Warning
This is the documentation the latest work-in-progress version of MPF!
This is the documentation for MPF 0.57, which is the “dev” (next) release of MPF that is a work-in-progress. This is probably ok, and means you’ll be on the latest, cutting-edge version of MPF.
However, if you want a more stable version, select the
v:stable
version from the lower-left corner of this page. You can always update to the latest at any time.
Creating standalone show files¶
You can create a subfolder called shows in your machine config folder or
within a mode config folder. Then inside that folder, you can create separate
files, where each file is its own show. The files need to have a .yaml
extension, and the name of the file before the extension is the name of the show
as you’d refer to it in your MPF configs.
A few notes for creating show files:
- MPF config files are case sensitive. It is best to stick to some kind of convention (such as lowercase names with underscores).
- Show names are “machine-wide” within MPF. This means that if you have two different shows with the same name in different locations, MPF will get confused.
- Valid characters for show names are z-x, 0-9, and the underscore. Python objects cannot contain dashes in their names, meaning your show file names cannot include dashes.
Here is a sample show file. This file might be called something like
flash_red.yaml
and would be located in your machine’s /shows
folder:
##! show: my_show
#show_version=5
- time: 0
lights:
led1: red
- time: +1
lights:
led1: off
- time: +1
##! show: my_show
#show_version=5
- time: 0
lights:
led1: red
- time: +1
lights:
led1: off
- time: +1
Notice it’s essentially the same show we used as an example in the section on show config formats. However there’s one important change.
Since this is a standalone show file, we need to tell MPF what “version” of the
show format this file is. MPF versions 0.57 use show_version=5
. If we ever
change something in the show format, then we’ll increment the version. (Don’t
worry though, we have and automated migration tool that converts shows to the
new formats. That’s actually part of the reason we include the show_version in
the show files)
The bottom line is that when you create a .yaml show file, the first line of
the file must be #show_version=5
so MPF knows it’s working with the proper
type of file.
Beyond that, the show file follows the show format covered elsewhere in this
documentation. You can nest show files into subfolders under the /shows
folder if you want to, and in can put /shows
folders in both your machine-wide
and mode-specific folders. (The /shows
folder should be in the root of your
machine config or the root of a mode folder. It does not go inside the
/config
folder.)