Yeah I do really love AutoPlay. It's the feature we have been missing all along in FME really IMO.
In the past I have spent many a good few days pumping money into clubbers just to get the pots up and gameplay settled down. The time taken to do this just kills any enthusiasm you once had for playing the machine.
I watched Alex's video about it last night on YouTube and I'm in total agreement with both of you that it's a brilliant feature and wonderful addition to MFME. In fact I couldn't help thinking whilst watching that video whether the same sort of thing might have been possible using an external program to MFME, one in which we could have setup a script with the parameters and pass the key presses along to the MFME application window. I'm really annoyed at myself that I didn't think of trying that in the past now.
I'm certainly going to have a lot of fun with messing around with AutoPlay, the inner nerd in me is already thinking about leaving a number of machines playing in a VM (I might call the VM "Georgina") for a few months and coming back to them to see the results. I have also been thinking about the warp speed parameter that Oracles VirtualBox provides. This allows you to run a Virtual Machine guest OS and run it faster than the real time clock. In theory this may boost AutoPlay to be even quicker (although that's very dependant upon how MFME works against the system clock timers, lot's could go wrong!) looking forward to testing that though.
AutoPlay is certainly something that should be discussed and highlighted more though. In particular I feel layout designers should now release with a basic AutoPlay config in place per layout (as some have already done). I appreciate that this config may depend on what you want to achieve of course, but at least it would always give a starting point and frame of reference for the player to mess around with.
We will, of course, never fully understand the factors which can affect gameplay of each and every machine. To do this we would need source code of each machine and then actually be able to understand what it's doing !
My point above is that I believe it's important to play emulated machines as close to real life as possible. As soon as I read that post from EdwardB about the £1's IN only and detection for Anti-Stats mode it hit home. Ok, maybe it's only on a small number of machines, maybe it does bugger all to the gameplay. The reality though for us is that we would never know for sure. Certainly for any machines that I care about getting a good emulated experience from I will be setting them up to have multiple coin inputs and ensuring that AutoPlay uses those different coin/token inputs.
Edited by mort, 14 August 2018 - 05:14 PM.
