01 April, 2016

Yes, FarSight can always do worse!

I have been complaining about the invisibility of the Farsight standard (silver) ball, like for ages. The only solution, following a suggestion of my frend Nick, was to choose among the various special unicolour balls one that had the best contrast given the dominant colour of the playfield. So when I tested Rescue 911 I decided to use a black ball. After playing for a while I had the growing impression that the ball was fuzzy. I took some screenshots in order to have a better look and this is what I found



Farsight has added a shadow at the ball. Instead of fixing the reflections that are creating all the problems, they have added a shadow, God knows why, which makes the black ball (one of my preferred ones) almost unplayable.

In the previous post on Rescue 911 pinball you can clearly see the shadow around the blue ball. The effect is not as bad as in the case of the a black ball but it is definitely not an improvement.  I cannot tell for sure when this feature made its appearance. It was definitely not there when ElDorado and Fireball were released but I have the impression that it was already present in Hurricane although I did not notice it at the time.

And just to remind how things can be bad with the ball reflections, shadow or no shadow, here is a screenshot from the Big Shot table



Why on earth does FarSight ignore the essential things and just adds useless cosmetic modifications? I guess we will never know.

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