Hello Everyone,
I was searching for debuggers for use on Mac.
Unfortunately both RAD Debugger and RemedyBG are unavailable on Mac.
So I am going for LLDB with Sublime text and Tracy Profiler for debugging.
See: An Introduction to Tracy Profiler
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There should be more tooling for the low level stuff like web world has.
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Which brings me to the GPU side of things.
I need some help attaching the Metal Debugger on MacOS.
Here’s how it looks: Press Start: Game development on Apple platform
I got the Performance HUD showing with METAL_HUD_ENABLED=1 env variable.
Alas METAL_CAPTURE_ENABLED=1 didn’t work. The HUD said that the capture mode is active. But capture shortcut didn’t work because MacOS blocks that feature for debug builds that are not Xcode built app or something.
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Luckily, It can be done programmatically as well: Capturing a Metal workload programmatically.
Here’s a blogpost: How to Capture Metal frame capture outside of Xcode.
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So how to do it using Odin?
I am following an SDL3 GPU playlist and I don’t have visibility into the GPU.
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How do you debug and check intermediate GPU changes? There’s no print nothing.
if a big pink background shows up, how do you figure out what’s happening?
I want to watch the stuff we copy to GPU, see the sets, binds, buffers, transformations happening, NDC view.
Maybe have a view like shader Node editors do, which can show what’s happening after each line of code.
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P.S. I don’t know any alternative to Metal Debugger, let me know if there is something else.
P.P.S. I wish I can write shader code in Odin.
