Question for Yves or Francois: logging events

[Blizna]

I am just curious why there isnt some kind of debugging log that would be extremely useful while debugging random crashes in applications (rather apps than games). When using many extensions its sometimes pretty tricky or even impossible to find out what event is causing it (considering hundreds of events).

Logging would increase "developer" value of MMF, IMHO - simple logging of executed events generated to some output file would be good enough, however I have no idea how difficult would it be to implement?
Maybe just logging numbers of executed lines wouldnt be too hard.
I think it would be really great help.

[DJFuego]

There is a debug app in XP. I stumbled upon it last week http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490913.aspx
the command line reference is a goldmine of information.

[netninja]

I would definitely find this useful. If MMF was able to simply mention which extension caused it to crash then that would help enormously.

DJFuego - did you mean to link to Getmac? I've tried using the debugger tools in Vista, but I needed symbol files etc so it wasn't too useful.

[Francois]

I was thinking of having a event debugger when I was working on MMF2. But the works was so immense (you have to have all the event routines, all the resources and a small event editor etc) that I dropped it and just displayed the objects data.
Maybe in MMF3...

[Blizna]

Francois: and what about simple output of last event (number of line e.g.) that should be processed?
So if the debug file contained number 20, you would know the crash was on that line in event editor.
I mean no complex debug, only simple showing which event line MMF was about to process.

[Retriever2]

I would definitely find this useful. If MMF was able to simply mention which extension caused it to crash then that would help enormously.

DJFuego - did you mean to link to Getmac? I've tried using the debugger tools in Vista, but I needed symbol files etc so it wasn't too useful.

I have found over time that debugging tools for Windows aren't always accurate about where a crash occurs, but they will accurately tell what extension (by naming the mfx file) caused the crash. I believe if you get Microsoft's send error report dialog, if you click details you can also get the name of the faulting extension.

[BrandonC]

Maybe I'm completely miss-interpreting the idea here, but maybe you could make it so that every event you add 1 to a counter and save it to an INI, reset it to 0 at the last event. Then if it crashes, you'd have a number in an INI file that signifies where the game stopped.

Merely a work around, but it might be interesting to toy around with.

[nivram]

That sounds like a good debugging work around.

Marv