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.

debug attach button

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!

Debug scripts

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.

Debug in Xamarin Studio

Debugging scripts in Xamarin Studio

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…


Wojciech Figat

Lead Developer

6 Comments

Artur · September 15, 2017 at 3:05 PM

Super :O
Takie pytanko, czy ten silnik będzie lepszy od Xenko? Bo jak dla mnie to taka konkurencja 🙂

    Wojciech Figat · September 15, 2017 at 5:18 PM

    Zdecydowanie lepszy! Potrzebujemy tylko jeszcze trochę czasu aby wszystko ukńczyć ale bedzie warto…

      Dawid · September 16, 2017 at 10:24 AM

      Jest może w planach multiplatformowość? Jakiś android albo konsolki 😉

        Wojciech Figat · September 17, 2017 at 7:55 PM

        Na pewno będzie wsparcie dla Android/iOS. Prawdopodobnie pod koniec tego roku. Dalej w kolejce jest Xbox 🙂

          Jakub Kuniszewski · September 20, 2017 at 9:59 AM

          A będzie jakiś Networking ?

          Wojciech Figat · September 20, 2017 at 9:53 PM

          Niska warstwa networkingu już jest zaimplementowana 🙂 Myślę, że zdążymy z ukończeniem reszty networkingu przed release. Zachęcam do śledzenia publicznego roadmap na Trello: https://trello.com/b/NQjLXRCP/flax-roadmap

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