How many games do a simple call to the SQL client library to send to the local SQL server a simple detailed report of what happened, when, why, and how bad it was? This information is ALL already available, but how hard is it to copy\/past the following into your source code and execute it as an SQL command?<\/p>\n
INSERT INTO reports.errors (time, problem, severity, stacktrace, user, IP, clientversion) values (TIMENOW(), “+assertion.getMessage()+”, “+assertion.getLevel()+”, “+assertion.getStacktrace()+”, “+assertion.getUsername()+”, “+system.getLocalIPAddress()+”, “+client.getVersion()” );<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Nice idea – free, detailed, metrics on exactly why, when, and where your game exe is crashing, any unexpected problems, anyone who’s running an out-of-date version, etc.<\/p>\n
And with the dev team no longer having to rely on users *actually bothering to tell them* when they see big flashing warnings and errors, we might avoid some of the programmer\/artist antipathy (“[artist] hey, can you help me with something?” “[programmer] its got an error! no wonder it doesnt’ work!”, “oh, ignore that, it always does that”, “um, how long has it been ‘always’ doing that?”, “ever since around the time the game started running really slowly, 2 months ago. It sucks – now everything takes me twice as long to test. But that’s just life, I guess” [cue: programmer grinds teeth, smashes forehead on desk, or similar]).<\/p>\n
NB: I have nothing against artists. They are just an easy scapegoat for a not-very-funny-but-actually-quite-painful-if-you’ve-been-there joke. No artists were harmed in the making of this post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(As spotted in last month’s Game Developer magazine’s Inner Product column. Good enough that I wanted to draw some attention to it, and hopefully add a bunch more of these good ideas as I come across them \/ remember them) Most games, when they crash hard enough, memory dump. The customer (or internal tester during […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,28,20],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}