There are a number of these LocalConnection external trace panels around now. They are very useful, especially if you are using an third party compiler like MTASC. Of course, something like AdminTool is the ultimate, but sometimes you just want to trace a few values out to see what’s happening.
Anyways, I made my own a while back, and blogged about it here. Although it was no-frills, I found that several people liked it and were using it regularly. Cool. One of them was Tim Walling, who not only used it, but offered a few enhancements. So, over the past week or two, we collaborated on version 2.
Improvements:
- You can now specify a level for each message: Debug, Info, Warn, Error, Fatal. These are color coded in the trace panel.
- You can filter messages by level, and set a default level.
- You can still ignore levels and turn off the prefixes for simple traces.
- You can save as plain text or html, preserving the color coding.
- The panel remembers its size and position when you close it, and goes back there when you reopen it. (My favorite feature.)
The exe was built using SWF Studio v3, which is pretty rocking itself. The whole thing is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license, which basically means you get all the source code and can do whatever the hell you want with it as long as you credit the authors.
I was all excited when I saw this post title because I have just recently begun using the panel and love it but had a few minor upgrades on my wishlist. The new changes listed sounded good as well but my excitement was washed away the first time I tried to compile with v2. You killed the “separate objects with a comma” functionality that was such a selling point of v1. For what its worth I also wish the textfield would set its scroll property to the max value after each trace so you could use it to track values running in an onEnterFrame and I really wish it traced out undefined instead of just a blank line. Would prevent having to frequently type Debug.trace(myObj == undefined).
Sorry to hear you miss the multiple tracing. Tim and I found we hardly used that feature, even though it seemed cool, and there wasn’t an easy way to do both that and the levels. If others say they really miss it, we’ll see what we can do.
As for the other items. Good points. I’ll add them to the to do list.
“For what its worth I also wish the textfield would set its scroll property to the max value after each trace”
That’s a great idea. Wish I had thought of it while making changes.
2.1, coming soon…
slackers 😉
Great tool ! thanks a lot
Awesome, glad I could help. 🙂 As for the multiple traces, I’ve just changed them from Debug.trace(val1, val2) to Debug.trace([val1, val2]). Works like a charm.
Thanks again,
Ben