Development Tools

Here we aim to document little known features that developers add to help themselves in the development process, wheather that be debugging, profiling, or what else

Debug

Compile with Debug support

Build debug

   ./bootstrap -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug

You can now use debugger, like gdb

Document weirdness

To record video from gameplay (e.g. to document unexpected behavior):

   To record video directly from Pioneer you will need to add the line
   RecordVideo=1 somewhere within your config.ini file. Then once ingame
   you can press Ctrl+ScrLk to start or stop recording.

Debug from in-game

Ctrl+I = debug window

Ctrl+F10 open planet viewer, to view selected nav target

Ctrl+F11 reload shaders while running game

Ctrl+Del reload pigui element, allows for live coding. Limited support: Only reloads the active view and then only if the active view has manually enabled it (add `debugReload = function() package.reimport() end` to the view's definition next to the draw and refresh functions)

Debug savegame files

./build/savegamedump savefiles/<mysavename>

and look in your savefile folder (e.g. ~/.pioneer/savefiles on linux) at <mysavename>.json file, put JSON e.g. into http://jsonviewer.stack.hu/

Debug Lua Callstack

A lua callstack can also help - there's a function in lua/core/Sandbox.cpp that can be called in the debugger to get a callstack

Misc.

Pioneer can dump galaxy information, to make sure the galaxy hasn't changed, or to gather statistics, described here: https://github.com/pioneerspacesim/pioneer/pull/2811

The quit confirmation box can be supressed by putting ConfirmQuit=0 in the pioneer configuration file

Profiling

For Profiling, one needs some tools installed?

Now new profiling functions merged: Add zone-based profiling support #5168

There's also support for chrome://tracing format event to JSON, for better visualization, since Add Chrome-Tracing output support to profiler #5380

Build with profiling support

ToDo edit this to improve and make sense and be correct

Profiling: to build with the profiler enabled, simply run ./bootstrap -DPROFILER_ENABLED=1 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo and compile as normal. The latter flag is not strictly needed, but building with a BUILD_TYPE

To-do: extract wisdome from this conversation, https://github.com/pioneerspacesim/pioneer/pull/4764 and document here

   <fluffyfreak> Gliese852, if you're on Windows then I use
                 https://github.com/VerySleepy/verysleepy a lot of the time
                 [17:37:07]
   <Gliese852> fluffyfreak: thanks, I meant the built-in profiler, it seems that
               if you do nothing, it creates a report on the launch of the
               program, and the launch of a new game [17:54:21]
   <fluffyfreak> If you're running the profile build then you can press Ctrl+p to
                 take a profile at any time [17:58:50]
   <fluffyfreak> hmm, been a while since I used it. There's two modes [17:59:37]
   <fluffyfreak> Ctrl+shift+p = is capture one frame, otherwise Ctrl+p toggles
                 capturing whenever the framerate is "slow" [18:00:12]
   

Using profiler

to do

clang format check

   Yes, for your use you'd likely want to invoke `FORMAT_BASE=master ./autoformat` or `FORMAT_BASE=HEAD~1 ./autoformat`
   - there's little difference between the `autoformat` script and the `scripts/clang-format.sh` script other than the 
   latter prompts you to automatically apply the issues in your files.

Editor integration

There is support for sending Lua code from IDE into running pioneer session via TCP: https://github.com/pioneerspacesim/pioneer/pull/3768 https://github.com/pioneerspacesim/pioneer/pull/4799

Easy start (Linux)

1. Reconfigure with remote lua console support and rebuild:

./bootstrap -DREMOTE_LUA_REPL=ON
make -C build -j4

2. Now after starting a new, or loading a saved game, you can connect to the program via telnet on port 12345:

$ telnet localhost 12345
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
** Welcome to the Pioneer Remote Debugging Console!
>

Now you can run any lua commands.

Example of use with VIM for hot reloading of the module

I added the following code to ~/.vimrc:

nmap ;mm :w<CR>:call PioneerReloadModuleFnc(expand("%"))<CR><CR>
function! PioneerReloadModuleFnc(filename)
	let s:data = strcharpart(a:filename, 0, 4)
	let s:lua = strcharpart(a:filename, strlen(a:filename) - 3, 4)
	if s:data == "data" && s:lua == "lua"
		let s:crop = strcharpart(a:filename, 5, strlen(a:filename) - 9)
		let s:convert = substitute(s:crop, "/", ".", "g")
		let s:command = "package.reimport(\"" . s:convert . "\")"
		:execute "!echo '". s:command . "' | telnet localhost 12345"
	else
		:echom "ERROR: file should be \"*.lua\" and in \"data\" subfolder"
	endif
endfunction

Now when pressing the combination ;mm in normal mode, the file is saved, then telnet is launched and the command is sent:

package.reimport(<your module name>)

where the module name is taken from the name of the file being edited. This leads to a reload of this module without restarting the game.

A short video of how it might look: https://youtu.be/f5s_tuAv6fc