Pinball Deluxe: Reloaded News

A quick update

• Fastball: Made the strike hole more likely to capture the ball
  
• Fastball: smoothed the transition from the rails to the flipper in the inlanes
  
• Fastball: fixed an issue with the Bunt mods
  
• Fastball: potential fix for a rare problem with the running lights
  
• Wild West: Adjusted the ranch capture strength in the left outlane
  
• Brix: fixed an issue with the reset of the bonus flippers
  
• Carnival: removed a tiny gap that allowed a ball to drain from the outlane when the blocking pin was up
  
• Wild West: fixed an issue when Bandit Shootout would start at the same time as a multiball
  
• Carnival (Winter): added the missing blocking pin in the outlanes.
  
• Space Frontier: potentially fixed an issue with the lock ball getting stuck in the bottom left hole.
  
• Powerball activation animation is now faster
  
• Space: fixed a bug where the ball would not be captured by the left outlane capture
  
• Daily Events: now shows when the best 22 out of 28 kicks in
  
• Removed the beta tag from the Daily Events. The rules may still change in the future however.
  
• Removed an issue on Game Over where a Challenge update and the Bonus tickets award tried to show at the same time
  
• Fixed an issue that could give a Challenge with a negative score goal
  
• Wild West: Fixed an issue that caused the background music to stop playing at some point
  
• Fastball: foul hits will now add a strike (except when it would be the last strike for the strikeout - in which case it will not add a strike, like baseball)
  
• Fastball: All-star will pause during end-of-ball bonuses and during the Batting mini-game
  
• Fixed a bug where some lights changed colors when turned on
  
• Laid the foundation for a new Daily Event play mode: Golf. More details to follow.
  
• Achievements cannot be earned in Golf mode
  
• The DND matrix ball label will better adjust to the size of the score
  

The latest test version is now live on the default branch. Here are the release notes.

- The blocking gate in the Saloon in Wild West won't raise on top of the ball anymore
- On Space Frontier, the view will not consider balls that are locked (it will scroll to the top of the table)
- When the timer runs out in Blitz Mode, the flipper will now freeze and let the ball(s) in play drain, allowing you to get end of ball bonuses
- Fixed a bug where the ball would always follow the same path when coming out of capture holes on Fastball
- Fixed a problem with multiple balls entering the left outlane at the same time with mod Wormhole Lock active
- Fixed a bug on Wild West where a locked ball on the right outlane would prevent proper scrolling
- Optimized the game room
- Wild West: The shootout will now correctly show the number of bandits hit
- Space Frontier: the antimatter ball will not trigger the skillshot anymore and will not get the bonus from hitting a locked ball
- Brix: Rebalanced levels above 35. The difficulty was too lumpy
- Brix: Lowered the increase in ball speed by level by a tad
- [PC] Experimental support for controller vibration
- Treasure Hunter: fixed a bug with Deep Dive
- Daily Events: fixed a problem when starting a game without internet connection.
- Treasure Hunter: slight time bump on the Jellyfish Swarm and Shark Survivor timed mode.
- Fastball: fixed a bug that made it impossible to complete the Inning challenge
- Fixed an issue that could cause the game to freeze for a frame when the matrix changed
- Potential fix for a problem arising when draining the ball and nudging at the same time
- Fastball: changed the top left flipper area to make the ball a bit harder to control
- Apparatus: fixed a bug on ramp in 2A where the ball would stay on the ramp and drain
- Brix: the hole at the end of each level has a larger attraction radius
- Wild West: changed the strenght of the right outlane pin. It will not send in right between the flippers anymore
- Fixed an issue that would prevent a new ball from being added at the plunger after a drain
- Work on new Daily Event Profile screen
- Fixed an issues where in Blitz you can get an additional ball after the timer as elapsed
- Added an "automatic" trigger on the plunger (used for Blitz only at the time)
- Changed the ball_lost sound on Fastball to a clearer version
- Optimized the performance of the Daily Event end-of-day calculations
- Changed the Video Settings to support more display modes

Hello,

There is a new version of the game (1.2) on the public test branch (password: testingtesting) for those who want to have a look. The main focus of the update is upgrading the underlying game engine to a more recent version and supporting new features. Mostly, that stuff is invisible or at least it should be unless there are some issues.

In addition there are a lot of bug fixes to tables and it paves the way for new tables to be introduced. The full notes are below.

- The blocking gate in the Saloon in Wild West won't raise on top of the ball anymore
- On Space Frontier, the view will not consider balls that are locked (it will scroll to the top of the table)
- When the timer runs out in Blitz Mode, the flipper will now freeze and let the ball(s) in play drain, allowing you to get end of ball bonuses
- Fixed a bug where the ball would always follow the same path when coming out of capture holes on Fastball
- Fixed a problem with multiple balls entering the left outlane at the same time with mod Wormhole Lock active
- Fixed a bug on Wild West where a locked ball on the right outlane would prevent proper scrolling
- Optimized the game room
- Wild West: The shootout will now correctly show the number of bandits hit
- Space Frontier: the antimatter ball will not trigger the skillshot anymore and will not get the bonus from hitting a locked ball
- Brix: Rebalanced levels above 35. The difficulty was too lumpy
- Brix: Lowered the increase in ball speed by level by a tad
- [PC] Experimental support for controller vibration
- Treasure Hunter: fixed a bug with Deep Dive
- Daily Events: fixed a problem when starting a game without internet connection.
- Treasure Hunter: slight time bump on the Jellyfish Swarm and Shark Survivor timed mode.
- Fastball: fixed a bug that made it impossible to complete the Inning challenge
- Fixed an issue that could cause the game to freeze for a frame when the matrix changed
- Potential fix for a problem arising when draining the ball and nudging at the same time
- Fastball: changed the top left flipper area to make the ball a bit harder to control
- Apparatus: fixed a bug on ramp in 2A where the ball would stay on the ramp and drain
- Brix: the hole at the end of each level has a larger attraction radius
- Wild West: changed the strenght of the right outlane pin. It will not send in right between the flippers anymore
- Fixed an issue that would prevent a new ball from being added at the plunger after a drain
- Work on new Daily Event Profile screen
- Fixed an issues where in Blitz you can get an additional ball after the timer as elapsed
- Added an "automatic" trigger on the plunger (used for Blitz only at the time)
- Changed the ball_lost sound on Fastball to a clearer version
- Optimized the performance of the Daily Event end-of-day calculations
- Changed the Video Settings to support more display modes

A medium-sized update paving the way for new play modes in Daily Events and general improvements to the game

- Added a label indicating when the next challenge will be available
- When getting an additional ball with a powerball in play, the added ball will also be a powerball
- Matrix mini-games will now pause mini-game countdowns. Let's take Carnival for example: if the Spin Wizard is active and you get into a Truck Attack, the timer will pause.
- Performance improvement when showing a ticket
- Added an option to override the visible size of the table on screen on a per-table basis
- Fixed a bug when using a powerball while there are 2 balls in play (one of them locked somewhere)
- Fixed a problem that can arise when 2 balls collide while droping from a ramp.
- Fixed a ball stuck problem on Apparatus
- Fixed an issue where the pop-up asking the player to update the game was not working properly (when Daily Events have been update with a new table for instance)
- Fixed an issue where the game over screen animation could be interupted and it would not resume
- Changed how the physics are calculated when the frame rate is very high. It was producing different ball movement than 60 fps before.
- Because powerballs are pretty bouncy, they can sometimes not hit the pins correctly on the outlanes. Starting with The Apparatus we introduce a pin to prevent the balls from draining if the outlane is open. In this update we have added the same functionality to Fastball.
- Change the scoring of future Daily Events to reward the players in the top 50 with more points. Before the change there was not much difference between a top 200 and top 25 score so we want to address how it is pretty impressive to get in the top 50. The new formula is 1st: 100; 2nd-5th: 90; 6th-20th: 85; 21st-50th: 80; then reward players using the previous formula. The formula used to start applying at rank 4.
- Fixed a bug with the timing of Challenges: they should not get out of kilter anymore.
- Support for new play modes in Daily Events. This will not rollout immediately but be prepare to see the modes Purist, Blitz and 1-Ball in the future.
- Fixed an issue with the menu at very high fps
- Various bug fixes

Check out the new table: The Apparatus.

Plus
- New challenges
- Fixed a few localization errors
- Fixed a problem with the tool tips formatting
- Made background and loading icon higher resolution
- Fixed a bug where the ball would not come out of the capture hole after the mini-game in Fastball.
- Nudge won't affect locked balls anymore (balls that are captured in a hole)
- New table: The Apparatus
- Small performance improvement during play (less draw calls)
- Auto-save score during daily events (every 60s)
- Fixed a bug in physics simulation that was producing unexpected bounces (most notably on slingshots)
- Changed where the capture holes for bonus ball in Brix can appear. More precisely, how close to other elements they can appear.