Godot video not triggering on mode start

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Anthony Bates

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Jan 19, 2026, 6:03:56 PM (2 days ago) Jan 19
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I'm working on getting my first mode working properly and having an issue triggering the video to start. The game is playing as it should, the attract video and light shows play properly, the video changes on game start and the appropriate music plays. I have it set so that 3 pop bumper hits lights the mode and the mode starts at the saucer. When you hit the saucer, the ball pauses there at the start of the mode and then ejects about 10 seconds later. It's meant to play a video as soon as the mode starts but no matter how I phrase it to trigger the video, the video never changes. The music changes correctly but not the video and I have tried a lot of different iterations of how to get it to trigger but nothing has worked. 

I have attached my base config as well as the mode config for reference and all the names are correct and the video files play on their own. If anyone could take a look and give me a suggestion as to how to trigger the video to play correctly, I would really appreciate it. Also, let me know if you would like to see my main config or any of my other yaml files if that would be helpful. 

Thanks,
Anthony 
base.yaml
escape_graveyard.yaml

Anthony van Winkle

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Jan 19, 2026, 7:00:25 PM (2 days ago) Jan 19
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Hello!

Your configs look fine overall, but there is quite a bit of unnecessary cleanup/management that could be causing issues.

First, MPF handles all game start/stop logic so you should let the system handle the transition between attract/base modes and back. Manually triggering events to end the attract mode (stop_mode_attractor simulate the attract mode's internal events (mode_attract_will_stop) may lead to weird behaviors and missed cleanup. 

Second, anything triggered by a mode (sounds, slides, lights) will automatically be removed when that mode ends, so you don't need to use mode_<name>_will_end events to do that kind of cleanup. Doesn't necessarily hurt anything, but it will cause noise in the logs and make it harder to figure out what's going on.

Speaking of logs! To your issue at hand, since the configs look good the best thing to check are the logs themselves. From the MPF log, is the event to play the video slide showing up? If not, something's wrong with the configs. From the GMC log, is that event getting heard and the slide being shown?

In the Godot GMC panel there are some options to increase the log levels, BCP and Media will be of the most use. Also when running the game in godot the Scene panel has a Remote/Local option, you can switch to remote to see the actual scene tree of your game in realtime. You can use that to go through the tree and see if your video slide is there, and if so what might be on top of it or why it might not be showing.

Hope that helps!

-Anthony

Anthony Bates

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Jan 19, 2026, 9:01:15 PM (2 days ago) Jan 19
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Hey Anthony,

Thanks for the fast response! I'll admit, many of the manual triggers I added were due to issues not getting video to play correctly. I had similar issues with initially getting the video to change when going from attract mode to the base mode on ball start. Now that I have that working, I will try to go back in and cut down on some of the extra manual transitions. Actually it may help solve exactly what the issue was with my attract mode transitioning to the base mode if I remove one thing at a time a re-test. 

I don't have my PC in front of me atm as I am at work but I'm pretty sure when I checked the logs before, the event to play the video was showing up, so technically the config should have been okay. 

I'll play around with the log level for Godot GMC as well as see if I can't get to the bottom of it. That was actually going to be my next step to work through. 

I'll report back once I've done those things if I still can't get the video triggering properly. 

Thanks again,
Anthony 


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