Software for powering real pinball machines. 100% free. 100% open source.
24 Nov 2018 - jab
MPF 0.51 has been released as maintainance release with new features, bugfixes, refactorings and minimal breaking changes.
Today, we release MPF 0.51 as a maintainance release to 0.50. 0.50 users should be able to upgrade with only minor changes to their config (if any). This post only mentions some highlights and you can alternatively read the full release notes in the MPF docs.
We generally improve the startup performance of MPF and MPF-MC by caching the parsed config when it did not change. In addition, we improved lights and show performance to smooth transitions at minimal CPU load. To prevent lags on flaky switches (or bad debounce) we also improved switch and event handler performance. Most of those changes were made based on feedback from users which were running MPF on embedded PCs such as the Raspberry PI 3 or Raspberry PI Zero. Similarly, we improved the performance of almost all of our platforms. If you see performance problem please report them in our forum.
The release contains numerous bug fixes based on user reports. One area which improved a lot is our ball search implementation. We added new options to customize ball search and improved the behaviour of quite a few devices. This should give new users a very smooth ball search experience.
However, as a consequence you might have to remove the playfield_active
tag from a few of your switches if they are used by a device.
MPF will complain about this on startup.
Those tags are no longer needed for switches which part of devices
because devices handle playfield activation internally in 0.51.
Previously, MPF would trigger a switch during ball search
(e.g. by resetting a drop target) and end ball search incorrectly.
We refactored the interfaces for accelerometers and steppers to support more hardware platforms. However, we believe that this only affects very few users. Please refer to the stepper config reference and accelerometer config reference for details.
A few new hardware platforms are supported in 0.51:
We extended the documentation. The config reference for almost all devices has been completed. We added a section about game design and how to lay out your modes. We documented common modes based on questions in our forum. Please ask there if you are missing anything.