Get the functionality of the Editor's 'Step' and 'Pause' at runtime?

Questions & Answers
1

Greetings.

My tester wanted the ability to step frame by frame on the actual device (Android/iOS) cause it would help catch bugs.

I know you could easily build your game with single frame stepping in mind and it would work but I’m in a point where it’s hard to add that feature in, I would have to mold everything to play nicely with it.

I thought it would be nice to have the built-in Editor Pause/Step which works perfectly. I saw that the functions are in EditorApplication.Pause() and EditorApplication.Step() but obviously that’s editor only.

Is there anyway to get that same functionality off of Unity’s runtime libraries?

Thanks.

EDIT: Thanks to @gorsefan here’s the final code I used with the timeScale, works very well as long as you’re Time.deltaTime in your game and not an unscaled deltaTime.

Just attach this script to a GameObject and call Toggle (turns it on/off) or Step to step a single frame.

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

public class FrameStepper : MonoBehaviour
{
    bool IsOn;
    bool IsStepping;

    public void Toggle()
    {
        IsOn = !IsOn;
    }

    public void Step()
    {
        IsStepping = true;
    }

    void Update()
    {
        if (Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.S))
        {
            Toggle();
        }
        else if (Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.N))
        {
            Step();
        }

        if (IsStepping)
        {
            Time.timeScale = 1;
            IsStepping = false;
        }
        else
        {
            Time.timeScale = IsOn ? 0 : 1;
        }
    }
}
2

Here’s some of my code which should give you the idea

	public void OnPlayPause ()
	{
		if (Time.timeScale == 1)
		{
			// We are running, so pause
			playPauseIcon.sprite = playSprite;
			Time.timeScale = 0;
			return;
		}

		playPauseIcon.sprite = pauseSprite;
		Time.timeScale = 1;
	}

To go frame-by-frame, on entering that mode i would pause the game. Then on “next step” input I would have a coroutine calling OnPlayPause(), yielding a frame, then calling it again, then finally returning.