Flax Facts #10 – Scripts debugging

Feature Preview: Tool for Visual Studio

Welcome back to the Flax Facts! Recently I’ve finished our brand new extension for Visual Studio (VS) that enables game scripts debugging.
It’s definitely must have for every game programmer. It allows to debug and track code execution live.
The plugin comes up with features like: breakpoints, threads stack traces, locals, expressions, custom break hit conditions and more.

But what it exactly does?

Code for 6 minutes, debug for 6 hours

First thing you’ll see after plugin installation is that the most important button in VS just got a new label: Attach to Flax.

That’s very handy thing. Just hit play button in editor and then attach (or vice versa) and start your debugging session.
Our tool detects running Flax Editor instances and automatically connects to them so debugging is possible.
Take a look at the following gif which shows how easy it is!

We need a few months to finish it and get rid of issues so it will be ready later this year.
And we’ll publish it in the Visual Studio Marketplace.

With that being said I’m pretty happy with this handy tool.
It has many great features like condition breakpoints, locals, custom expressions, stack frames preview with nice source mapping so working with a code is easier.

The plugin can attach or detach any time without a hurt.
Also, I tested debugging in Xamarin Studio (old MonoDevelop) and it seems it works also fine.
In that case, you need to know exact debug server IP address and port but it can be gathered from the log file.

Future

The most important part is done.
As I said we need add more stability and resolve some minor issues so it will be ready to publish.
At this point, we don’t need any more features but I’m pretty sure we gonna add remote debugging and more advanced flax debugger discovery.
It will be used to debug scripts on mobile devices and consoles but later about this…