So.. I had a plan to do these developer diaries each week. That didn’t last more than a week. I found I was spending more time trying to record progress than actually making it. There’s also gaps where nothing actually gets done, which would make for some dull updates. So I’ve backed away from the idea of such regular updates and will do them at less regular intervals. I want to try and keep the format however. So anyway, this second entry will be covering progress from 23/11/2020 until 23/12/2020.

Monday 23/11/2020

The long play session from Sunday brought up a number of things to address with the latest build of the code. Two bugs I thought I had seen the back of came up again, although could not be reproduced 100% of the time. The first one was two balls being served up during ball save. This came up twice during the session. I’ve further tightened up the timeout config settings on the outhole and ball trough ball devices. I have also switched the ball serve for the ball save to occur on a slightly later event that occurs during the ball save process. The second bug is related to the animated star field background stopping in some cases after a second player is added to the game. To get this to occur was not easy as it’s very timing specific. The root cause is somewhere under the MPF hood and not specific to my game. I worked around this same issue last week in other areas of PINBOT 2.0 so was able resolve it using the same method. The animated star field background is an animation I rendered to an animated GIF file that MPF then plays. Currently, this animated GIF is used across many slides and shows in PINBOT 2.0. What I think is happening under the hood is the same animated GIF asset is use across multiple slides and when a slide that uses it is destroyed, it “stops” animating the GIF even though other slides that are active are still using it.
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