Debugging Tools

By Jordan Calderwood

This week I am working on setting up debugging tools for the rest of my team. Early in the week I ran into linker errors while trying to set up preprocessor definitions so that we can automatically toggle debug functionality depending on the build configuration. I realized that our project properties were set up incorrectly. I separated the linker include libraries in the project properties based on debug and release, and 32-bit and 64-bit configurations, where previously all libraries were included in each configuration. I then changed the code generation settings for the debug configuration to multi-threaded debug DLL, which resolved many of the linker errors.

I then added support for a DebugRenderer singleton that can show transform information of GameObjects, and to show velocity vectors for physics debugging. I set up all of the graphics pipelines for this system and created a key press toggle to turn the feature on and off. I also created a key press event to display the current frame rate to the console window. This ended up being much easier than I thought, since we are using a class called XTime which has this calculation built in.