Debugging and Probing

Debugging

With Debugging, you can monitor any messages passing along a patchcord, or pause execution and walk through processing in the patcher step by step. Debugging starts with Watchpoints, which you can configure to monitor, print, or pause. To add a watchpoint, right-click on any patchcord and select Add Watchpoint, or select a patchcord and select Add Watchpoint from the Debug menu.

• Print Watchpoint: A Watchpoint that will print a message to the Max Console whenever a message passes through the patch cord. This message indicates the source and destination of the message, along with its contents.

  

• Monitor Watchpoint: Display a popup in the Max patcher when a message passes through the patchcord.
• Break Watchpoint: Pause execution and open the Debug Window whenever a message passes through the patchcord.

  

Enabling/disabling Debug Mode

Choose Debugging from the Debug menu to enable debugging. You can also use the Debug icon in the bottom toolbar to toggle debugging, as well as enabling Illustration Mode.

Stepping Through

When a Break Watchpoint is triggered, execution pauses and Max will focus on the Debug Window. From here you can see the sender, receiver, and contents of the message that triggered the watchpoint.

After triggering a breakpoint, The Continue button will let you resume execution, and the Abort button will effectively remove the message from Max's scheduler and exit debugging. This can be really useful, especially if the message is about to do something that you don't want.

The Step button is a very powerful tool in the Debug Window, allowing you to walk through the flow of messages in a Max patcher one step at a time.

When stepping, whenever sending a message to an object triggers a new message, the new message will appear at the bottom of the execution stack. In this way, you can see the whole processing chain in response to a message.

Illustration Mode

• Introduction
• Activating illustration mode
• Clearing pending messages

Probing

Probing lets you see the last message that passed through a patch cord by hovering over the patch cord you want to inspect. With probing you can see messages, matrices and textures, as well as audio vectors passing between objects. Event Probing, Signal Probing, and Matrix Probing must all be enabled from the Debug menu before you can use them.

Event Probing

With Event Probe enabled, hovering over any patchcord will display the last message that passed through, or else no data if no message has passed through.

Signal Probe

The Signal Probe lets you see the audio data passing between two objects. With Signal Probe enabled, hover over any audio patch cord to get a visualization of the data. While the signal probe popup is visible, you can press the up or down arrow keys to cycle between Meter, Scope, and History views.

The Signal Probe also works with mc.* objects.

Matrix Probe

Unlike the Signal Probe and Event Probe, the Matrix Probe displays in a separate window. Enabling Matrix Probe from the Debug menu will display the Matrix Probe window.

From the Window tab, the Mode chooser will let you choose which plane of the matrix to inspect—alpha, red, green, blue, or a composite of all four.

The dropdown menus at the bottom of the window will let you view additional information about the matrix, including the number of planes, the type of data contained in the matrix, and the dimensions of the matrix.

The Scope tab shows useful statistics about the matrix. For example, the vectorscope view shows the distribution of color intensities, which can help you visualize which colors are most common in the matrix.