Breakpoints Aren't Working in Nova... What Am I Doing Wrong?

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1

I'm running into a pretty serious issue with my rhythm game where upon trying to play a second song (be it retrying the same song, or selecting a new song) the game seems to hang in the scene transition. Up until now I've gotten by debugging with print statements, but this issue is proving tricky and I need to set up some breakpoints to see what's happening and step through the code. Except, when I run the simulator even though the debugger seems to be active in Nova, and I have a breakpoint set up... it never gets hit. Even when it should be on the first song playthrough that works as expected.

I'm using The 2.5.0 Lua SDK, and I'm running Nova 11.10. And, in the off change it impacts this, I'm using the Noble Engine to support the development of my game.

I've looked at:

And the documentation here: Inside Playdate

However, I don't see anything really addressing the issue I'm having, and I'm not really sure what I'm doing wrong.

Here are the settings for the simulator in Nova:

nova-settings

And this is what I see in the debugger while running my game in the simulator:

Screenshot 2025-06-17 at 7.32.12 PM
Screenshot 2025-06-17 at 7.32.12 PM2460×500 22.4 KB

Any thoughts? Suggestions? Eager to get unblocked here, appreciate any help.

2

I can't help you too much with the debug issue in Nova, but I've used Noble for a while and you have to be very careful to cleanup all scene properties, variables, singletons, event listeners and resources during your :exit() and :finish() methods. I found myself with a lot of issues similar to yours because of things staying in memory and executing in the old scene context, even after moving to a new scene.

I hope this helps.

3

Yeah, I think that's part of what I'm struggling to debug atm - as far as I can tell I'm cleaning up everything in my :finish() method, but something's still going wrong and I'm not sure what I'm not catching before exiting the scene where you play the song. I'm hoping by debugging I can step through and see what's specifically causing the hitch.

4

Apologies for double posting but today specifically I got an error on running the simulator I hadn't seen before, it seems related to why the debugger isn't working but I'm not entirely clear on what it actually means:

Request “setBreakpoints” failed: Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=32 "Broken pipe" UserInfo={NSLocalizedDescription=Broken pipe, NSLocalizedFailureReason=Error in write() function}
Request “setBreakpoints” failed: Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=32 "Broken pipe" UserInfo={NSLocalizedDescription=Broken pipe, NSLocalizedFailureReason=Error in write() function}
Request “setBreakpoints” failed: Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=32 "Broken pipe" UserInfo={NSLocalizedDescription=Broken pipe, NSLocalizedFailureReason=Error in write() function}
Broken pipe
Error in write() function