Pause, step, breakpoints

Unity’s pause stops the game. This pause stops one agent, and the rest of the scene carries on without it.

The problem

Both Platformer enemies patrol, and one of them is choosing wrong. Pausing the game freezes the evidence along with the bug, and the moment you resume, twenty ticks go by before you can read anything. What you want is the suspect standing still while the scene keeps running, then one tick at a time on demand.

See it

Paused on one follower while the scene keeps playing. Each step grants exactly one evaluation.

Pause and step one follower

1. Attach to the agent, as in attach and inspect.

2. Choose pause in the toolbar, or press Space while the editor has focus. Its tooltip says what it does: Pause / Resume this follower only: Space.

3. Confirm the other enemy keeps walking. The pause belongs to the attached agent.

4. Choose step, or press ., to grant exactly one ordinary evaluation. The button’s tooltip reads Advance one tick: ., and the status bar confirms Stepped one tick.

5. Read the active card and its result, then step again.

6. Choose resume when you have what you need.

Figure 1. Paused on one follower. The control now offers resume, step is enabled beside it, and the toolbar still names the follower you hold.

You should see

One agent advancing exactly as many ticks as you asked for, inside a scene that never stopped.

What one step actually grants

A step is one credit. The paused agent skips its update callback until a credit exists, performs exactly one evaluation, and spends the credit only after that evaluation has run. Step is enabled only while paused.

Two limits follow from where the credit is checked.

• The credit gates the agent’s own Update or Fixed Update callback. An agent your game drives through TickOnce advances on your schedule, so use Unity’s global Pause and Step for it.
• Entity documents mirror Unity’s global Play mode instead: the same two controls read Pause / Resume Unity Play mode: Space and Advance one Unity frame: . See entity debugging.

Closing the document, detaching, reloading the domain, or quitting the editor all resume a follower this document paused. The editor cannot leave one of your agents frozen behind your back.

Breakpoints

A breakpoint stops the attached follower when execution enters a node you marked.

7. Right-click a card in an attached Live graph and choose Set breakpoint. The status bar confirms Breakpoint set on n_123, and the card gains a marker.

8. Resume, and let the game reach that branch. When the follower enters the node, that follower pauses and the status bar reads Breakpoint hit: n_123.

9. Step from there, or right-click and choose Remove breakpoint.

Markers live in editor preferences, keyed by graph asset and authored node id, so they survive a domain reload and a re-bake that reorders runtime indices. Nothing is written into the .bqbehavior file.

Figure 2. The marker is a red dot on the card’s top-left corner. Here it sits on a card that is running, which is exactly the frame before the next entry stops the follower.

Two honest limits. A Static document has no Set breakpoint item and never paints a marker, so set and clear breakpoints on an attached Live GameObject graph. An entity document offers the same menu item and cannot pause anything, because the entity host supplies no per-agent execution control. Breakpoints are a GameObject feature in this release.

Change one thing

Change one thing

Set a breakpoint on the patrol action, resume, and watch the follower stop on entry while the other enemy keeps walking. Then step once: the action gets one evaluation and holds RUNNING, which is the difference between an immediate result and a held one, visible one tick at a time.

When it goes wrong

Symptom	Check	Fix
Space does nothing.	Confirm the document is Live and attached, and that the editor has focus.	Click the canvas, then press Space. The key is bound in Live only.
Pause is disabled.	Read the attachment word for LOST or DETACHED.	Reattach to the running agent.
Pause has no effect on the agent.	Read whether game code drives it through TickOnce.	Use Unity global Pause and Step when an external scheduler owns advancement.
Step does nothing.	Step needs the follower paused first.	Pause, then step.
A breakpoint never hits.	Confirm the document is attached and the branch actually runs.	Attach, then reach that branch. A Static document has no breakpoint menu item and no follower to stop.
A breakpoint on an entity graph does nothing.	The entity host has no per-agent execution control.	Use Unity global pause and step, and read the entity debugging page.

Next

• Entity debugging: what changes when there is no GameObject.
• Live colors: reading the frame you just froze.
• Watch it run: the tutorial pass over all of this.