Logs and filters

Introduction

Unity has built in support for four types of filters, and allows you to filer the in editor log with these filters.

  • Info
    Messages about your game, this corresponds to the Debug.Log().
  • Warnings
    Warnings about your game, this corresponds to the Debug.LogWarning().
  • Errors
    Warnings or exceptions in your game, this corresponds to the Debug.LogError().
  • Exceptions
    These are tracked when exceptions are thrown.

These filters are great and allow you to split up what’s visible in your in-editor log, however when a product grows, searching through thousands of entries becomes burdensome and frankly a waste of time. On top of this, you cannot see the in-editor log window when you have a built out player running on an iPad or Windows computer for example.

.Command solves all these problems by giving you a powerful suite for filtering and displaying logs in your player.

Displaying Logs in built out players

This functionality works out of the box and requires no effort from you whatsoever. The in game .Command window will mimic the Unity Editor Log exactly. It also out of the box provides the same filtering functionality, providing info, warning and error filtering.

Adding custom filters to .Command

.Command ships with three built in filters, Info, Warning and Error. These can all be toggled on in the Filter Window.

As an extension to this you can add as many Filters as you like, and they will automatically populate the Filter Window window. In order to do this, you must follow the following steps.

Note

If you followed the Quickest Start when you installed .Command, you might want to have a read over the Slightly less Quick Start for more information on loading .Command.

  1. Create an enum that will hold your custom Filter definition, for example…

    private enum AdditionalFilters
{
    dotCommand,

    Networking,
    Sound,
    Graphics
}

  2. When you load .Command, pass your custom enum to the Load method.

    DevelopmentConsole.Load(typeof(AdditionalFilters));

3. Your new filters; dotCommand, Networking, Sound and Graphics should now be available in the Filter Window.

Logging with your custom filter

Now you’ve told .Command about your custom filters, .Command knows how to perform custom filter, the only thing left to do is start Logging with your custom filter. In order to do that, you’ll want to perform the following steps.

  1. Add the correct Namespace for your Debug.Log

    using Debug = WellFired.Command.Log.Debug;

  2. Perform your logging

    Debug.Log(AdditionalFilters.dotCommand, "Hello Log!");

.Command provides overloads for everyone of Unity’s Log methods, as an extension that takes an enum as the first parameter. It’s also worth mentioning that Unity’s build in logging functionality still works, so you can slowly migrate your logs over to a filter safe approach.