So I was musing about MSFS with my pint of Whisky, as you do (I watch too many Critical Drinker videos …) and I had a sudden idea about my perpetual “where’s the ruddy logger” complaint.
I use Linux for , well, everything else, 'cos I can’t stand Windows, and it has a program called strace, which runs a program but tracks all the system calls. So when something crashes you had a clue what it was doing.
Might be useful for debugging start up CTDs if nothing else. Probably be too much of a performance hit for running the actual game, but anything’s a step forward from “Community Folder, USB peripherals, okay reinstall then, I give up”.
Has anyone tried this, or has any experience of using this ?
If no-one knows, I’ll give it a go on my working installation (I can’t see how it would bork it, security maybe ?) and see what happens.
I’ve used it a fair bit, but not for MSFS specifically. Usually for figuring out how software works, or what process is using the disk (and exactly what it’s reading/writing).
If you don’t set any filters, the amount of data captured is just impractically massive (possibly something like 100 000 lines in a few seconds). I don’t think it’s doable to simply set it up to log everything and go back to see what it captured.
A bit off topic, but Process Explorer is also great. It’s basically a far more powerful alternative to Task Manager. Probably not as useful in this exact scenario though.
I’ll give it a try. Even if it reduces throughput by 99% it’d still probably be worth it for trying to figure out CTD causes on startup, as far as the main menu. It might take 30 minutes to get to the crash, but it’d be something
Okay, so I tried it and it seemed to work fine. Displaying lots of capture information about MSFS. Oddly, to my surprise, it didn’t slow it down much at all on default anyway. I think this might be useful for debugging startup CTDs and possibly running CTDs as well.
