I’ve been using Unity for a few years now and have developed a deep and unhealthy love for it. As a game development framework it’s easily the most expressive and flexible system I’ve ever used, in 20 years of making games.

However, as with most things, there’s the odd bit of friction that could be smoothed over, and one of the joys of Unity is that it allows you to address them when you want to. I’ve developed a couple of such things over the years, which I intend on releasing freely to the community.

First up is a replacement logging system for Unity. Unity’s built-in logging system and console are great – being able to click on logs to select game objects, viewing callstacks, etc are incredibly handy features. But I found myself wanting more. Specifically:

Debug channels. When you’re trying to ship a game debug messages can get very spammy, and make it difficult to sift out the signal from the noise; at the same time those spammy messages can often be useful for tracking down rare bugs. Debug channels allow you to categorise your messages as ‘loading timings’, ‘weapon debugging’, etc, and limit your view to a particular channel, allowing you to keep all your messages without being overwhelmed by them.

Filtering out stack frames from the callstack. It’s not uncommon to want to create your own debug layer to manipulate your logging before it hits Unity. Unfortunately, by default your new methods appear in the callstack, and the source of the error is shown to be your own debug method, which is annoying – you want some way to remove elements from the callstack.

Inline source view. You see a bug and you want to quickly see the source code around one part of the stack frame, without necessarily jumping into your text editor.

A modular system to allow different backends to process logs. I want to be able to write my own file logger, or my own in-game console, and have full access to the callstack, etc.

Timestamps! I want to see when a log happened.

A more compressed view; Unity’s console uses space somewhat inefficiently, using two lines of text for every log.

An in-game console. Sure, much of the time I’m working in the Unity editor, but sometimes I want to see my messages on my target device.

UberLogger addresses all of these issues and some more. It’s a drop-in replacement for the default logging framework, so no code changes are needed – Debug.Log, etc, all just work, though if you want to use features like channels there are some new methods.

In the editor it looks like this:

And in game it looks like this:

It uses an MIT license, so if you’ve got any features to add send me a message (or a pull request). And if you find it useful, let me know!

Simon