How do you trouble shoot?

dehecile

I was just wondering what you guys do when you run into a bug or aren't able to get something to work. Since i am running into a few bugs here and there and a few problems, i usually turn to the forums, but that often doesn't work. so i was just wanted to start this topic to see what people had to say and to see what you guys are doing when you run into problems.
DHCL

jonmulcahy

i can usually trace my bugs back to triggers not acting like they should. I'll drag a bunch of empty actors onto the screen and have each one display the value of an attribute. usually by watching how or when something gets triggered, I can figure out what is going wrong.

tenrdrmer

A lot of times my issues are attributes are not triggering or changing properly. one thing you can do is put a display text in your actor and have it display attributes that may be involved in the issue and see if they are triggering, changing, or set properly.

If you look at the cookbook channel on youtube I believe TSB has a video about debugging your rules to find the problem.

His videos are usually extremely helpful so go chance theres good information there.

EDIT:
Jon beat me to it.

dehecile

ohhh, thats a really good idea. i never though of that before

osucowboy18

If something in one of my apps doesn't work, I usually spend a couple of hours trying every solution I can think of, but when I'm out of ideas, here's what I do. My first step is to ask for help on the forums, and 95% of the time, that works. However, if I can't find an answer on the forums, I send an email to GameSalad explaining the problem in detail, and someone gets back to me usually within 24-36 hours.

- Alex

dehecile

dehecile said:
ohhh, thats a really good idea. i never though of that before

sorry if that sounded sarcastic

osucowboy18

Completely forgot to mention jonmulcahy and tenrdrmers methods. They work great as well.

- Alex

dehecile

osucowboy18 said:
Completely forgot to mention jonmulcahy and tenrdrmers methods. They work great as well.

- Alex

what are those?

Asymptoteell

I sometimes realize I'm changing attributes based on attributes being changed at the same time. Sometimes, I just need to put in an after .1 second timer.

osucowboy18

Sorry, I guess I wasn't perfectly clear Whenever I want to see what my attributes are doing and when, I drag a bunch of actors onto the screen and use the Display Text Behavior to see the values of my attributes at various points throughout my game. This allows me to trace through my code to determine the problem. Hope this helps.

- Alex