EGOSOFT: Why not add option to upload client crash reports?

[Maziou]

I'm no programmer, so perhaps there is a good reason. But lot of games these days automatically pop up a window asking if you want to upload a crash report online, when the client fails. Why not add something like that to X:R? Easier than emailing info@egosoft.com with dump files. And you can be sure to get all the files and data you need to analyze.

Upside would be that you get a lot more files from many more players; so you can more easily determine common causes of issues. Downside is you will get a LOT more files from MANY more players; so you'll be busy going through a lot of data.

[04ihegba]

Becasue to make any of that useful, you would need a heuristic dump analysis tool and there simply isn't the userbase to make that financially sensible.

To companies like Adobe, building a program that scans every dump looking for similarities to find the most common bugs and bring them to a programmer's attention is very worthwhile, as it would literally be impossible to find the source of even 1/10th of the bug reports they receive if their entire employee base was just doing bug hunting. That's because that program will literally work for millions of users, many of which have bundle packages consisting of 10 or more applications. Some of which will have legacy versions of those bundle packages installed as well which are not end of life yet so much be patched when windows updates come out too and so forth.

Simply put, making this thing is going to take much more time tha is worth it. Time that could be much better spent actually fixing bugs.

There's probably a company out there that can provide Egosoft with a product that will do this for them, but even then I doubt Egosoft even have the bug-fixing capacity to tackle enough of the bugs that are presented to them to make the process significantly faster. I can't see it adding up when you do a cost vs benefit analysis of it.

[ltbennett]

Because to make any of that useful, you would need a heuristic dump analysis tool and there simply isn't the userbase to make that financially sensible.

To companies like Adobe, building a program that scans every dump looking for similarities to find the most common bugs and bring them to a programmer's attention is very worthwhile, as it would literally be impossible to find the source of even 1/10th of the bug reports they receive if their entire employee base was just doing bug hunting. That's because that program will literally work for millions of users, many of which have bundle packages consisting of 10 or more applications. Some of which will have legacy versions of those bundle packages installed as well which are not end of life yet so much be patched when windows updates come out too and so forth.

Simply put, making this thing is going to take much more time tha is worth it. Time that could be much better spent actually fixing bugs.

There's probably a company out there that can provide Egosoft with a product that will do this for them, but even then I doubt Egosoft even have the bug-fixing capacity to tackle enough of the bugs that are presented to them to make the process significantly faster. I can't see it adding up when you do a cost vs benefit analysis of it.

This.

Not to mention the Dump analysis tool would need to be updated and maintained alongside the game, whenever something in the dump files would change (worst case: almost every time you change something in the game) you'd need to update the tool to reflect the new changes so it doesn't just explode when trying to parse through received files. Not worth the extra work when they have a perfectly good set of forums with reasonable members of the community only too happy to post up crash reports as they find them.

Additionally, this way you can stick whatever bollocks you like in the dump file, such as "the fliggle did the crash in a pork bun." ... nice human-readable errors- makes it easy to debug afterwards. xD

[Nightdragon81]

yes but with dump files they will now exactly the reason it crashed and then can code to fix it. thus spending less time hunting and more time fixing.

[sabrehawk]

dude these guys are incapable of coding the most simple operations in their scripting correctly...you could also ask them to construct a cold fusion reactor...or invent the warpdrive.