Build Configurations

C# (well, technically, MSBuild) has a system known as “build configurations”. Basically, you get a nice drop-down menu in Visual Studio (or Rider) that allows you to change how your code is compiled and ran.

In a default C# project, you have two configurations: Debug and Release.

• Debug has debug checks (e.g. asserts) enabled, and is compiled/ran without optimizations¹.
• Release has no debug checks and is compiled with optimizations.

In RobustToolbox, there are various development tools that cannot be included in live release builds. Examples of this are the csi C# Interactive prompt, for security reasons. These tools are generally compiled in behind the TOOLS preprocessor define, which is also how they are turned off.

Furthermore, during game development it might generally be useful to run optimizations more frequently than usual. Not getting a stable framerate on a debug build can make testing rather painful, but simply switching from Debug to Release in the default C# model also gets rid of checks like asserts, which does change behavior and might cause you to miss issues.

Because of this, we have the following set of configurations in our solutions:

• Debug: has debug checks, tools, and no optimizations.
• DebugOpt: is like Debug, but with optimizations enabled.
• Tools: no debug checks, but tools and optimizations enabled. This is what you’d use when mapping.
• Release: no debug checks, no tools, optimizations enabled. This is intended to be as close to a live launcher build as you can get.

How to use these

Rider

Select from that drop-down at the top of the window.

Visual Studio

I’m too lazy to find a screenshot, but the drop-down looks kinda similar to Rider.

Visual Studio Code

TODO