Thumper's Dromed Magic #4 - Monolog

[Komag]

Dromed Magic #4 - Monolog
Dromed Magic #4. The monolog is something that you should look at every single dromed session. It can show you information you can't get any other way. There are various ways of turning the monolog on. One way is to issue the dromed command mlog name where name is the name of the file you want the output to go to. You can turn the monolog off with the command mlog close. However, the way I prefer to start the monolog is by including the following line in dromed.cfg:

monolog

This will turn the monolog on automatically every time you start dromed. The output file in this case is always named monolog.txt. You can only look at the monolog output file when it is closed. The file will be closed when you exit dromed but you can close it sooner with the mlog close command.

But wait! There is an even better way of viewing the monolog that doesn't require you to close it first. Go to http://www.sysinternals.com and download a free copy of DebugView. Start DebugView while the monolog is open (either of the above methods work) and you will see that DebugView can capture and display the monolog output. To test DebugView, issue the dromed command mprint testing 1 2 3. The text should appear in the DebugView window. If you don't see it or you see other random non-dromed messages, go to the Capture menu and make sure "Capture win32" and "Capture events" are selected and "Capture kernel" is NOT selected.

There are a huge number of commands which produce monolog output. Here are just a few of the more useful ones:

rend_name_list : list all rendered objs to mono
list_props : List properties on mono
ai_*_watch : Toggle watches on an AI

I mentioned previously that I had another way of logging playtesting comments. It's the monolog. I run with show_stats on and when I find something I want to comment on, I issue an mprint command something like this: mprint %% The sound propagation at -20 12 42 is screwed up. I just copy the position from the stats display. I add double percents (%%) to help me find the comments again in the monolog.txt file. I use the monolog because I can also see all the other output along with my comments.

-Thumper