Debugging utilities built in to Factorio

[obstinate]

I'm wondering what debugging modules are built into Factorio. I know about game.player.print. Are there any other facilities? For example, there are pretty printers that will print tables to strings. Is such a printer built into Factorio?

Also, are there any better alternatives than the game console? For example, a window that can persist over gameplay?

[Adil]

You can launch the game from console, so standard print function would send its output there. You can redirect that output to files.
There is serpent pretty printer, which can print lua tables ( syntax is print( serpent.block( arg )) ).

[prg]

Another useful function is debug.traceback() to figure out how the hell you ended up somewhere.

[obstinate]

You can launch the game from console, so standard print function would send its output there. You can redirect that output to files.
There is serpent pretty printer, which can print lua tables ( syntax is print( serpent.block( arg )) ).

This is great, thanks. So I can put the game in windowed mode and look at the terminal rather than having to use the in-game console for debugging. Fantastic.

Is there any hot-swapping of mod code?

[Adil]

Is there any hot-swapping of mod code?

control.lua is reloaded with loading save or map restart. data.lua is only reloaded on game restart.

[Jorn86]

How do I exactly run Factorio from the console using Windows? Just running

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factorio.exe

will start the game, but return immediately so I don't see any output. Running it using

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start factorio.exe /wait

doesn't start the game at all. Redirecting output to a file like

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factorio.exe > log.txt

doesn't help, as the file remains empty.

[prg]

Is that using Steam? Try the DRM free version, that should stay attached to the terminal.

[Jorn86]

I should have figured Steam was the problem

The direct downloaded version does show me the output, including serpent-ed tables. Thanks!

[White-Tiger]

Just in case someone finds this through Google...
It's possible to keep using the Steam version and still have a console.
Use "SET LAUNCH OPTIONS..." from Factorio's properties in Steam and set them to:

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cmd /c %command%

[aubergine18]

Don't forget the `log()` function available to lua throughout the entire script lifecycle - dumps stuff to game log. It takes single argument (as far as I know) - a string.

For example, in data-final-fixes.lua:

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log( serpent.block( data.raw, {comment = false, numformat = '%1.8g' } ) )

Serpent docs: https://github.com/pkulchenko/serpent

[matjojo]

Don't forget the `log()` function available to lua throughout the entire script lifecycle - dumps stuff to game log. It takes single argument (as far as I know) - a string.

For example, in data-final-fixes.lua:

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log( serpent.block( data.raw, {comment = false, numformat = '%1.8g' } ) )

Serpent docs: https://github.com/pkulchenko/serpent

so eeuhm, I'm using serpent.dump, to help check my data integrity, but all my ouptuts looks like this:

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do local _={[1]={name="teamname",players={}}};return _;end

looks like it's outputting: do local _= (the actual output);return _;end


is this also the case for you, or am I seeing a bug?

EDIT: the grammar made sense in dutch...

[prg]

Try serpent.block() instead of serpent.dump().

[matjojo]

Try serpent.block() instead of serpent.dump().

serpent.block() does not have the 'do local' part in front and behind it, but it has the added problem that it is designed to not show tables in tables, which I need it to do

[prg]

serpent.block() does not have the 'do local' part in front and behind it, but it has the added problem that it is designed to not show tables in tables, which I need it to do

Huh?

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/c print(serpent.block({1,2,{3,4,{5,6}}}))

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{
  1,
  2,
  {
    3,
    4,
    {
      5,
      6
    } --[[table: 0x7f12d8873aa0]]
  } --[[table: 0x7f12d8873a40]]
} --[[table: 0x7f12d88739e0]]

[aubergine18]

Here's what I use

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local logFormat = {comment = false, numformat = '%1.8g' }

log( serpent.block( someObject, logFormat ) )

Example: In my data.lua, I logged `data.raw` to get this: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/auber ... r/data.raw

[matjojo]

serpent.block() does not have the 'do local' part in front and behind it, but it has the added problem that it is designed to not show tables in tables, which I need it to do

Huh?

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/c print(serpent.block({1,2,{3,4,{5,6}}}))

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{
  1,
  2,
  {
    3,
    4,
    {
      5,
      6
    } --[[table: 0x7f12d8873aa0]]
  } --[[table: 0x7f12d8873a40]]
} --[[table: 0x7f12d88739e0]]

yeah, I'm sorry. the table in the table I used was empty, I forgot -_-