Asset Review – Editor Console Pro

We’re starting a new series! Once in a while The Knights of Unity will be reviewing assets from the Asset Store. In the first post we will take a closer look at Editor Console Pro.

editor console pro in the Unity Asset Store

Overview

Editor Console Pro is an Unity editor extension and a replacement for standard Unity console window. Its primary objective is to make the best of Unity logs. The hottest feature is probably the ability to display source code snippets instead of raw backtrace file names and line numbers.

editor console pro screenshot 1

The first thing you may want to do after seeing the backtrace is going to source files and seeing where and how the log has been produced (or exception occurred.) It’s such a common thing to do that after you realize that displaying code snippets instead of line numbers works much better, you’ll wonder why haven’t you used it before! What’s more, clicking on any visible code line will take you directly to that place!

Another great feature is log filtering. Big games typically have lots of logs. Sometimes they may be used to debug a specific behavior and sometimes there are log messages that (maybe) should be there, but are not necessarily visible to you every time. For these and any other cases you can set up a filter. You are able to submit a quick filter (the filtering text input is always visible,) or define custom filters to be displayed right next to standard filters (these are Log, Warn, Error and Exception).

editor console pro quick filter

If this is not enough, can save your filters to preferences file, so when you’ll be working on a single project with other people, you’ll be able to share your filters with them!

There is also a special kind of filters called simply Ignore. It can be found in preferences window.

editor console pro ignore

Logs filtered with the use of these conditions will not be displayed in the console window. This will help you to hide logs you don’t want to see.

ECP is highly customizable as well. You can choose your own font, font size, decide which columns should be visible. There are also other options that you will find in the preferences window.

The quality

Editor Console Pro asset is distributed as a DLL library. It’s a wise choice for editor extensions, because it works even when Unity fails to compile project scripts when started. The downside is that the source code is not available for the customer.

I never had any issues with Editor Console Pro except one. Prior to Unity 5 you could only set one log callback (for getting log messages from inside the engine). By trying to read the logs you were forced to remove any previously set callback. No need to mention that ECP was using this particular callback to get the logs for itself. This gave me a serious headache for a short period.

The documentation

This type of asset does not need a lot of documentation, but one short readme file is, to be honest, too little. It would be nice of the author if he could prepare an illustrated PDF or more web page content.

Summary

Asset Store URL: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/11889?aid=1011lGBH

Pros

  • Great quality
  • Actively supported
  • Low price ($30)
  • Really makes a difference

Cons

  • No sources, only dll
  • Documentation could be better

Score: 8 / 10

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Asset Review – Editor Console Pro
We're starting a new series! Once in a while The Knights of Unity will be reviewing assets...
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