Reporting bugs

Discuss the Wing Commander Series and find the latest information on the Wing Commander Universe privateer mod as well as the standalone mod Wasteland Incident project.
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charlieg
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Reporting bugs

Post by charlieg »

So if we have a buggy version, where's the list of latest bugs?

For the record, I do not consider the following thread a) organised enough b) thorough enough or c) current enough for the purpose of tracking bugs:
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... php?t=5516

A list of specific, reproducable issues to be addressed needs to be put on the wiki. That way somebody can attack them and take this heap of dented metal and make something beautiful out of it.
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Post by Privateer Ferrius »

With all due respect, this is my thread for my projects, and is not meant to be at all comphrehensive for all of WCU. You would know this if you took the time to read the first post :P

By the way, should you have time, you could do more than just sit there telling US what we need to do, and do some of it yourself.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Well, it's actually all the same bugs as in previous versions, only worse; like there used to be the ocassional item that you buy and disappears, now it's like items you buy for your ship drop into a black hole immediately. Serious problems with savegames. Glow map and specular textures don't work. You land at a base where you don't even see enemies around, and while you're shopping it gets attacked and you're dead before you can make it to your ship. Problems with missions. But last time Spirit was around, she was having some big mixup with executables and she lost the units.csv file, I had to upload my old one for her, so no wonder. Once she gets a few steady days of work I think she'll clean most of it up.

Ferrius, UT2003... you mean inflatable balloons with faces painted on them? Well, it would be a start, at least...
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Ferrius, charlieg is not a developer, but he's better intentioned that he might sound at first, and he's well respected around here. ;-)
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Post by charlieg »

Ferrius is right. One of us needs mod rights. That should be moved.
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Post by Privateer Ferrius »

chuck_starchaser wrote:Well, it's actually all the same bugs as in previous versions, only worse; like there used to be the ocassional item that you buy and disappears, now it's like items you buy for your ship drop into a black hole immediately. Serious problems with savegames. Glow map and specular textures don't work. You land at a base where you don't even see enemies around, and while you're shopping it gets attacked and you're dead before you can make it to your ship. Problems with missions. But last time Spirit was around, she was having some big mixup with executables and she lost the units.csv file, I had to upload my old one for her, so no wonder. Once she gets a few steady days of work I think she'll clean most of it up.

Ferrius, UT2003... you mean inflatable balloons with faces painted on them? Well, it would be a start, at least...
I'm not talking about the model quality jsut the polycount. It doesn't take much (IMHO) to do better than the UT series' models :P
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Hope you're right. Well, you ARE right, I can't imagine I'd make worse models if I was limited to 4 vertices :D
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Post by klauss »

Ok... I think it's time SF's bugtracker went to active use...

Ok... prerequisites for fully qualified bug reports:
  • It needs to be precise. No... "I can't buy Shield3" thingies... if that was the case, we'd have noticed - obviously, there are circumstances which are making "Shield3" unbuyable... you have to describe them. That is... report as much context as you can.
  • Reproduction instructions - give as many instructions as possible that will make us developers be able to reproduce the bug. A golden rule of debugging is that there's no bug as elusive as the non-reproductible bug.
  • When it's a graphical glitch, be kind enough to post a screenshot with the report - an image is worth 1K words.
  • Be verbose - it's far better to wrong by speaking too much, than by speaking too little (as the latter will promote the bug to immortal status).
  • If possible (and mostly when it's upgrade or mission-related), attach savegames with pre-bug and post-bug snapshots. Remember that savegames are divided in two files: the text files in ~/.privateer100/saves and the ones in ~/.privateer100/serialized_xml. This is one of the best steps one can take to ensure a reproducible bug.
  • Provide accurate version information (what full release, with which patches applied)
  • Provide system information (OS, OS version, graphics card, etc...)
  • Attach stderr.txt and stdout.txt (or the linux equivalents, which is capturing the console buffer)
I know it's a long list... not all items are required, but providing them all is one of the best things you can do to make our life easier ;)

BTW: If someone could gather the bugs reported in the old thread and report a fully qualified bug report to the bug tracker, I'd appreciate it.
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Post by Privateer Ferrius »

charlieg wrote:Ferrius is right. One of us needs mod rights. That should be moved.
I agree. I have a lot of experience in that field, well more in administration than moderation, but still :P I have enough on my plate though - perhaps Chuck or Dual? Dunno if they have any experience though.

By the way CharlieG, I wasn't trying to attack you if it came off that way, I jsut didn't think my thread was the appropriate place for that sentiment, and the other bit, well, we can use all the help we can get :P

@Klauss - sure can do.

By the way, I don't know who has admin access to the project, but if they want to add me there, my sf.net handle is just my name, that is to say - petermdodge

[edit]: I've gotten all the bugs up there on that thread that I can verify exist and compile a fully qualified bug report for, which amounts to only three. Many I simply can't replicate (which is annoying to say the least) and quite a few I simply don't observe. others are simply duplicate reports. Anyways, I'll keep hacking to see if I can get you any more bug reports, and I'll work on figuiring out exactly what keeps my new WCU install from working. Oddly, I have an older one that still works, from when I first got Privateer as well, but the newer one does not, so I am attempting to isolate why one works and the other does not.
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