deeproot Pinball thread

I hope not.

I hope Deeproot gets their game or games out, and I hope it's all we hope for.

That would be great for pinball, great for Pinside.

LTG : )

they have, its called optos (williams), proximity (heighway), touchscreen surface (multimorphic). heck i know kugler used a cheap webcam to detect dice dots on his homebrew casino pinball. also if musk can make a self driving car using nothing but cheap cameras (no lidar) i wouldnt think tracking ball position would be terribly hard

Define "functioned."

except... that wasn't the conversation. It was about doing it DIFFERENTLY than p3 had already done.

Like a marble in a shoe box.

No. That wasn't mentioned one single time.

Its not getting the basic idea working that would be the issue, its the reliability. Throwing in a camera or two and some tweaked 3rd party software - great, now what happens when every 5th or 10th ball is missed? What about when things get weird with 6 multiballs and parts of the playfield that obscure views momentarily? Its not that it isn't doable, its the 'last mile' problem. And since you brought up Tesla, thats why 100% self driving cars aren't going to be shuttling people around anytime soon. Sure it can detect and react to things...but the 'last mile' issue - congestion, double parking, the chaos of school drop off...anything thats not a highway and things start getting unreliable. Dialing in the near total reliability is the hard, time consuming and expensive part.

None of this is to say I don't wish the best for whatever Deep Root is doing - I look forward to the reveals.

I don't really know how to rate games the way some of the top players do. I will certainly say that the games were not an initial hit as they all made it to some sort of close out if I recall correctly. CV being considered the worst game for operators at the time. Ultimately the art style of the games is now desired and the layouts are fun to shoot. The code is certainly the biggest disappointment but a casual player is almost always impressed with what people consider the JP big 3. I want to see some games out of deeproot. I'm excited to have another option out there for our location games.

Foam core lined shoe box.

I think you meant to say . . .

Magic Girl from Zidware, built to Jpop's specifications , under contract, by American Pinball

Not a touchscreen, I believe it is an IR field over the playfield surface that tracks the ball

So you‘re saying if somebody likes TOM, TOTAN and/or CV they are at best casual players? That „serious“ players would not be impressed by these games? Nice touch.

Sorry, man, I‘m just not ready to jump on your jpop-haters bandwagon.

I edited my original comment. Thanks for the clarity.

I think I saw some news in the last 24 hrs to the contrary..2020 I believe was said.

So wait.. you proposed a tracking system.. that you even admit is not feasible... to address a problem that you (should) know P3 already addressed, and did so successfully?

So you're back to reinventing the wheel with impractical ideas? You and the cameras in the ball guy should hang out more often.. two peas in a pod.

Elon Musk says alot of things...and hey, hopefully its true! I am super skeptical though for the reasons I mentioned - he has been setting and missing deadlines for a while now on the "hey you can have your car drop off your kids and be an uber while you are at work" fantasy. I say this as an owner of a Tesla solar system, they make solid products.....just not buying it. And unlike pinball, which would just crater sales if a game were missing switch triggers a few times a game, the stakes are much much higher.

they just dont hold up to a good player... i was amazed by TOTAN when i was new to the hobby but would never own one now that I know how to play pinball.

i mean, you could literally play the wizard mode in TOTAN until the earth ran out of electricity or your game melted...

Please steer me toward the "Raza" video - if, in fact, it's posted anywhere. I've read about it and, naturally, I'm curious to see it. I've searched for it in this thread but can't find it.

Thanks!

I hope they make lots of great games.
But if they do, there will still be arguing here.
Probably better natured arguing than if disaster befalls, but still arguing.

I would love to talk with Jpop and tell him how much I loved TOTAN. It was my first pinball in 2008. I played it everyday for a long time. I am so glad I had the opportunity to own one.

Not at all. I'm saying that casual players tend to appreciate the game more than someone that reads code before they play a game.

"Not feasible" means that every play of thoughts has it's downsides that would have to be worked out and I don't claim to present you a fleshed out solution aka IAMRIGHT.

But I am.

I'm only think it further. I want it not only to work but to be cheap. So the question when developing something like I proposed is how much decrease in precision can you justify/ will be noticeable.
My proposed solution is for example not feasible if the cameras view is obstructed. So you have to evaluate if that is a major problem and how often there is something in between the top of the backbox and the glass. (Under the usual circumstances: Never)

So we could collectivly let our phantasy flow and work some of this out just for fun or just keep saying that everything is shit, impossible and everyone else is wrong.

And camera in the ball is a terrible idea for obvious reasons I pointed out immediately.

Oh and sadly I don't know of a single P3 in europe. Also I am not in pinball development but in automotive.

Or watches a YouTube vid

While I appreciate the back and forth, you are talking best case scenario. What happens when the ball "jumps" off a post due to old rings? What happens if there is a multiple happening and you have multiple jumps? Ball tracking will be lost. Then what? Play again?

You know (or maybe you don’t) the medical industry use cameras that fit in a pill swallowed by the patient, self guided and self stabilized. It’s the 10th of the size of a pinball.

But anyways, since you didnt read what I’ve posted after, I didn’t say it was realistic or doable, I also did not say it should be done. What I said though is that there was other methods than a camera to track a ball in a closed environment.

I'm writing on a phone so I can't type all that again but I allready answered that ~2 pages ago.
Short: You don't track the ball. You just define areas (like switches) where the view (maye an infrared light) gets obstructed by the ball or not.

If you NOW in multiball shoot a slow ball in the left orbit and one in the right, the game will count it as an orbit shot also. The game doesn't track the ball. It assumes you made the shot because these two switches are hit.

Also this "play of thoughts" doesnt assume to get rid of all switches.

Sorta' like the one that got many of us into this mess....

The ball doesn’t need a camera but you surely need glasses Mr Pea !

An Ir beam or an array of them, who said anything about a camera !

We still can hang out tough.

With pleasure !

Well, to be fair, they clearly spent more money on the 2019 version of essentially the same pitch.

You are alone with your opinion, but that you are entitled to.

Meanwhile 3 of his pins consistently are on every top 20 list. So they hold up as some of the best ever made.

Sounds like maybe you need a hug from J-pop Levi?

I can help arrange that!

—Robert, dT

+10
Pics PLEASE.

Hoo boy, seems risky

100% agree with LTG!

I hope to be hugging a Deeproot pinny here in Australia in the near future!
: )

They also don't hit them with bats and throw them around at a few m/s or smash them with other steel objects. You're comparing apples and cucumbers.

"There are other methods..." and you illustrate that with examples you acknowledge are not "realistic or doable"

That's the idiocy of this thread over the last two days... supporting points with stuff you know is complete garbage. Knew so much.. you even went back to the well three times to refine it..

Your idea simply evolves to what we already have.. optical switches. When you start addressing all the nooks and crannies you want in a game.. you end up with all these zones that can only be seen from nearby places.. and why bother with an advanced computed image if all you are doing is proximy detection.. so you end up with just what we already have. Optos or induction detection.

When you go to visual and expect a good FOV.. you end up doing what P3 already did.. a big open empty space.

There's a simple reason why pinball doesn't have any of this advanced technology.

It's not because it isn't possible. It's because everyone capable of doing it already have six figure jobs at SpaceX, Apple, Tesla, NASA, Lockheed Martin or (insert giant tech corp here).

It would be way easier if you would just read what has allready been written before trying to proof some conspiracy.

It is an opto, exactly. I said that allready.
But with only one emitter and one recepient, so you don't need to tie lots of cables into a switch matrix and therefore save money.

But off to higher misterys...

Since now we know nearly everything about Deeproot and their games:
When does the Star Wars topper come out?

I think that is really dismissive of some of the very smart engineers that work at Stern for example.

Anything is solvable with money and man power, especially at the level pinball is at. A more accurate reason in my opinion is there is no business case or return on some of these ideas.

When JJP bailed on the pirates mech, that was an engineering failure due to lack of experience/smarts. They said so.

When Stern isn't putting video camera ball tracking in games, that's business smarts.

Yes.

But I'm talking about competition. And competition driving innovation.

It was business smarts of Stern to keep the DMD to keep development cost low. It would be business dumbness if they would still be doing this, competing with JJP.

JJP gives us nice games, so Stern has upped their game.

Deeproot says they want to keep the price low, so you have to rethink the development and manufacturing side of things. (Whatever they'll do.)
Camera replacing a couple of switches, tracking the flippers for an end of stroke switch replacement, while using ist maye also to be able to stream your game could potentially drive cost down while adding additional features.
Again: Not saying that this is the way to go.

Simpler example:
Most Pop Bumper Areas are totally seperated. Would it really change the outcome noticably when all 3 Pops are only driven by one switch line & coil?
Would it save money? I dunno! But it is something that could be evaluated if you see the need.

Even simpler and Stern allready does this:
If you don't have to hit targets in a specific order why bother intergrating a lot of seperate targets but include a big one, like in Munsters.
It is risky to do that if people think you're watering down the experience, since this is an obvious change. But they did it and will look if people get around accepting it.

I don't know, last night I watched the SpaceX rocket take off from Houston. The booster rockets were spent and split off after about 4 minutes. 4 minutes later they landed perfectly upright in Cape Canaveral Florida at the exact same time. All done in 8 minutes! Musk is making real magic happen.

This might be my "yelling at a cloud" moment because while I am all for experimentation and innovation, THAT is the single most insulting half-assed watered-down bullshit cost-cut I have ever seen.

I mean I have to ask, at that point why did they even bother with a single long target at all? Just use the scoring switch behind a stretched rubber ring. HA! I just saved Stern another $7 per game

Of course it is. I've seen this argument before and it's always stupid and offensive.

There are PLENTY of people who work at Stern because they WANT to. They'd rather work in the pinball business than somewhere else. Many people have turned down higher-paying jobs to work in the pinball industry.

Most pinball companies aren't just hiring people who are otherwise unemployable off the street. They are hiring talented people who want to work on pinball machines.