Inspecting tables ..

[Equendil]

I'm sure most plugin developers have been using some sort of table dump at one point or another, either to check their own data structures or undocumented features of the Turbine's API. A few days ago, thinking a GUI to browse data structures (ie tables) would be more convenient than text-dumps in the standard output, I quickly wrote a crude GUI to do so for my own use.

One thing leading to another, thinking others might find it useful, I took the extra step of polishing the interface and turning it into a plugin for browsing lua structures from the global environment and down the rabbit hole.

The result is Here Be Dragons (in reference to unchartered territories). It can be used either as a plugin to browse lua structures starting with _G, or to browse local structures from within your own code. While nothing extraordinary, I hope it can help other developers and slightly counter the lack of developing tools.

[Garan]

There is a similar tool packaged with MoorMap which only shows in debug mode (for MoorMap, you turn on debug mode in the Options dialog). It also allows you to interactively execute statements as well as setting values as watchpoints - they update in the Update event of the debug window so you don't want to set too many. The debug.lua file can be added to any project fairly easily.

I don't use the watch points that often, but the ability to inspect the environment, especially the user data is handy and the ability to interactively execute commands, including modifying event handlers on the fly is quite handy for debugging.

[SanDBoX]

I really have to give you my thanks and kudos, I was having a difficult time tracking back one little bug that was breaking everything, and thanks to you and your hard work I figured it out!

Thank you again.