Does hot reload really work?

Questions
1

Hi,

I’m currently looking for a game engine for a small mobile hobby project.
After some experience with Unity I realized that I loved C# but didn’t much care for Unity’s design ideas (prefabs…)
So now I strongly tend to Monogame.
But looking at engines is fun and defold seems particularly polished and productive.
One feature in particular seems too good to be true : hot reloading.

Could you explain a bit more, how this works?
What are the limitations, how do you use it?

If I’m debugging some code and see the mistake, can I just halt execution, fix it and continue running with the fix in place?

It feels like my expectations are way too high, but I am getting rather hyped for this.
Thanks in advance for your explanations :slight_smile:

2

Have you read the manual? I think it explains it pretty well :slight_smile: https://www.defold.com/manuals/hot-reload/

1 Like
3

If you are debugging code in the debugger and spot an error then you need to resume code execution, open the script file containing the error, make the change and hot reload. This works for all script files. For Lua module files you need to take extra steps to unload the required file from the global state but it works as well.