Debug Utilities

Astro has a few different tools you can enable to make debugging a bit easier. These options are enabled by creating an .ini file named Astro.ini in your project’s root directory with the following keys and header:

[engine]
enableTypeChecking=false
enableDebugOverlay=false
enableAssetsPrint=false
disableGamePak=false
gcBetweenLevels=true

(all of the specified values are the default values if no ini is provided)

For a brief explanation of them,

• enableTypeChecking will force the engine to make sure every Wren value passed to foreign methods are the right type of value - use this when developing.
• enableDebugOverlay displays a small overlay on top of the game with basic information like entity count, framerate, and information on fixed-timestep if that is enabled. See below image.
• enableAssetsPrint prints the generated Assets.wren file to stdout.
• disableGamePak stops the engine from loading things from game.pak regardless of whether or not it finds one.
• gcBetweenLevels tells the engine to call the garbage collector in between each level switch. Disabling this can cause strange behaviour.

In reading order, the debug overlay displays

1. Actual framerate, updated each second.
2. Entity count in the current level.
3. How many frames process_frame was set to true over the last second.
4. How much “leeway” the engine is giving to fixed-timestep process frames to compensate for fluctuating framerates.
5. A graphical display of the processed frames’ distributions over the last second (black bar in the middle is good).

The last 3 will only be displayed if timestep is not 0.