Debugging Features

This past week I had two main jobs: design an overall architecture for the game and implement basic debugging features in-game. Both should not have been that hard, but the way Unity implements things makes the process much harder than it should.

I implemented two features for debugging: a debug menu and debug attributes. The debug menu allows the programmer to open up a menu and change the state of the game. This is exactly like an in-game console, but with a graphical interface. The simplest thing that the menu should do was to draw debug lines. Debug lines can be almost anything from player trajectory to collision box. The idea for this was when draw debug lines was activated was to draw the collision box for each entity. But Unity being Unity, it made what should be a simple task next to impossible. Unity does not have a built-in function to draw a line. No, in order to draw a line, I could either do Debug.DrawLine() or Gizmos.DrawLine(). Both of these do what I want, but the lines only show up in the scene tab, not the game tab. This is problematic because I need to see these lines when I debug the game in the game tab. I won't have access to the scene tab unless I pause the game. That's why I need a method to do it in the OnGUI event. Even drawing a thin box, proved to be problematic. I could use Unity's built in OpenGL to draw the line, but this would be overkill for what I need to do and defeats the purpose of using an engine in the first place. However, I may need to create a GL Utils static class just to do basic functionality that Unity is too lazy to implement (if there is a reason, I haven't found it).

Example of Debug Menu

The second feature I implemented was a debug attributes. This allows the programmer to cycle through each entity and display the attributes of that entity on the screen for easy debugging without relying on Debug.Log to update each entity each frame for cluster. This was much easier to implement; however, what I hoped to have implemented was if draw debug lines were activated, then the collision box belonging to the selected entity would highlight in a different color so that the programmer could tell which entity was which.