Is this the future of Godot debugging?

Check out my latest game Burden of Truth on Steam!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/29...

When it comes to debugging your game while working in the Godot game engine, your options used to be pretty limited. Back in Godot 4.2 and 4.3, which is around the time when I started learning the engine, pressing "play" in the editor meant a whole new game application was compiled and run which acted as your preview of the final export. Though you could interact with nodes in the live scene by using the Remote Tab, the fact that you had an entirely separate window to manage made debugging a bit difficult, especially for single monitor users. Combined with the fact that the regular node manipulation gizmos in the scene aren't available for debugging, you can hopefully see how it was harder to tell what's going on compared to other engines which run the game in the editor like Unity and Unreal.

When Godot 4.4 released, a landmark PR brought back some of the conveniences of these larger engines by allowing the built game window to run embedded in the editor window. Though this approach has its own limitations compared to running the actual scene in the editor application (and potentially allowing the already functional scene view to work as a live debugging view), with enough effort, we could still add in most of the debugging tools that a developer might expect from Unity. One of those tools is the ability to view the game from a debug perspective while playing it at the same time.

That's why I started looking into creating a pull request that allows two game windows to run embedded in the editor, which should hopefully pave the way for gizmos and other neat features that give you a lot of flexibility and ease of use when debugging. The point of this improvement is to reduce the need for user-created debugging tools while getting closer to the seamless debugging experience found in Unity and Unreal. It's something that is practical for nearly every game but still optional and disabled by default so as not to mess with the workflow that people are used to. Back in March, I finally completed the code changes and I'm now waiting for it to be reviewed and merged, possibly for 4.6 or some later version if it takes longer. In this video, I cover my thought process behind this PR, why it's helpful, and how we can take it even further going forward. Feel free to let me know what you think of this feature in the comments and send it some support if you're inclined!

You can check out the pull request for the dual screen game view here:
https://github.com/godotengine/godot/...

0:00 Intro
1:33 What is live debugging?
4:43 Debugging before Godot 4.4
6:34 The game view
10:10 Creating the dual game view
13:25 What's next?
15:51 Closing thoughts

~~LINKS~~

As always, if you'd like to keep up with my latest updates, be sure to follow me on Twitter or Bluesky!
  / robproductions  
https://bsky.app/profile/robproductio...

I have a Discord server! Feel free to join and hang out!
  / discord  

#godot #gamedev #indiegame #indiedev #gaming #development #programming #gdscript #tutorial #computerscience #gameengine #workflow #devlog #coding #debugging #github

🌐I have an official website here!
https://www.robproductionsgames.com/

🎮You can check out my Steam Developer Page here!
https://store.steampowered.com/develo...

📷Check out my concept art and WIP screenshots over on Instagram!
  / robproductionsgames  

🎥Subscribe to the channel for more looks behind the scenes of my development process!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVRH...