solved: Comet scoring error?

Now this is an answer i could get behind. Will confirm in test tonight but in the clip you can see extra ball light is lit at the 200k hole. surely this belongs in the deep cuts thread. thanks for explaining!

How do light extra ball?

completing duck and/or rabbit bonus standups (not sure how many times)

Complete the DUCKS and RABBITS banks 2x each. 3x each lights special.

It’s an adjustment as to whether this is per ball or per game and whether or not there is memory.of previously-lit targets. Default is per-game with target memory (easiest).

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Verified in the code. This does NOT seem to be called out in the manual, however.

So if the tournament officials were not familiar with this, Justin would have been penalized unfairly in the match in question. He must have had the extra ball lit on the top ring for this to happen.

I much prefer when games have the option to individually set these types of things… extra ball=nothing or specific score that you get to set, etc. on the specials as well.

The code did look solid for the million stuff I didn’t see how it could have been a bug. In fact it was kind of nice that it highlighted the ‘2’ in the millions by blinking it (unless Comet does that for all million’s digits)

EDIT: You get the 200k *pf multiplier anytime you have your extra balls maxed out. So if game is set to 1 extra ball at a time, if you light and collect a second one, it will pay the points for that second one.

Also, there is an error in the corkscrew routine, not sure of the condition that would cause it, but it would jump back earlier into the routine to the wrong instruction. Luckily, that instruction ends up translating to ‘switch on $BF’, nop. So no damage since you can’t turn on a switch that high. (out of range)

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Where on the PF does the game show that the EB is qualified/lit for collection on either the jump ramp or the corkscrew ramp? I’m not seeing an EB insert on either one from the IPDB pics.

EDIT: I see them now… they’re the three horizontal orange arrows in front of the jump ramp. And one of the circular inserts in front of the Corkscrew.

Here is the screenshot from the clip. The top EB is lit.

Also, initially unsure of how the extra ball light rotated. From watching the clip, it looks like major switches changes it? At the start of the clip the EB light is at the bottom position and Justin shoots the corkscrew ramp, which moves it to the middle position. His next shot is the center ramp and the EB light moves to the top position, at which point he then shoots the million shot.

I believe that the Cycle Jump EB is on a timer that cycles it between the different rings of the jump.

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Correct, it’s all adjustable. The default is the bottom ring is lit for 5s, the middle 10s, and the top 15s, then back to the bottom for 5s again. It blinks the two holes when it’s about to change.

If you watch the full video, you can see Justin light the EB at about 1:59:45 by hitting the last orange target on the left. This starts the EB on the low ring, then you can see it advance to middle then eventually top when he collects that and the mil.

P4 lit the eb too, but obviously its value was not realized by anyone until yesterday. :wink:

Well the value isn’t. But even earlier Bally games would typically award 50K for unearnable extra balls. Thanks for confirming though.

A typical Williams thing to do was to blink the millions digit if you got the jackpot in later games (Cyclone, e.g.). I don’t know if this is the first instance of that idea or not, but it will only blink if you get the million shot, not if you get to 1M by grinding.


The bigger question is should eb/special consolation awards be multipliable? My stance is no (but I think LOTR may actually do the multiplying for highly technical reasons), the main reason being you don’t* multiply extra balls and specials.

*DOUBLE notwithstanding.

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Classic pinball paradox:

if all scoring is doubled well the scoring from an EB is a score so it should be doubled

If you don’t get 2 extra balls then you shouldn’t get double score because the score is a replacement effect (hello fellow MTG players!) of the extra ball, which can’t be doubled.

But then it gets replaced with a score … which can be doubled … and round and round we go!

Maybe all games should just have a setting … EB points multiplyable YES/NO…

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what about take highest / high score double that?
what about when replays are set to EB? and EB is set to points?
double points from betting points?
double lose points on games where you can lose score?

please identify games which fit all these scenarios

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All games should have as many changeable things broken out in adjustments for people to fine tune to their liking. Presets can handle it for most people, but for flexibility, break all the stuff out. Timers, scores doubled/not, carryover features, etc.

Nightmare to test and debug of course depending on how granular you’re getting.

they should but some game coders have the mindset of that setting is going to be my way and there will be no config for it.