will be the go to. Sure you can have settings that change but there should be an ifpa or papa standard rule sheet that way when you play your playing on what is to be judged or prepared for in a tournament.

I wasn't referring to using Visual Studio to design UI, that's old hat. The architecture design tools in it are amazing. I had a "purist" stage too where I thumbed my nose at Msft coding and preached vi/Linux all day long. I've coded major systems in more languages than you can imagine. Trust me, there is a better way to manage platforms than using text editors and hand built make files. That style of coding has its place, I still bang out quick stuff in java and eclipse when need be, but the MSFT tools are vastly superior when it comes to supporting software methodologies like Agile.

too many out there like this yet and they're not more demanding yet

This is INCREDIBLY incorrect. As an open source developer and a VI bigot (I loathe emacs), having and IDE and various other tools do absolutely speed up development. Copy and Pasting from a library is all well and good and anyone can do %s/$search/$replace/g but in reality there is far less of that being done than you think. A good IDE with syntactical checking and built in JIT compiling, hooks into SVN, Maven, etc.. is absolutely a necessity.

and I was starting to believe you were tech savvy and not another lemming lol

An associate of mine just got the galaxy note. Wow that thing is goofy large. It's like holding an old graphing calculator to your head.

For a long while phone companies were trying to make the smallest phones possible. Now they are trying to figure out how large they can make them and still have people slap them against their heads lol.

100% agreed

Yeah I don't even get how those fit in a pocket. Can barely get a hand around them.

lol it's funny you mention that because a guy I work with got one too but he's a 6'8" former basketball player and he got it because it fits his hand. Anyone else it's like a pizza box on the ear

That's because people hardly use them as a traditional phone anymore (ie make calls) It's now a portable hand held computer for internet access. More screen real estate is superior for these uses.
Seems pretty simple to me - and yeah in the old days a tiny cell was "sexy". Not anymore

Damn is there no thread anywhere safe from phone bickering...? and who could possibly care what brand anyone else uses?

I agree completely. I have had an IPhone4 for about 2.5 years and am waiting to upgrade for a bigger screen IPhone (5"-6") when they come out with it. If next year's IPhone offering is not at least 5" then I will likely switch to Samsung
To me the phones have become all about portable internet rather than phone calls which any old phone can do.
As long as the phone is skinny and fits in my pocket, the larger screen size is better to me.

Ooooooook and how about Stern not completing their code?

I'll sum it up for you. "Finished" code = good "Unfinished" code = bad

If this fails to satisfy there are always 10 threads going with the same underlying message from the same guys with the same conclusion. I suppose with no further info to discuss seeing a thread derail is pretty understandable... even if it is about (aaaarg) phones...

Huh? So should they lay everyone off while the money stops coming in during this time?

I'm predicting that they will jump on the remake train, or do a Tron premium. But I don't know crap since I don't have an Iphone, so you might wanna get someone else's opinion.

Make good enough machines and you can just sell premiums make 2 a year and be fine. Making 3 different pins a year in this competitive environment and not having up to snuff code within a year of most of your releases seems like a recipe for disaster. I love many of their recent designs and want them to be successful but their software support for pins needs to improve without a doubt.

In light of another codeless weekend, can we keep it off topic on cell phone discussion in the interim please hahaha

Come by and play some flawed Xmen LE code. Got it back up and running with a new aux board and wiring harness! Code isn't quite finished but its fun!

Oh nice! I'm jacked to play more Xmen after watching it in the Expo tournament.
Pretty much awesome at it now.... in my own mind...

Better hope not. No one at staff at PPS will be capable of that. They're not a software house.

Well I don't have a horse in the race, so my care-meter is somewhat low, but you can't deny it is a possibility.

Hopefully it works out.