Idea for debugging

Daddicus

Chieftain
Joined
Aug 28, 2010
Messages
47
I have an idea for quickly debugging the very basic "is my mod running at all?" question. But, I don't know modding enough to know how to do it. Here's the idea, which I've used before in many applications I've written where debugging is problematic:

Change some very innocuous item in the game that a user would typically see very early in setting up a game. Perhaps change some generic leader text from the normal, and add "Mod xyz start:" directly into the text for a message one sees early on.

But, make two changes, in case the mod is running but fails midway through. Put the first change as the very first item in ones list of XML items, and the second as the very last one. Thus, if both are available, there are no simple typos or whatever preventing basic functionality.

These two items would be left in the XML for debugging until the mod is "show-worthy", and they they would be removed or commented out.

Would it work? Does it "solve" a real problem? (i.e. do people other than me run into situations where the mod doesn't crash the game, but still doesn't work either?)

If it is feasible, what would be the right set of unobtrusive changes?
 
It's very easy to do something like this. Just change the Palace's yield's slightly. For instance, the Palace normally adds +1 Culture, so just make it +2 instead; you'll immediately notice whether it's working or not, on turn 1, without having to do anything.

The problem is that this doesn't help much. Barring the sorts of setup issues you were running into in your other thread (which 99% of us will never see), XML doesn't fail in its entirety, it works on a file-by-file basis since it's translating to SQL. So seeing the Palace get an extra culture will tell you that the XML file containing that particular change works, but it won't tell you anything about any of the other XML files in a mod.

Also, FireTuner will tell you some XML errors, the logfiles will tell you others, and FireTuner will tell you any Lua problems as well. So the information for debugging is already out there.
 
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