Request of enumeration of bug reporting procedure

[themousemaster]

Ok, so I'm sure everyone is slightly annoyed at me for pointing out bugs no more substantial than continuity in the research tree and shift-build being wonky ;p.

I have a more severe bug to report now, but... well, the how-to forum says this:

Warzone2100 Version


Operating System


Hardware Information


Warzone2100 Configuration


Bug Description

My version of warzone and my operating system are simple enough, and a bug description I can try to develop without assistance.

The question is, where can I go about finding my hardward config and WZ2100 config?  (I'm on a windows XP machine, if that narrows down the answer any).

[DevUrandom]

Warzone configuration is usually not very important. For hardware information it is mostly important if you have a 64bit CPU and operating system (eg. WinXP64) or whether you have a nVidia or ATI graphics card.
Especially for the graphics card common sense should be used. If you report a problem that doesn't have anything to do with graphics (eg. WZ cant find a file, or the sound is crappy, etc.) you don't need to give that information. The CPU is a bit more tricky, because if you compiled Warzone yourself for a 64bit system you might discover bugs which wont show up otherwise.

Generally: If some particular info is missing (or if we suspect a specific component to be a problem), we will ask for it. Though this shouldn't encourage you to tell us "There is a bug in the multiplayer mode". A little bit more info than that is needed of course.
The most important part is the _detailed_ description (I never saw anything which I considered too much!) of the bug and how to reproduce it. And of course the operating system and the version of Warzone you used...

A good bug description tells us what you did before the bug happened, what should have happened and what happened instead.
Information how to make that bug show up may be as interesting as a description under what circumstances the bug does _not_ appear. (Common sense applies. If you have a bug that nearly always happens, this is useful. If you report a bug which nearly never happens or only under very specific circumstances, then the negative testcase wont help us at all.)
Savegames are also very useful.
If you know how to use a debugger and have one at hand: A backtrace is allways more than useful.

[themousemaster]

No, I don't have a debugger.

The actual error I'm getting is a generic Windows one; and though I can identify timing of the problem, I know enough about programming to know that it likely won't be of much help.

I was just wondering if there was a dump somewhere which contained more specific information (I found the stdOut and stderr files in the warzone directory, but they are blank).

Ah well, when I get home tonight, I'll type it up.

[DevUrandom]

Try the attached exe. (A preview of 2.0.6)

BTW: Everybody should try it and see if the bugs he reported are really gone or if there are any new problems... Will make an offical anouncement later...

When WZ crashes, it should popup a window asking you whether you want to save a dump. You can then zip that dump and attach it to your posting in this forum. (The dump should be considerable smaller than 5MB, the maximum allowed attachment size.)

[themousemaster]

When WZ crashes, it should popup a window asking you whether you want to save a dump.

You mean the message box that pops up saying "Warzone2100 has caused an error... would you like to send a report to Microsoft"?

[DevUrandom]

Not that one...
I mean the dialog box which says "Warzone crashed unexpectedly, would you like to save a diagnostic file?".
At least it should pop up. If it doesn't then that's an unexpected bug...
It pops up when I run WZ in Wine... Maybe WinXP does something different and prevents unhandled exceptions?

[themousemaster]

Perhaps.  Aside from the program just stopping, the "send error report to Microsoft" is the only thing I get.

I can see if "show details" can be done from that box, if it would help any, but I'll need to go and crash another game to get a file to copy and paste ;p.

Which won't be until the weekend.

[DevUrandom]

Here it works 100%... Either this is one of the bugs which never appear exactly on my machine, but happen on all others, or you are using the wrong exe... You should see "Version 2.0.6_pre - Built Mar  5 2007" in the mainmenu.

[Giel]

Here it works 100%... Either this is one of the bugs which never appear exactly on my machine, but happen on all others, or you are using the wrong exe... You should see "Version 2.0.6_pre - Built Mar  5 2007" in the mainmenu.

Works perfectly well for me as well (WinXP@Laptop).

You should get a yes/no dialog box asking you to save a diagnostics file. This should be before the "error report to M$" dialog box appears (in fact that M$ error report box doesn't appear at all for me, instead I only have the yes/no dialog box.)

PS Make sure to use the .exe file DevUrandom attached to his post (in this thread).

[themousemaster]

I'll d/l 2.0.6 and test this weekend.