Excuse my slight frustration vent, but having spent several months making a mobile title (which has now shipped), and still poking in the dark when it comes to trying to do something as simple as attach a debugger I feel like this at the stage where it needs urgent attention.
Currently, I am completely unable to attach either the Android Debugger to an Android Device in Visual Studio, and due to a mixture of lack of experience and zero documentation I’m also unable to work out how to attach the XCode debugger to an iPad too. Throughout development I feel like I’ve been facing an uphill battle with what should otherwise be a really simple task, but I am constantly fighting the engine when it comes to things like this. I thought my prayers were answered when this article came out, about attaching the Android Debugger via Visual Studio 2015.
However that also fails to work because the Package that Unreal builds out has duplicate keys inside it (whatever that means) - so Visual Studio rejects it. 4.12 has just come out, and we’re still supposed to be using CodeWorks 1R1 according to engine docs - which is well over a year out of date. There have been masses of improvements to the SDK since, but none have made their way across. The same seems to now be true to iOS as well. After ‘copious googling’, the only answerhub post I’ve found of any help is this one: Debug on iOS device - Debugging, Optimization, & Profiling - Unreal Engine Forums
However, once again I’ve come up short - and the users there are also complaining about changes that have been made that have made it more difficult to setup XCode properly. This basically means that if an issue presents itself on a device and not on the development PC (aka ALL the freaking time), you are completely helpless when it comes to trying to fix it. Or in our case, you have to spend hours adding ridiculous amounts of logging to your code to try and track down where crashes occur.
We’re currently experiencing a crash-on-launch issue on several specific iOS devices (iPad2 and iPad Mini 2), which is actually costing us sales and reviews. While normally this is easy enough to resolve, we now can’t attach anything to the debugger to work out why there is a crash and fix it. I don’t know if IOS debugging is as broken as Android or if it’s just my lack of knowledge of XCode, but I’ve been scraping through documentation and answerhub trying to find just a scratch of information, but have so far come up short.
I’m not alone on this either, several users in the Slack group have brought this up and it always ends the same way. This is actually really harming us, because we can’t fix any of these problems until this stuff works - or at least until there is some instruction on how to do it. I’d really appreciate some instruction here because we’re totally stuck until we can resolve this, and every day this goes by unfixed it’s costing us sales.
