What would you like to see in the debugger

How about the option to have selected variables and/or properties of objects/instances appear next to the objects/instance(s) in question. Similar to how we'd create debug text objects to appear along side each object.

So, say we have an object that has a Pathfinding behavior and 3 variables. There are two instances of this object.

We want to evaluate the Pathfinding status and two of the variables for just one particular instance. So, we check off some check boxes next to the info in the debug window and those details appear alongside that particular object instance. A check of a box and info will appear/disappear from that text display.

This way, we don't have to play hide-and-seek through various tables of info which may be separated from several other tables in the debug window.

Could be nice to display a small area that can give focus to the project view to make it keyboard responsive after changing a parameter in debugger view. It's possible to click on it but many project as mine do specific things (as exiting !) when a mouse click is done so it could be useful.

naelian - Sounds interesting. Could you elaborate some more? I'm not sure I totally followed.

naelian - Sounds interesting. Could you elaborate some more? I'm not sure I totally followed.

Editing a parameter in the debugger view make this view becoming the focus/main view right ? ... so keyboard/touch event are no more understand by the project code unless putting the project view as main by clicking on it (is the most simple way). Obviously if your project code is doing specific things on mouse click/touch events such as exiting (ex : screensaver project) it's not very convenient. The idea is just to put button or a on top window on the debugger view to be able to focus quickly the Project view, doing so no action on the project view itself is needed to make it focus again so this simple way isn't creating some unwanted behaviour.

My only problem with the debugger is that it's REALLY slow in my game. I get around 10-20fps running it on Chrome, and 20-30 running it on Node-Webkit. I tried running it on a preview server using another computer but I couldn't get it to run (nothing showed up).

andreyin imagine your code with so many textbox update every tick it will never be so fast ! ... obviously provide a way to disable temporary the debugger to make the game playable to test a specific case is perhaps something scirra could add in future. Actually at 20-30 fps some games stay really playable, consider that it's a good test to know if your game is still playable on very old computers !

naelian you're right, and the game does work! But the platform behavior has some weird issues with low-fps, for instance, if you move a character to the right it keeps "warping".. I have tried to fix this before but to no avail, I still have to look into it using the debbuger.

Also I thougth that the textbox update thing only really slowed down on CocoonJS? I'm aiming for a Node-Webkit release.

The 0.7.0 node webkit use in the last C2 beta release (R142) is really fast but including a debugger system always create a huge dps drop. You can perhaps try to reduce fps drop "not using" some elements in debug mode. Testing system browser.querystring = "?debug" (verify syntax i'm not sure) is true if you are in debug mode and false in other case so you can probably not execute or hide many things that are just here to make your game more nice in debug mode as for example some webgl effects or background layers and keep the "engine" code unchanged. May be this can help you to make this debug mode more usable (i hope so).

First I want to say how awesome the debugger is. It's really awesome. Only now do I realize I would have been unable to finish my current game going in the direction I was. For example, I had no idea checking the width of a single sprite every tick would use ~1% of CPU. But with the debugger I can work around these things.

Second, what I would like to see in the debugger is a tiny bit of flexibility in how the the events are displayed in the profiler. I love love love that they are organized by groups and by highest%, but right now the popout window isn't working for me and it is kind of hard to keep track of the different groups in the small vertical space of the profiler window when it is attached to the game window. Maybe a alphabetical option so they don't jump around so much? And some way to hide groups we're not interested in, or maybe let us click on specific groups in the events list to add them to the watch window?

I have noticed that the debugger does not display the full Array data, no matter how wide I stretch the window, meaning I cannot check some values!

I have a related problem where I can't see my global variables because some of the names are a bit too long (That being said, I tend toward long variable names, so maybe it's me<img src="smileys/smiley5.gif" border="0" align="middle" />).

It's a bit frustrating that the readouts in the debugger can't be resized (so, I could slide over the divider to see my globals properly.)