Allow viewing and manipulating the game world when paused again

As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to pause and view/manipulate the game world in its current state. This is because I will receive a huge notice saying “Rendering is paused for debugging…”, making it impossible to do anything in the 3D editor.

Some use cases:

  1. I am firing rays and want to see what parts are being hit. Currently I am creating visual arrows, but I can’t actually see where they’re hitting, especially in the moments that count. If I have a bug where an NPC is claiming to be hit, and it is constantly moving around, I want to be able to set a breakpoint when a ray hits an enemy, and then look at the world to see what it is hitting. I don’t want to have to mess with my NPC code and potentially fail to reproduce the bug after that many changes.

  2. I am testing pathfinding code for mobs. I want to make sure that they can handle a dynamically mutating environment. The NPC is actively moving around, and wandering code makes them move randomly, so I won’t have enough time if the game is actively running, or it will be very frustrating. The simplest way to do this is to pause the world, place some blocks, and resume to see what they do.

Currently to achieve these, you need to change your code or write a lot more debug code than ought to be necessary for what would be easily possible if I was able to pause the world and mess with it.

11 Likes

I agree with this, also add an option to save builds during run-time, I lost a Game because of that, but this feature would be very very useful

2 Likes

well this got buried lol i support this idea, why would you not be able to see the game?