I will commend Asobo’s employees for their dedication to driving to somebody’s house to reproduce a bug. But to be frank, I’m not sure if that was the best use of their time, especially if the drive was far (they also waste time on the drive back). If they can get users to submit their bugs via a live submission system, it’s possible there would be no need for the Asobo employees to drive to this person’s house in the first place.
In the end, we want Asobo to make the best use of their time. The better use Asobo makes of their time, the more bugs that get fixed for us.
Many games nowadays feature automatically generated crash reports. Once a CTD is detected, these tools collect relevant data and bring up a screen which allows the user to enter a short text and have send or cancel buttons.
I believe MSFS would benefit from such a tool greatly. While a CTD is just a nuisance for normal games which are autosaved every few minutes, a CTD in MSFS often causes great frustration. Resuming a flight is not possible and it disrupts flight tracking software.
The advantages of such a tool are:
-It gives Asobo an indication how often CTDs occur. I doubt that everyone bothers to send every CTD to Zendesk, but if a complete CTD report is just a click away, Asobo will get a much better overview.
-The crash report includes relevant data for debugging, such as installed mods or where the crash occurred. I believe this will raise the quality of these reports compared to Zendesk tickets and allows Asobo to fix the crashes more easily.
-It gives user the feeling that something is done to address the CTDs. Right now you are just left in frustration and I often don’t feel like filling out a Zendesk ticket at that time. If a report is easily sent for every crash, I know that Asobo sees the crashes and will likely fix them in the future.
And allow us to send the log directly to Zendesk without any other requirements. Just click a button and it fills in all of the field that is needed and attaches crash logs.
After this weekends CTD issues which have affected many people a Crash.log or suchlike would go a long way to helping Asobo, a game of this magnitude with so many moving parts needs a descriptive log system.
This really should be something that doesn’t require “Votes” from the community before it registers with the Devs, this really should be something that is a top priority regardless, please add this in ASAP - to help Us to help You.
Well for some reason I can’t quote your text here, but you’re absolutely right when you say
“This really should be something that doesn’t require “Votes” from the community”
I remember countless times that someone in X-Plane had a problem with their setup that caused either crashes or just plain bad FPS. Many times, that file pinpointed the problem. Also, it would solve the problem of people claiming they have no active mods when they actually do - that happened a lot as well.
With the MSFS community we have here, I have no doubt that many of these problems could be solved if everyone had a log file to share with others.
Yes with even more addons coming on board, this is paramount. I struggle to believe it has only garnered 14 votes. Not even close to being on the wishlist radar.
I have had several CTDs over the past few days. The event handler is of little help to the normal user.
It’s like walking through a forest through a night without a moonlight and without a flashlight. It must be possible for Asobo to log all steps of the simulator. There was a log file for this in X-Plane. In the event of a crash, you at least knew where and which plugin caused the SIM to crash. That doesn’t help to solve the problem. However, it shows exactly the point or the add-on that caused the crash. Yesterday I tried to take off a flight for 4 hours. The SIM crashed in various places permanently. I still have a life outside of the SIM and just wanted to fly for 2 hours.
I have had several CTDs over the past few days. The event handler is of little help to the normal user.
It’s like walking through a forest through a night without a moonlight and without a flashlight. It must be possible for Asobo to log all steps of the simulator. There was a log file for this in X-Plane. In the event of a crash, you at least knew where and which plugin caused the SIM to crash. That doesn’t help to solve the problem. However, it shows exactly the point or the add-on that caused the crash. Yesterday I tried to take off a flight for 4 hours. The SIM crashed in various places permanently. I still have a life outside of the SIM and just wanted to fly for 2 hours.
perhaps is now the time to bring what should be considered a “basic” capability to this “sim” - seriously. Just look at the forums and you can see the need some kind of crash reporting.
I understand that every update causes issues…but now, not only do we potentially have compatibility issues given the magnitude of the update, but we can clearly see the impact that degraded/overloaded servers have on this “game” and have even less ways to see what is the causing issues.
MSFS is all about 3rd party addons, but with a constantly updating base game, these addons and modules can quickly become incompatible in a way that hangs or crashes the title.
Without insight into application activities, troubleshooting addon-related hangs and CTDs is entirely a matter of trial-and-error. Transparent application logs and CTD error messages would solve this.
Instead of quarantining items from the Community folder in a search for the culprit, the user should be able to read the logs/messages and figure out which item caused the crash (or at least which items were most recently loaded).
This would be HUGE. Im tired of having CTDs without even knowing what caused. I mean a sim cannot be 100% crash free, but giving the user the ability to analyse the crash should be mandatory
A nice feature that MSFS added in WU6 is Sim application crash detection. On next load it detects that Sim Crashed. Can we please add a 3rd option the menu to send a Crash Dump / Log data to Microsoft? That may help with some of the Crashes to Desktop / CTD. In fact, maybe have it pop-up upon crash instead of waiting for next load to gather latest / fresh crash logs ?
Since WU6 … yes … being able to activate developer mode and set a “verbose logging” flag to narrow down CTD events would help everybody … Asobo included.
In the last 12 month almost all my CTD events happened in the last week (not counting the endless crashes due to the Xbox controller going to sleep in the first few weeks of the sim about a year ago)
