I'm not planning to release it until I've actually used it for a while, but I couldn't help but post about this...

Last night I had a debugging problem where I needed to just plain look at all the values in my zone object to see what was going wrong.

I didn't intend to do anything major, but two hours later I found I had created a complete hyper-linked object inspector, cleverly called "Deadron's Deft Debugger", and in only 95 lines of code.

Today I upped that a bit adding some nice interface stuff, but it's still pretty amazing that in Byond you can get this with just a few lines of code.

Here is what it does:

If you create the debugger and call debugger.ControlPanel(), it displays this in your browser:

Deadron's Deft Debugger

Pick an object to examine.

your area | all areas
your turf | turfs in view
you | mobs in view | all mobs
objs in view | all objs


When you click on any of these objects, you get either a list of objects or a listing of an object's variables and their values.

If a value is an object, list, or savefile, you can click on it to view what is inside it.

The class also lets you add any object to the list that shows up in the ControlPanel. In my case, all my games are run by a top-level object called GameController -- by putting that in there, I can literally navigate to any object or value in my game. Here is what the GameController looks like when I choose it:

GameController

name = GameController    [text]
_initialized = 1    [number]
version = 1    [text]
version_date = 8/12/00    [text]
gameDatabase = LivingDeadGame.sav    [savefile]
localDebugFile =     [null]
playerController = /deadron/dbitem/player_controller    [object]
gameForum = /deadron/dbitem/bbs/forum    [object]
clientList = /list    [list]
_eventReceivers =     [null]
bulletinboard = /ForumManager    [object]
isBroadcastingEvents = 0    [number]
lobby_zone = HQ    [object]
tag =     [null]
type = /game_controller    [object]
vars = /list    [list]

This is pretty incredible flexibility -- I certainly couldn't have created it in any other programming system I've used. It would have been way too complicated.

Once I've refined it based on my own debugging efforts, I'll release it. Over time I could add watchpoints and setting of values, if people find that interesting.

Dantom, a couple of questions:

1) Is there is a way for me to get my hands on the global vars hanging out there? That would be a nice addition...

2) Is there any way for me to determine that something is a type rather than an object? Right now a type looks like an object to me, and I make it hot, but actually clicking on it is not useful since it's not really an object.