Pinball FX 2 - bugs/issues and recommendations

[The Loafer]

This thread is created to assist Zen Pinball gurus in fixing bugs/annoyances and offer some recommendations (which may end up in its own thread). Let us try and keep it focused on this

Issues found so far. All of these reflect playing pinball fx 2 at 1920 x 1080 in portrait view on a win 7 pc.


- I was playing world war hulk and I had placed the dmd at the lower left since its a fairly large apron area. Well, I activated the arena, and oops, the dmd is covering the flippers since there is no apron on that mode. Ouch! So no dmd placement at the bottom, though I will try the small size dmd

- it's a bit of a pain to place the display in portrait but I appreciate having it, so just a little pain is not a big deal. Would be great to have the ability to switch to portrait within the app

- I wish we could zoom out a bit, it almost seems like it should be, some of the writing on the apron is not visible though i need to test all cameras

- With the dmd back at the top, the nice upper area is not really visible, not a bug but this connects to the camera view issue where if the camera was pulled back a bit more, this would not be an issue

- most of the views work but there is no perfect view, so hopefully more are coming.

- I mentioned the dmd bug earlier, where if you pick large dmd and upper left, part of it is offscreen.


Well done zen staff!

[The Loafer]

A few more:

Hey, is there any way to hide the camera and pause symbols on the top left screen ? They are quite huge and disturbing...

I agree, I would suggest:

- remove it completely
- making them smaller, MUCH smaller!
- have it appear only on mouse movement
- have it semi transparent

It seems to be me a left-over of a touch interface since u can change the view by clicking on that button while playing (but of course on the pc, we would just press "g" )

Others:
- I would recommend some kind of a countdown counter when unpausing the game. Lost a ball because of that...

- one of your "help" screens shows the Mars table. What a tease

[The Loafer]

note:
- I would recommend some kind of a countdown counter when unpausing the game. Lost a ball because of that...

this is actually in the game, but it either does not work if I use the mouse to paus (by clicking on the pause symbol) or it does not work if the ball is cradled on the flipper.

[DjParagon]

Yeah, I was just about to post that the countdown works perfectly using a 360 pad. ^^

[JTenebrous]

Throw one more big vote in for an option to remove the Pause and Camera overlay buttons. They are nothing but a useless visual distraction to me, which is a shame because these tables are otherwise looking *stunning* in 1080p Portrait mode (for Portrait mode and other upcoming cabinet features alone I will be buying/rebuying as many tables as you provide - even though I already own the full Zen 2 table set on PS3). Also - thanks for bringing this to Steam! Nothing could make me switch to Windows 8, so this is very much appreciated.

[LeanderL]

My thoughts:

1) pause and cam buttons: hovering them displays them but if the mouse is not on them the buttons disappear. You can change the cam with c so the big button is useless. I know it makes sense on tablets etc. but Windows users should at least be able to get rid of them. Something like "display buttons yes/no" in the settings.

2) Adjustable DMD. Not that difficult to implement...you can freely move the DMD anywhere on your screen (options menu)

3) Highscores: "remember me" function. If you play single player entering the same three letters all the time is not convenient.

[Roo5676]

View 1 or 2 seem to be the best for a cabinet. The angle on 1 seems slightly better, but I wish I could pull it back just slightly.

I do wish you could disable all special cameras though. Right now it goes back into them every time (launching ball normally, launching ball from left "Hand" plunger on Wolverine, Darth Vader talking to Boba Fett, etc.) You can hit the camera button during it and go back to your full table view, but it doesn't stick.

Agree on removing the massive pause button.

Agree that there is no good place for a medium-sized DMD. Lower left seemed ok, but on some tables (Biolab) it actually overlaps the flippers a little. Being able to move this to another monitor (or real DMD! ) would be nice.

And someone mentioned it somewhere - a brightness option would be nice. Seems to be a bit too bright - it's a bit harder than it should be to see the ball against the yellow Wolverine playfield, for example.

I posted another thread about getting Xpadder working for my controls. It would be nice to have support for any controller (besides Xbox 360 controller).

Honestly, most of my complaints are cabinet-centric (for which I know support is going to come later). The game is fantastic and totally playable with my Xpadder setup. Maybe at some point I'll start a cabinet-mode wishlist thread or something.

[Praag]

My thoughts:

1) pause and cam buttons: hovering them displays them but if the mouse is not on them the buttons disappear. You can change the cam with c so the big button is useless. I know it makes sense on tablets etc. but Windows users should at least be able to get rid of them. Something like "display buttons yes/no" in the settings.

2) Adjustable DMD. Not that difficult to implement...you can freely move the DMD anywhere on your screen (options menu)

3) Highscores: "remember me" function. If you play single player entering the same three letters all the time is not convenient.

Totally agree. I also suffer a bug entering the Arena, the ball simply vanished, right flip stay up, nothing i can do except quit the game.

[rooter]

Does anyone else have major flipper lag?

[shogun00]

Does anyone else have major flipper lag?

Yep! I'm trying to figure out what's causing it on my build. I came up with four possible solutions, but I don't have time now to check them out at the moment.

1.) Make sure the graphics card driver is up to date.
2.) Make sure your monitor is set to "game mode".
3.) Check the graphics settings on Windows and make sure that there aren't any motion enhancing* filters running.
4.) Try lowering the resolution and/or turn off the ball trails and anti-analyzing. Those use up quite bit of GPU memory.

* Motion enhancing only works on content with 30fps or less. It doesn't work too well with 60fps games. Usually both the monitor and graphics card have these features available.

[kingcozy]

Game runs at 500x speed!

Okay, I don't know if it's ACTUALLY 500x speed, but as soon as I get to the main menu I can see that the game just starts speeding up like crazy. The flaming Pinball FX logo's fire animation starts speeding up like CRAZY, and when I actually load up a table it's INSANELY fast - way too fast to play. Everything from the character animations on the table to the actual ball physics are sped up.

I've tried updating my drivers, running in windows compatibility mode, changing the executable's CPU affinity to a single processor, changing the resolution, trying to go into windowed mode (you can't), launching the executable directly from its installed Steamapps location, etc. etc.

I'm stumped.


Anyone else have this problem? I just bought this game and would love to play it, but it's completely unplayable like this.

[iCub]

See here for others with the same problem and the solution they discovered:-

http://steamcommunity.com/app/226980...8532661899236/

I hope this works for you.

[iCub]

This comes under recommendations:-

Add the Mars table that comes free with the Windows 8 version

The Steam community is living up to their name and getting rather "steamed" up that Windows 8 users get a freebie table but the Steam version doesn't.


Bring back the "low quality" mode from the Windows 8 release to allow use on Atom based tablets and older PCs/Laptops. (I know Solitude kindly replied to me in another thread that he will look into this, but I thought it worth including in the recommendations thread too incase other players are interested).

[kingcozy]

See here for others with the same problem and the solution they discovered:-

http://steamcommunity.com/app/226980...8532661899236/

I hope this works for you.

Bingo. Thanks a lot! Now I can enjoy this game.

I did a bunch of searching too before posting a thread, sorry! I hope others can find the solution as easily as I did. It's a shame it's such a non-obvious bug though.


For those who don't want to click links - make sure you have Vertical Sync set to "Let 3D Application Decide" in your Nvidia control panel - then make a new profile for Pinball FX2, and set Vertical Sync to ON.

My problem was that I had Vertical Sync turned off by default in my Nvidia Control Panel for ALL games and software. I guess Pinball FX2 REQUIRES VSync to be on or it doesn't run properly, hence the sped up effect.

Hope this helps, and thanks again for your link!

[LeanderL]

Adding the Mars table would be cool.
And in addition to my previous ideas please think about fixed cams (user selections) that do not automatically change during multiball. I know that the view must be changed for certain minigames etc. but the zooming out during multiball really doesn't make sense.