Visual Pinball Engine - MPF Gamelogic Engine

Enables the Mission Pinball Framework to drive VPE

Documentation at https://docs.visualpinball.org/plugins/mpf/

Overview

MPF is an open-source framework written in Python to drive real pinball machines. It has a "configuration over code" approach, meaning that 90% of what you'd do in a pinball game can be achieved through configuration (YAML files) rather than implementing it in code.

When you read MPF's Getting Started page, you'll notice a banner stating that "MPF is not a simulator." Well, you've found the simulator. ;)

This project lets you use MPF to drive game logic in VPE, a pinball simulator based on Unity. It does this by spawning a Python process running MPF and communicating with VPE through gRPC.

User setup

This project is available as a Unity package at registry.visualpinball.org. To install it, make sure the scoped registry is added in your Package Manager settings. Then open the Package Manager in Unity and add org.visualpinball.engine.missionpinball under Install package by name.

The Unity package is built and published to our registry on every merge to master.

Use

1. Add the MpfGamelogicEngine component to the root object of your table
2. Click on 'Get Machine Desciption' in its inspector
3. Click on 'Populate Hardware' to bring the coils switches and lamps from MPFs machine description into VPEs respective manager windows
4. Assign the coils, switches and lamps to items on your playfield using the coil, switch and lamp manager windows

Development Setup

In order to import the package locally instead from our registry, clone and compile it. This will copy the necessary binaries into the Unity folder. Only then, import the project into Unity.

Since the Unity folder contains .meta files of the binaries, but not the actual binaries, .meta files of uncompiled platforms are cleaned up by Unity. In order to not accidentally commit those files, we recommend to ignore them:

git update-index --assume-unchanged Plugins/Google.Protobuf.dll.meta
git update-index --assume-unchanged Plugins/Grpc.Core.Api.dll.meta
git update-index --assume-unchanged Plugins/Grpc.Net.Client.dll.meta
git update-index --assume-unchanged Plugins/Grpc.Net.Common.dll.meta
git update-index --assume-unchanged Plugins/Microsoft.Extensions.Logging.Abstractions.dll.meta
git update-index --assume-unchanged Plugins/System.Buffers.dll.meta
git update-index --assume-unchanged Plugins/System.Diagnostics.DiagnosticSource.dll.meta
git update-index --assume-unchanged Plugins/System.IO.Pipelines.dll.meta
git update-index --assume-unchanged Plugins/System.Memory.dll.meta
git update-index --assume-unchanged Plugins/System.Numerics.Vectors.dll.meta
git update-index --assume-unchanged Plugins/System.Runtime.CompilerServices.Unsafe.dll.meta
git update-index --assume-unchanged Plugins/System.Threading.Tasks.Extensions.dll.meta
git update-index --assume-unchanged Plugins/VisualPinball.Engine.Mpf.deps.json.meta
git update-index --assume-unchanged Plugins/VisualPinball.Engine.Mpf.dll.meta
git update-index --assume-unchanged Plugins/VisualPinball.Engine.Mpf.pdb.meta

License

MIT