[0.8.8] Debug log console sometimes "bugs out"

[peter980]

The debug console accessed by F5, is great way to see some logging in-game. Started events, actions, changes in states or variables. Great for debugging problems with CSC or general bug reporting for Original Story.

But it looks that sometimes it outputs just blank screen.

My theory is that some action that is supposed to be shown in logs has issues, and until it gets too old to be shown in history, it prevents anything eles being shown there.

I usually fix this by repeating some action over and over, until log appears again, which supports theory above. Unfortunately, I do not know what exactly triggers this...

[eekdon]

The debug console accessed by F5, is great way to see some logging in-game. Started events, actions, changes in states or variables. Great for debugging problems with CSC or general bug reporting for Original Story.

But it looks that sometimes it outputs just blank screen.

My theory is that some action that is supposed to be shown in logs has issues, and until it gets too old to be shown in history, it prevents anything eles being shown there.

I usually fix this by repeating some action over and over, until log appears again, which supports theory above. Unfortunately, I do not know what exactly triggers this...

It's a combination of Unity text mesh renderer limitations and also our own failure to properly prevent the text in the log from triggering an ArgumentException (I think that's what I've seen in the Editor, anyway). Basically if Unity tries to render too much text, that text element can break and nothing will appear at all, with the only way to resolve it being to address the excess text. The debug log has a mechanism in place to try and 'protect' itself from this, but no provisions in case of a complete break. The same thing (up until somewhat recently) could also happen with the console if you spammed long help text blocks (and more recently, with the 'list' command I added per your suggestions ), but I added provisions to literally delete large chunks of text at a certain length to prevent it and also to handle that specific exception. Even if it did happen in the console, the 'clear' command serves as a backup/fix since it completely empties the offending text object, allowing the user to keep seeing text feedback.

We're aware of several limitations of the debug log and we'll try to get to these as soon as we can as we know how convenient it is for players who want to get into the nitty gritty of the game, or who are testing custom stories, or who want to help us with troubleshooting.

[eekdon]

BTW I think you and a few others will really appreciate the 'list' functionality that exists on several console commands now. You now have the ability to get momentary 'snapshot' info of much of the data we as developers would have in the Unity Editor (ranging from stuff you know about like states, all the way to floating point distances between NPCs), including a LOT of data that was previously completely invisible unless you looked at a story file.