Game Development Community

Debugging tools avaliable in torque

by Philip Bloom · in Torque Game Engine · 01/03/2006 (11:36 am) · 5 replies

Just starting up my second major project in torque, getting the codebase put together to work up off of and I'd like to try and resolve one weakness that in my understanding from last project I did. Everything came together fairly well, but I don't feel I took much advantage of the debugging features avaliable in Torque. I was wondering if there was anywhere to really read and get a full grasp of what debugging features and tools are avaliable for working with in Torque. I've seen a glimpse of the memory manager discussion (on tuts and TNL) and mention of a profiler that's in it (but I'm not very aware of), but nothing along the lines of "here's a top down look of what debugging tools are in torque". Now, it's very likely that such a document still doesn't exist, given searches for such haven't turned up much, but hoping others in here can help brief me in on how to take better advantage of the debugging tools avaliable in torque for developing.

#1
01/08/2006 (1:16 am)
There are asserts, the profiler, journalling, and the memory manager. There are some domain-specific tools, too, like the DEBUG_NET macros, and input logging.

The very best tool is your debugger, though. :)
#2
01/09/2006 (10:57 pm)
Thanks. It helps being aware of such though. =) Can't make use of what you're not aware of. Recently switched to using torquedev as well. Makes me wonder how my last project got along without script level debugging.

Philip
#3
01/10/2006 (1:43 am)
I've just started using Codeweaver / TorqueDev, and I can't get debuggin to work. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
I suspect that I need to make a debug build of the TorqueDemo ( I haven't even touched the C++ code yet ) is that what I need to do? And can someone point me in the direction of a resource that explains how to do it?
#4
01/10/2006 (9:53 am)
Make sure you've gone into debug properties and pointed it at your debug executable (Release works too, but isn't as productive). Also make sure that there is a line like: dbgSetParameters(6060, "alphafirst"); at the beginning of your main to setup debugging output on that port with a tag for it for the debugger to listen on.
#5
01/10/2006 (9:57 am)
Hi Michael,

You'll need to recompile the Torque engine in DEBUG build. Your best bet is to use Visual Studio, as I think Eclipse had issues with a recompile to DEBUG build.

If you download the latest version of Codeweaver / TorqueDev, there is a debug wizard which will automatically configure debugging for you so that you don't have to do anything else (including adding the dbgSetParamters line in main.cs).

Let me know if you have any more questions,
Sam