Anyone who has stepped through code or has waded through endless lists of variables or log entries knows that these aren’t always the best ways to find certain kinds of bugs. For example, when a physics-controlled object does not behave as expected, looking at how the values of variables change on every frame can be a painfully slow and frustrating process – if you are lucky enough to be able to break into the debugger at the right time.

However, when you display the values of variables graphically, you can instantly see trends and relationships. This makes it much easier to spot errors and to track down what caused them. Sometimes it can even highlight problems that you were not aware of. Continue reading →