Page MenuHomeFeedback Tracker

Expose some system by which Server Owners and Modders can obtain information about crash reports
Feedback, NormalPublic

Description

This is a feature request for an official system or method for Server Owners and Modders to be able to obtain information about crash reports generated in their Servers and/or Mods. There is an (subjectively) extreme amount of crashes in both environments that we have no information on from the logs.

Currently, the best we have is posting crash report GUIDs in Discord in hopes someone wants to help out. You can probably imagine this is very inefficient.

In Modding
For example only yesterday I have discovered two new crashes I have never seen before that seem to happen during physics simulation even though all the work I've done yesterday was writing systems code that does not interact with physics at all.

Since I don't know exactly what causes the crash, my only option seems to be to rollback backups and try again or press random buttons, disable random code, and hope it is fixed.

This really discourages me from spending more time on modding, since the time spent running around like a headless chicken could be used to move the project forward and clearer information on where my issue comes from would help facilitate that.

In Servers
For Server Owners the current recommended practice when experiencing crashes is something like "remove all mods, then add a few mods at a time to test if you crash less" or simply "start removing some of the mods and see if you crash less". As you can imagine this is very tedious.

Modded server owners struggle with this because once they strip their server from mods, their community is less likely to play on the server. If there is less crashes afterward, does that mean the problem mod was removed, or is it just because there are less people playing, so less frequency of the same crash occurring?

It would be much more preferable to know the general direction of the mod which once removed would improve stability.

Details

Severity
Feature
Resolution
Open
Reproducibility
N/A
Operating System
Windows 11 x64
Category
General
Steps To Reproduce
  1. Become modder or server owner
  2. Pain

Event Timeline

Geez changed the task status from New to Feedback.Thu, Jul 10, 10:48 AM
MarioE added a subscriber: MarioE.Fri, Jul 11, 4:43 AM

When it comes to the crashes you've mentioned, the only real way to debug them is by having full access to the game's C++ engine codebase. Even with that access, unless you're highly familiar with the systems and structure of the code, identifying the root cause would still be extremely challenging.

These types of crashes typically stem from one of two causes:

  • Your mod is directly or indirectly contributing to the issue.
  • The crash is caused by something happening on secondary threads, outside of your control.

To be clear, access to the internal engine code is not something that will be made available to modders. The best course of action in these situations is simply to report the issue. That said, there’s often no need to report it manually, as such crashes are already logged and sent to our internal systems.

That being said, we are actively working on improving support for the modding community. We're currently looking to hire someone specifically to collaborate with modders and help with these kinds of technical challenges. If you're interested or know someone who might be, the position is listed here:
https://careers.bohemia.net/position/programmer-modding-quality