FlowEnt Inspector

I've created a tool a long time ago, to help with debugging and I'm baffled that I haven't talked about it since now because it's an amazing helper.

In order to open it just go to Tools > FlowEnt > Inspector. You shall now see a new window.

Here you can see some controls that can be used on the engine and a list of animations. In the screenshot, you can see 0 animations because nothing is running. The nice thing about this tool is that it works in play mode and in edit mode as well.

Let's take a gander at how we can use this and start by playing some animation. I'll use the demo scene from the FlowEnt package for this. This is what I see after playing the Demo for a few seconds.

You can see the main Flow that is used in the demo animation, and some inner flows and tweens. Upon first sight, we can see that the animations have some basic info attached, such as an Id. This is auto-incremented starting from 0 and it's used internally by the framework. Another thing is the Name. The second flow (Id: 1) has a name that is set using the Options for any animation(Flow, Tween, or Echo). Another thing is the "i"(info) button. We'll come back to this in a while. For now, let's take a look at the controls.

Controls

This is using the IControllable interface.

Play/Pause - it's using the

IControllable.Play()

and

IControllable.Pause()

Skip - similar to the step button on the Unity editor will send one update event to all animations. Stop - it's using the

IControllable.Stop()

Time scale - it's using the

IControllable.TimeScale

and sets the global timescale.

Go ahead, give it a try. Play around with the controls. I'll wait for you.

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Now that you have enjoyed being a DJ, let's see that "i" button. Choose an animation and click on it(best to do it while you paused all animations).

In my case, I picked the character flow. Here's a screenshot.

You can see that you have the same controls, but also a different message.

"Stack trace only available when debugging enabled. Please enable it in settings."

So let's go ahead and enable it.

Here we can now see the stack track of the animation creation. This will be useful to spot the location where a faulty animation has started. You can also control this animation just like you can control the overall animations. The buttons work exactly the same just for this animation. Happy debugging!

For more tips and tricks go to FlowEnt website.