Debug features

FlameGame features

Flame provides some debugging features for the FlameGame class. These features are enabled when the debugMode property is set to true (or overridden to be true). When debugMode is enabled, each PositionComponent will be rendered with their bounding size, and have their positions written on the screen. This way, you can visually verify the components boundaries and positions.

To see a working example of the debugging features of the FlameGame, check this example.

Devtools extension

If you open the Flutter DevTools, you will see a new tab called “Flame”. This tab will show you information about the current game, for example a visualization of the component tree, the ability to play, pause and step the game, information about the selected component, and more.

FPS

The FPS reported from Flame might be a bit lower than what is reported from for example the Flutter DevTools, depending on which platform you are targeting. The source of truth for how many FPS your game is running in should be the FPS that we are reporting, since that is what our game loop is bound by.

FpsComponent

The FpsComponent can be added to anywhere in the component tree and will keep track of how many FPS that the game is currently rendering in. If you want to display this as text in the game, use the FpsTextComponent.

FpsTextComponent

The FpsTextComponent is simply a TextComponent that wraps an FpsComponent, since you most commonly want to show the current FPS somewhere when the FpsComponent is used.

ChildCounterComponent

ChildCounterComponent is a component that renders the number of children of type T from a component (target) every second. So for example:

So for example, the following will render the number of SpriteAnimationComponent that are children of the game world:

add(
  ChildCounterComponent<SpriteAnimationComponent>(
    target: world,
  ),
);

TimeTrackComponent

This component allows developers to track time spent inside their code. This can be useful for performance debugging time spent in certain parts of the code.

To use it, add it to your game somewhere (since this is a debug feature, we advise to only add the component in a debug build/flavor):

add(TimeTrackComponent());

Then in the code section that you want to track time, do the following:

void update(double dt) {
  TimeTrackComponent.start('MyComponent.update');
  // ...
  TimeTrackComponent.end('MyComponent.update');
}

With the calls above, the added TimeTrackComponent will render the elapsed time in microseconds.