Debugging Godot With Visual Studio Code

I’ve been playing around with Godot a bit recently, a promising 2D/3D game engine that is completely open source. What most impressed me is that the entire engine is distributed as a 50MB binary. Compared to the 1GB+ installation size for Unity, this is pretty amazing.

Here are some quick instructions for debugging the Godot engine itself (i.e. rather than a game created in Godot) using VS Code:

Make sure you have all the build requirements. Refer to the build documentation available here.
- I ran into an issue with the scons command which would throw this error:
  Fatal Python error: Py_Initialize: unable to load the file system codec ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'encodings'
  To fix, open scons.bat (mine was in C:\Python36\Scripts) and remove/comment the following line: set path=%_dp0;%dp0..;%path%
Clone/download the Godot engine source code from GitHub here.
Open a terminal at the root directory of the source code and build using the following command: scons platform=windows target=debug
In VS Code, open the source code root directory as the project folder.

Go to Debug → Open Configurations and enter the following:

{
    "version": "0.2.0",
    "configurations": [
        {
            "name": "(Windows) Attach",
            "type": "cppvsdbg",
            "request": "attach",
            "processId": "${command:pickProcess}"
        }
    ]
}

Set a breakpoint somewhere in the code that you know will be hit. For example, Main::iteration() in main/main.cpp.
Run bin/godot.windows.tools.exe.
Go to Debug → Start Debugging then type in godot to find the running process and press ENTER.
The debugger should now be attached to godot.windows.tools.exe and the breakpoint should be hit.

godot debug