Debugging KoDP

When we did the original King of Dragon Pass, internal builds had some arcane keystroke that brought up an ugly dialog that let you type a scene number, or click one of dozens of buttons to set state or trigger raids. This was invaluable both for developers and for testers — who wants to play until you run out of cows, just to make sure the game handles that right?

Causing a Scene

The game is far enough along that this would be useful. Instead of an arcane keystroke, it’s invoked by an arcane gesture.

The new version is actually a little easier to use, because it shows the scene name.

Once we have external testers, I want to add another feature which will also be much easier thanks to ten years of operating system progress: the ability to email the debug logs to accompany bug reports.

Wreaking Chaos

This has already been invaluable in testing the interactivity code mentioned in the last post.