I have recently started adding networking to a game I have been making but the development of this in comparison to a single player game seems extremely slow. This is mostly due to the complexity of debugging issues that occur. As a general rule the problem can be:
- sending the wrong packet data to the server.
- the server unpackaging this data incorrectly.
- the server sending the wrong data to the clients.
- the server applying the data in the wrong way.
- the clients unpackaging the data incorrectly.
- the clients applying the data in the wrong way.
So this can get quite complex and the main ways I have been debugging so far is through either trying to debug normally in the IDE. Outputting a lot of Logging information, which can be tedious. Outputting some debug information to the screen which is often fairly limited but can show problems in real time.
I'm just wondering if anyone else has any other better ideas or any network debugging tips that have really helped them?