Hello all,

I thought it might be a good idea to describe what we have done in VII to track down and eliminate bugs that cause game crashes.

Firstly, RTW has its own bug reporting function. Throughout the development stage we have kept our beta's free of such errors.

Secondly, there are community developed tools that check for syntax errors in the most commonly modified files. We have run these tools regularly as well and solved the issues they reported.

Thirdly, we know of certain bugs that are in the original game. We cannot solve those, but in some cases there are workarounds. If so, we have used those that have proven to work.

Fourthly, we use version control. That means all changes to the beta are stored, and we can roll back to any version. If testing throws up a bug that the tools do not report, we go back and forth through the revisions until we find the one where the bug was introduced. On occasion we have eliminated bugs without even knowing exactly what caused them. The problem here is that due to time constraints, this narrowing down has to be done in ai-campaigns mostly. Even then, this method is only reliable if the bug has a frequency of, say, once every 80 turns or so.


The point telling you this is to make it clear to all that the chances that we can actually fix a reported game crashing bug are very small. If we are to fix it, we really have know a lot about the exact circumstances that produced the crash.

This is not an appeal not to make bug reports. If enough reports come in to establish a trend of sorts, we may be able to start looking for something. It's just to tell you that all the "troubleshooting" methods have already been applied. There are no easy fixes left. If there were, we would not have released the mod.