What is a good way to slow the agent down during testing?

I am communicating with Unity through the Python API. Right now I have a trained agent that I'd like to visually inspect during testing. If I do time.sleep(0.5) in Python before calling step() on the Unity environment, the StepCount increment by more than 1. It actually increases by 16, which makes me think StepCount is incremented somewhere else.

If I instead don't have any sleep time in Python, and in C# do:

Code (CSharp):

1. public void FixedUpdate() {
2.         WaitTimeInference();
3.     }
4.  
5. void WaitTimeInference() {
6.         stepz = StepCount;
7.  
8.         if (timeSinceDecision >= timeBetweenDecisionsAtInference) {
9.             timeSinceDecision = 0f;
10.             RequestDecision();
11.         } else {
12.             timeSinceDecision += Time.fixedDeltaTime;
13.         }
14. }
15.  
16. public override void OnActionReceived(float[] vectorAction) {
17.         numActions++;
18. }

then I get a desired result of actions being taken slower. Obviously here I have stepz which increments way faster than numActions.

Is there a better way to slow the agent down for testing? Because I obviously can't really set MaxStep since that continues to update and putting time.sleep(0.5) in Python seems to still result in the StepCount incrementing elsewhere within Unity.

 

It seems like when I modify timeScale it behaves as expected, but if I do what the docs suggest and also change fixedDeltaTime to be Time.fixedDeltaTime *= Time.timeScale it seems to have no affect.

Looking at the docs, 0.02 should result in 50 calls per second. If I set Time.timeScale to 0.5, then that math makes it 0.01, or 100 calls/second. Wouldn't I want to make it Time.fixedDeltaTime /= Time.timeScale to get it to be 0.04 or 25 calls/second? Or am I misunderstanding the interraction between those variables?

EDIT: I think the documentation is wrong. Time.timeScale seems to be the only thing you need to change. If you look under https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Time-fixedDeltaTime.html it states that it's affected by Time.timeScale.