Get the functionality of the Editor's 'Step' and 'Pause' at runtime?

Question

Greetings.

My tester wanted the ability to step frame by frame on the actual device (Android/iOS) cause it would help catch bugs.

I know you could easily build your game with single frame stepping in mind and it would work but I'm in a point where it's hard to add that feature in, I would have to mold everything to play nicely with it.

I thought it would be nice to have the built-in Editor Pause/Step which works perfectly. I saw that the functions are in EditorApplication.Pause() and EditorApplication.Step() but obviously that's editor only.

Is there anyway to get that same functionality off of Unity's runtime libraries?

Thanks.

EDIT: Thanks to @gorsefan here's the final code I used with the timeScale, works very well as long as you're Time.deltaTime in your game and not an unscaled deltaTime.

Just attach this script to a GameObject and call Toggle (turns it on/off) or Step to step a single frame.

 using UnityEngine;
 using System.Collections;

 public class FrameStepper : MonoBehaviour
 {
     bool IsOn;
     bool IsStepping;
 
     public void Toggle()
     {
         IsOn = !IsOn;
     }
 
     public void Step()
     {
         IsStepping = true;
     }
 
     void Update()
     {
         if (Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.S))
         {
             Toggle();
         }
         else if (Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.N))
         {
             Step();
         }
 
         if (IsStepping)
         {
             Time.timeScale = 1;
             IsStepping = false;
         }
         else
         {
             Time.timeScale = IsOn ? 0 : 1;
         }
     }
 }

Answer 1

Best Answer

Answer by gorsefan · Jul 08, 2016 at 08:19 PM

Here's some of my code which should give you the idea

     public void OnPlayPause ()
     {
         if (Time.timeScale == 1)
         {
             // We are running, so pause
             playPauseIcon.sprite = playSprite;
             Time.timeScale = 0;
             return;
         }

         playPauseIcon.sprite = pauseSprite;
         Time.timeScale = 1;
     }

To go frame-by-frame, on entering that mode i would pause the game. Then on "next step" input I would have a coroutine calling OnPlayPause(), yielding a frame, then calling it again, then finally returning.

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vexe · Jul 09, 2016 at 12:30 AM 1

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Thanks for the reply. I'm doing something similar except I was calling our game's clock pause/resume functions thinking that they were setting time scale to 0/1 but it was actually just a isPaused boolean flag which is why it wasn't giving me the effect I wanted exactly. timeScale is much better definitely assu$$anonymous$$g the code uses deltaTime and not some unscaled deltaTime which we don't.

Get the functionality of the Editor's 'Step' and 'Pause' at runtime?

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