Debug console
I am not a developer on this project, so all of this is non-official knowledge.
The debug console is a hidden UI inside Preface that allows developers to change various settings and try out different features of the engine.
As of now (December 7th 2024), the game contains a check to see if a debugger is attached to the game process. If this is the case, the game will switch to "dev mode", which allows access to the debug console.
There are many ways to do this, but here is a simple method I found:
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Download Visual Studio (e.g. Visual Studio 2022 Community). During installation, make sure to install the "C++ Desktop Development" workload.
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Start Visual Studio 2022. You can either create an empty C++ project or just click "Continue without code" in the start-up menu
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Start the game. Once it is running, go back to Visual Studio and in the top toolbar click "Attach..." next to the green play button
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In the process selection popup, select "ecs_techdemo_app.exe"
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Go back to the game. In the bottom left corner, the brackets should now say "(dev)" instead of "(prod)"
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Congratulations! You are now a developer ;) Simply hit F2 now to open the debug console at the top of the screen:
By pressing F1, you can toggle the mouse cursor between the debug console and the in game camera. To hide the console again, press F3. Here are some fun things you can do with it:
Go to Camera > Movement and click on 'Switch mode' until you get one of the "Free flight" modes
Go to Rendering > Raytracing and check the 'Enabled' checkbox. After restarting the game, ray tracing is now enabled.
Go to Windows > Network Subsystem. By clicking 'Create Lobby' in the Steam tab, you can open a lobby. Once enabled, the "Invite to game" option becomes available when right-clicking a friend in the Steam overlay. I don't know though if this actually does anything at the moment.