How to debug an addon that won't activate?

Caligari

I'm new to Godot, but a long-time programmer.

I've got a decent bunch of C# code that I'm trying to make into an addon, so I can use it easily in Godot.

I've created the various scripts and configs and the icon to define the addon. But all I'm told when I try to activate it is that it can't load the addon defining script because there seems to be an error.

Can I get anything more useful at this stage? Or am I on my own in working out what isn't coming together?

When following tutorials and playing around I've seen the same message pretty much no matter what I've done wrong, which isn't very helpful. In those cases I just had to check against the provided steps, but doing it for my own addon I have nothing to refer back to, of course.

Is there a log I should know about, or additional options or something that makes it easier to track down the nature of the problem in these cases?

Advice appreciated!

TwistedTwigleg

Does the console/terminal that appears when running the Godot editor show anything? You can pass in -d or --verbose when launching the game/editor and that might help, though I have not used either myself so I cannot say from experience.

One thing I've tried when debugging plugins is commenting all of the code out in the main plugin .gd file, and then slowly adding it back piece by piece to see roughly which chunk of code is causing the problem. Though I've only used GDScript with Godot so I do not know if this will work/help with C#.

Caligari

Thank you for that.

I didn't find much more information, actually, but you reminded me that all debugging can fall back on the "remove this and see what happens" pattern, which I hadn't fully explored here.

My problem ended up being solved when I got rid of my .cs wrapper, and went to the .gd file that the system seemed to want (as evidenced by the Edit of the plugin line in Settings seeming to reset to GDScript when reloading the project). I didn't need C# at that level, and it seems to happily preload() the rest of my .cs files from the .gd file. At least to the point that I have it activating and running, and complaining at runtime that I have to add more code to wire it all up.

I'm not at all convinced that the pure C# addon plugins work as intended, now. But I don't need them, and this is more than fine.

Thanks for the push, TwistedTwigleg!

TwistedTwigleg

I'm glad you got it working!