In random order:
- there is a
bug report about this issue. It was marked critical until very recently, but demoted to high because of a combination of not hearing complaints, the EULA stating that info may be used, and there were other critical bugs that needed to be more visible. The reason it is not quickly fixed by a using a confirmation window is that: 1) on some OSes it already lets you enter information about what you were doing. Killing this box means nothing is sent. 2) there are no devs around who can quickly fix this. 3) the reports are VERY useful, even though they have not yet enough information.
- before, people were asked to send the dmp files to me. Several did. I could only use them if I had up-to-date program database files, which I often did not. Of the files that were send me 90% were crashes in ati drivers, solved by pointing to an old forum thread. All in all, this way of getting info was not very useful
- Many os/hardware related crashes happen shortly after starting the game. We lost many new players this way. They would try a few times, then give up on the game. They would not go to any place to know where to send info.
- The bug tracker is a good place to provide bug reports, but many crashes cannot be reported there properly either. Luckily many players do report bugs, but crashes that occur very often are not recognised this way. I can tell you that with the new crash reporting, some major problems surfaced, that were then fixed by devs spending much time on them. From a situation where ATI crashes were below 20th place, we were quickly back at ATI crashes (when added up) being the number one problem again. If you own a MAC, be very glad for the automatic crash reports, or most of you would have been left out of playing the game for a while now. When at this point sending the reports would have been optional, we might have missed some important information about how often problems occurred on certain systems.
Only a small number of people have access to the reports, which include a char name, which enables us to ask people for more information, some OS and hardware info, and a comment if the player specified it. A stack trace shows where the crash happened. Example of the info:
| Date | Product | Version | Build | OS | CPU | Reason | Address | Uptime | Comments |
| Jun 07, 2010 18:09 | PlaneShift | 0.5.3 | Mar 11 2010 19:27:59 | Windows NT 6.0.6002 Service Pack 2 | x86 | EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION | 0x34 | 51 | PlayerName:Lanarel Arewar Compiler: VisualC RendererVersion: 3.2.0 Renderer: GeForce 8600 GT/PCI/SSE2 |
ALthough the EULA does mention information may be used for debugging, I personally do not read those things either, and think it would be better to make it optional, or have people put a setting somewhere. There are more important things to fix though. I would prefer no crash reports need to be send in the first place
