Seriously, how do people visually debug in Unreal?

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

I feel like either Unreal Engine is stuck in 1998, or I am missing something.

I really hope I’m missing something huge, because:

  1. I just added an arrow utility to a blueprint, and when I press Play, it disappears. If I simulate, it shows, but then I can’t control the player.
  2. Whenver I Posses, Unreal Engine takes over my camera and hides the arrow (and hides collisions or any other debug stuff I’ve enabled in the Editor).
  3. If I split the view, and let one view overlook my level and then Play/Simulate the other view, THE SPLIT VIEW STAYS FROZEN!

I mean… what?

Why?

Coming from Unity, I’m just baffled. Is this what a billion in Fortnite money buys?

Please, please tell me what I’m missing!

2

Being passive-aggressive won’t take you too far 'round here ^^

BTW: Visual Logger | Unreal Engine Documentation

3

If all you need is the arrow, well just go through the arrow’s details panel and make sure “hidden in game” is false. Almost every component has this option, but depending on the component it may or may not be defaulted true.
In the viewport, you can quickly check what’s going to be hidden at runtime if you press G.

4

I use the DrawDebugXXX nodes (Sphere, Arrow etc) when I want to visualise things quickly.

5

I believe I understand what OP is referring to in #3.

In Unity, there is a game view, and a scene view, both of which can be viewed simultaneously. The game view is typically viewed as if you’re playing the game (so where ever the camera is during gameplay, that’s what you see in the game view). However, the scene view allows the user to navigate anywhere in the scene as the game is playing to see whatever it is they want to see. If they click on an object in Unity’s Hierarchy (which is Unreal’s world outliner), they can see instantly where that object is in the sceneview and, they can even focus on it, so as it moves, the reviewer can maintain visual contact with the object.

I’ve wanted to know this myself coming from a Unity background. When I create a new viewport, I too get a frozen screen when I’m playing in the other viewport. In other words, its frozen the instant I press play. I have combed through the documentation to see if I’m missing something, but I could not find anything on this. I’m fairly confident Unreal has this somewhere, even if it’s a two-three step process to set up, up front.

Essentially, from my experience, you can eject yourself while playing in the editor, which allows free roam, but I guess to frame the question properly, how would you be able to have two separate windows, both live action, where, one window is you playing the game (Unity’s game view), and the other window displaying action wherever you wish to navigate to?

7

While the game is running you can press alt F1 and eject from possessed pawn. Or use a “none” default pawn on your game mode.

To see common debug info while playing you’ll need to type the various command-line commands that the game view hides by default.

Also many components are marked as “hide in game”, colliders, trigger boxes, etc.
You can just uncheck that checkbox.

​​​​​But everything is in one view, no dedicated “game” viewport. There’s the “Simulate” mode for similar results (alt+S).

8

Thanks Bruno Xavier. I think you answered a question I’ve been wondering for a while now. That feature in Unity, in my own opinion, made some troubleshooting, some types of debugging, and some design simpler because as you’re playing the game, you can see, in real time, anywhere else in the scene you want. It comes in very handy. But it’s not an ‘o no, I can’t do my job’ kind of thing without it. So, we adapt; that’s part of the job :slight_smile:

Have a great weekend.

9

I’ve tested this a bit now, and I guess for Unreal, this is for now the correct answer.

It’s nowhere near as immediate or flexible as just having a split-live viewport like in Unity, but the timeline scrubbing is rather neat.

(Someone also told me to set up a spectator mode for similar debugging in VR, but that sounds even more cumbersome, so I haven’t tested that yet.)