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You're acting as though the game's current state is cataclysmic when it is not, and that behavior is unlikely to yield a productive response. All you can do is report bugs to the correct places and move on.
You haven't gone to school to understand what "optimizing a game" means. I have. Technically I dropped out, but the reason we're talking past each other is that two of us have game dev experience, while you clearly don't.
Writing efficient code is much harder than writing code that works. Optimization is the most engineering-knowledge intensive aspect of game development, and refactoring the game's codebase to perform better would consume months worth of manhours while doing nothing of substance to drive sales. Businesses only invest in projects they expect to bring a return. How many people would buy Pinball FX4 tables if the engine performed 20% better that aren't buying them now? Probably not enough to justify the cost.
After multiple performance patches and an apparently-acceptable Switch port, I can't see them going back to make major changes. The only factor that might justify additional optimization is improved Steam Deck performance, Star Trek: TNG on Deck looks rough, but it's not a large enough bottleneck for the majority of users to qualify as a "must fix" issue. We've already received two major performance patches, so it's likely the low hanging fruit has all been fixed, and with support for all three upscaler algorithms already implemented I can't see it warranting further investment.
Right now Zen's #1 priority is to license every holy grail table, recreate them acceptably, and then trying to maximize subscriber revenue at the point where buying every single table has become prohibitively expensive. That's where the money is, so that's where they're going.
I'm not exactly thrilled with the game's performance either, but the fact that we're both talking in terms of "it's playable but should run better than this" speaks volumes. Compared to the day one EGS build, which had appalling frametimes on high end hardware, the current state of FX4 isn't really that bad. Unfortunately it's not very good either.
At this point, though, I'd rather see Zen get their act together and implement an antialiasing technique that doesn't make the ramps look noisy and gross. It's a somewhat intrinsic problem, those bright silver lines are in high contrast with the playfield, but there's no escaping that they look really bad right now. Despite lighting overall being much better than FX3, that particular aspect of the image quality is wanting.
Hard to say what's happening, but that theory sounds potentially plausible.
Another possible theory is that, upon being asked to pay for what is nominally the same table for potentially the third time, the average, casual gamer is expecting to see a much more noticeable improvement that what's being offered in FX. When they boot up FX for the first time and compare the free tables to their FX3 counterparts, for non-experts like myself it's genuinely quite hard to spot the visual improvements, especially if you're playing on an older PC or don't have the best monitor (my setup is pretty good and i still struggle to see much difference).
Also, to the average gamer, the free Zen originals may feel unfamiliar and less fun because they were designed around a different set of physics. Whilst the the top players will (presumably correctly) point out that the physics are much improved in FX, this isn't necessarily something that most casual gamers notice or value.
In order to entice people to part with their money for potentially the third time i think Zen should have been offering something that looks, to the average gamer, like a real next gen, step-change. Whilst that might have happened under the hood thanks to the Unreal Engine, it's not particularly obvious to those picking up the game for the first time and giving it a quick trial. Maybe something like VR support or cross-platform purchases or the much touted Pinball Royale mode would have made FX feel more of a significant progression.
And then, in addition to being generally underwhelmed by improvements that aren't immediately obvious, people spot things like "coins", collectables, ads that you can't remove and a new subscription model. Not saying any of these things ARE scams or unreasonable (though i personally hate the ads), but they are things that tend to be associated with the worst and most predatory mobile games. So the overall feeling is one of stinkiness and low quality and players start to suspect a cash grab. The 30+GB download size doesn't help either - people might feel they've waited a while for the download only to be totally underwhelmed and potentially the victim of a dodgy cash grab.
So there's quite a few factors that result in a very bad first impression and maybe that's what's behind many of the bad reviews. Just a theory though.
Mmm, that's up for debate. Optimization is a broad subject, but many optimization tasks are narrow in scope.
Often, the biggest performance gains don't come from trying to shave milliseconds from vital routines. Rather, it's how the system is used. Low hanging fruit is cheap, code is expensive.
You can optimize a level (or entire game) without touching a line of code. Geometry, streaming settings, shader counts, texture sizes, particle systems, entity counts, drawing modes, collision detection parameters, pathfinding settings etc. all contribute to scene complexity, load.
And most of that is going to be managed by level designers and technical artists in editors, not by engine programmers. After all, one of the main benefits of using a general purpose engine like Unreal is so you're not spending so much time/money optimising engine code.
The idea that PFX should be better optimized is a valid one.
We should expect Zen to use Unreal 4 more efficiently over time as they gain experience with it. I'm looking at you Curse of the Mummy...
Zen have already said that the latest Switch patch should improve graphics. And they've said that work on the Switch's special requirements will feed development in the other PFX builds.
As I said, I don't care how Zen fixes the issues, just that they do. If they don't I won't be buying, which has nothing to do with getting free tables. I believe many people just aren't interested in buying the same thing over and over. As for Upscaling, FSR isn't working properly and XeSS isn't working right for me(I think it may be an AMD specific issue). There are many issues that are major that haven't been fixed; just look at the Bug Report list. I've been waiting nearly half a year to see Bride of Pinbot fixed, which has a game-breaking bug in it. If they won't fix these issues promptly(or at all), what confidence does that give a potential customer in Zen.
I don't need to take a particular coarse to understand what optimization is, and it's not hard to tell when a game isn't properly optimized. It's Zen's job to hire people who are qualified.
It's not about supporting tables you bought years ago. It's about Zen leaving tables with major bugs on them, and never fixing them. There is a problem on Williams Tables on FX3, where, over time, the flippers go askew and, at a point, will disappear, if your game lasts long enough. You have to shutdown the game and reload it to fix this issue. FX4 has various major bugs right now, which they haven't fixed after 4+ months. If that's the kind of quality you expect out of a company, you do you, and continue to buy them.
It would seem like both of the following can't be true: "87% of players are happy with Pinball FX3" and "Pinball FX3 tables don't work correctly for a significant percentage of users". If Zen failed to address bugs that are impacting a large number of people... why aren't there more complaints? As it stands, most of the negativity is related to how DLC was handled for Pinball FX4. It's not like the Williams tables wouldn't have sold well, those are Zen's crown jewels. If a bug is affecting so few players, it's not fair to characterize it as major. The impact may be disruptive for you, but its reach is limited.
Out of curiosity, I scrolled through all of the top voted negative reviews for Pinball FX3 and exactly zero of them mention bugs in the game. Ergo I'm going to reasonably conclude that the bug you're describing is not widespread. If I had to guess, it probably hasn't been fixed due to being an edge case that is difficult to troubleshoot and/or fix. If the issue only manifests after hours, that definitely has the potential to be hard to reproduce.
Unfortunately no software developer is able to fix every single bug. I reported a scoring issue in the Switch version of Pinball FX3's Medieval Madness table that caused my score doubler to continue indefinitely and they were never able to track down the cause. I actually felt rather bad, I'd reached... I want to say #7 in survival and the score was not legitimate. It was a very good round, but not that good.
Objects slowly shifting across screen sounds like a floating point rounding issue. If the bug is something along the lines of "rounding errors accumulate when running at 1000+ fps" I can't fault them for saying "edge case, won't fix". That's a reasonable response. Every time you talk about these bugs, it feels like you're deliberately omitting a lot of information.
This was uncalled for, don't shout at strangers. At least I'm used to it at this point, although I'd told myself I was going to stop replying.
You're entirely correct and I don't disagree with anything you wrote, but I don't think that really changes the underlying point that I was making. Figuring out the most efficient way to implement visual effects is still very challenging work that goes much faster when it's being handled by experienced staff, and Zen are working with limited resources and a business mandate to implement as many tables as possible so that they can capitalize on the subscription gold rush (or die trying). They've also already dropped two major performance patches, which gives us good reason to think that most of the low hanging fruit has already been trimmed.
I'm glad this whole project isn't my mess.
I'm led to believe that was caused by Royal Madness. I don't know if Zen's logic was looking at music/sound cues or lights, because Multiball Madness starts at the same shot, and those lights also flash for Royal.
Why not look at FX3's bug list?! I'd have figured that would be the first place you would have started. It took me less than one minute to find it.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/442120/discussions/search/?gidtopic=1520386297687601515&sort=time&q=flipper+rotate
There is also an issue on FX3 with the flipper getting stuck after leaving the pause menu(and other times), which requires the flipper button to be pressed to reset it, which can and has caused a ball to be lost.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/442120/discussions/search/?gidtopic=1520386297687601515&sort=time&q=flipper+stuck
This is the problem with development these days, edge casing bugs. Oh, it only affects 5% of players, screw em! Your talking about floating point numbers!? How many players do you think know/care about how something is programmed? Programming is intended to abstract the inner-workings of a piece of software away so the user doesn't have to know how it works, just that is does.
When people keep trying to undermine peoples legitimate complaints, I can, and will respond. Where is the shouting?! Are the words yelling at you somehow?
(Hint, it ain't the steam forums).
Well, it's rather odd that a Zen Devloper would provide a Bug Report Page in Discussions and encourage Steam users to report bugs for FX4, if it wasn't official. What is the point of this page if it isn't where a customer is supposed to report bugs? One would think that if this wasn't the Official place to report bugs, that a Zen Developer would include an external link for customers to report bugs. Sorry for my lack of mental acuity, but perhaps you could enlighten me on this subject, Eddie.