Virtual Flight Recorder: Help us help you find bugs quickly

On the Developer Q&A, I heard Sebastian Wloch say that there are so many use cases for testing that it’s difficult to reproduce bugs sometimes. Why not give us a function we can map to a key that lets us “report” what’s happening in the plane into a file we can attach to a bug report? Like when my AP starts porpoising my Citation, I can press a button and it begins “recording” the circumstances that exist in my environment (weather, plane telemetry, GPS coordinates, etc) and outputs a file to my desktop. I’m assuming (hope) that CTD’s are already reported to you automatically, if not we need that too!. Just a thought.

Tools for catching error logs and sending reports could be very helpful for users and devs.
btw: there’s is a debug console in dev mode. I belief you can select it from the views menu.

Interesting suggestion indeed. Voted!

From the bug reproduction standpoint, a rolling buffer tracking state would likely be sufficient. The user presses a hot key when the bug occurs and then presses again to stop recording (or recording automatically stops after a some period of time). Because the buffer has been rolling, there is state data from immediately before the bug through the bug manifesting itself. When recording stops, there should be a dialog that pops asking for a description of the bug and then the report is automatically sent off. Ideally, there should be a way to analyze the data on the back end such that patterns could be identified so that similar reports would be automatically grouped together. That way, issues affecting larger numbers of customers would bubble up and get the necessary visibility and priority.

Anyway, the state data should allow a developer to immediately load that state into the simulator to reproduce that portion of the flight (and hopefully, the bug). Additionally, the “flight data recorder” should be the basis for automatic crash recovery. If the sim crashes, state should get saved and the next time the simulator is started the user should be asked if they wish to continue their flight from the point at which it was interrupted–including with with the pre-crash flight plan loaded.

2 Likes