How to end segment show immediately(!!)?

[worldpeace-germany]

Hello,

mpf 0.80 with Cobra segment displays. I show the typical things on my segment display, score, ball, player.

For example on theplayer_addedevent I set the corresponding score display to 0

  player_added{num==2}:
    p2_score:
      show_tokens:
        txt: " 0"

Once the game ended I play some kind of animation on my display segment, like scrolling the text "GAME OVER" from left to right. That all works (more or less) fine. That animation (show) loops forever. Now of course the player presses the start button again to play the next game, with that the player_added event is triggered and the score field is set to 0. The show still runs and overwrites that 0 with some text. Thus I need to stop the show before.

The first event which is fired when the user presses the start button is request_to_start_game, so with that I want to stop my game_end_animation:

  request_to_start_game:    #reset
    game_end_animation:
      action: stop

It does stop my animation, but not immediately it seems to finish the current step, so if I have a transistion_out animation that is fully played to the end (as it seems). I have set events_when_stopped:

  game_end_segment_update:
    game_end_animation:
      events_when_stopped: reset_segments
      show_tokens:
        txt: "PLAYER {machine.machine_winning_player} WON     "

I do see that event reset_segments being fired, I listen to that event to set the initial values for the first player (e.g. player=1, score player 1=0, etc) The values flash up for the fraction of a second, then the animation continues until the current step is done. After that the display is all blank. So the events_when_stopped seems to be fired when the show gets the request to stop, but not when it has stopped. I either need the show to stop immediately, no transition_out anymore or I need an event which is only fired once the show has really stopped.

Anyone an idea how I can achieve this?

Thanks!

[avanwinkle]

From the sound of it this is expected behavior. The thing with shows is that a "show" is really a series of events being fired at specified times, so once a show step happens and the step's events are fired off (e.g. changing a light, updating a segment display), those events are forgotten and the "show" is just waiting for its next step.

For your segment display scenario, the solution should be to play your incoming show at a higher priority than the other one, so that the new text is higher on the "stack" and therefore takes precedence. The underlying text will finish its transition silently and then be done, and that won't be visible with the higher-priority text on top of it.

[worldpeace-germany]

Good idea, but doesn't work, from above example I changed to

  player_added{num==2}:
    p2_score:
      priority: 100 #added this line
      show_tokens:
        txt: " 0"

In addition I saw that for mpf 0.80 the time: values need to be quoted, I did that as well. No change at all. Any other idea?

In general, I am really sure that there is some issue in mpf for the segment displays, I have so many strange behaviors I am not able to explain (okay that doesn't have to mean anything...). But some of them are very obvious, e.g.

• I can print "i" on the segment, if I change the text to "," it doesn't work anymore, same with "" it doesn't work anymore
• I have a (somewhat) working show, now I add another step at the end (just before the last "duration" step to hold the last step), it doesn't display, it just stays blank before the show starts from the beginning

    - time: "13"
      segment_displays:
        neoSegTopLine:
          text: "PLAY  AGAIN   "
          expire: 6s
          transition:
            type: push
            direction: left
          transition_out:
            type: split
    - time: "25" #this step I added
      segment_displays:
        displayScore1:
          text: "score 1"
          expire: 4s
    - duration: 10s

I am happy to help to test, to debug, to document, whatever I can contribute to make this better I am willing to do.

[worldpeace-germany]

Use of replace with missionpinball/mpf#1820 and the need to overwrite the display with "" at the same time as the stop command is sent. (or rather in show_player right afterwards)