Allow admins to show players a read-only 'View Variables' panel

[SabreML]

Probably a good portion of my adminhelps over the last year or so have been asking if an admin could let me know what x variable is set to, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's been sending these.

Having the ability to see (and set) variables is an incredibly useful tool as a coder, really only matched by proc calling. Unfortunately, unless you have admin permssions or you spam ahelps during a testmerge, the ability for non-admins (PRRs included) to debug objects and behaviours on the live server is severely limited. Add to that the number of issues which seemingly choose not to happen at all in test servers or are limited by population, and you've got a pretty high number of bugs and runtimes which aren't being fixed or even detected.

Any admins experienced with DM code will be able to avoid this issue of course, and potentially even create a PR to fix the issue right on the spot. 'Codermins' like this though are very much the minority, and while many admins know how to edit variables and debug to some degree, tracking down the source of a runtime or a reference error can sometimes be a whole different process entirely.

---

I propose that we stealborrow PR #30463 from /tg/station, which allows admins to grant a read-only version of a datum's VV panel to a player of their choice. There are likely still bugs in my quick test port, and I know there's bound to be some variables that need to stay admin only, but I've attached a video below to demonstrate the feature.

The potential benefits of this really are countless. Assuming it can be made as airtight as possible so as to not allow a greytider to edit someone's ckey out of existence, this would allow PR authors to have much greater insight into how things interact with players during a testmerge. Along with the obvious debugging capabilities.

---

The current version of this still requires an admin to show it to you, which is around the same level of effort as just reporting back with the value of a variable, but I'm hoping that if this idea gets any traction that the read-only version can be given to PR Reviewers and possibly Mentors under limited conditions. (Possibly with extended permissions to allow for navigating nested objects, but that can come later.)

As I said, I already have the main part of the code ready to go, but I thought that since this is very much an admin-centric idea that I would wait for any feedback from staff before submitting it fully.

---

[AffectedArc07]

7 hours ago, SabreML said:

Probably a good portion of my adminhelps over the last year or so have been asking if an admin could let me know what x variable is set to

I have never seen a single one of these.

ahelps with the word “variable”

---

 

While I am well aware of the usefulness of this, it’s in my boat of “is this really worth adding given the infrequency that it’s needed”

[SabreML]

Huh, I was sure that there would have been more of those. Maybe some of my own requests were done via msay instead.

Either way, I'd personally flip that around and say "Even if it's used infrequently, why not have it anyway for the times it would be useful?"
It's only 22 lines of code to add it as a feature in its current state, so I can't see any real downsides myself other than the standard 'muscle memory' argument, and I can't imagine there would be much of that for the VV dropdown menu.

As I said (I think) my original plan for this was to give it to PR Reviewers and Mentors under certain restrictions. PR Reviewers because they already see the MC, runtimes, and qdel logs. Mentors because it'll allow them to check the attack intent, movement intent, contents, etc. of a player directly, rather than needing to guess.

[S34N]

There are more, I've asked at least 4 or 5 within the past few months alone. I don't think I've used the word "variable" specifically mind you.