Place to store games securely for reporting bugs

Almakos

  • Posts: 632
It would be nice if there was some way to send game demonstrating the issue, without attaching it in the forum post for everyone to see.
Sometimes it is lots of extra work to recreate issue in a blank new game.

p.s. I realize that it is easier to pinpoint bug with minimalistic and simple game, but usually that means spending much more time instead of just report issue and provide steps to reproduce it.
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Hectate

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  • Posts: 4643
It's a manner of crowdsourcing the effort. The slight extra time that you take to create a game with a reproducible bug is time that Jon or another dev doesn't have to do that. Which means he can go right into fixing the bug, and making it easier for anyone to confirm the fix later.

Scenario one: Ten different people report bugs. Jon creates a test to confirm them, fixes the bug, verifies it's fixed, and uploads the fix.

Scenario two: Ten different people report bugs and provides a simple test to confirm. Jon runs the test and and fixes the bug. Those ten people then verify that the uploaded fixes work.

In which scenario can Jon fix the most bugs in a set period of time?
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Patience is a Virtue,
But Haste is my Life.
Proud member of the League of Idiotic Stencylers; doing things in Stencyl that probably shouldn't be done.

Jon

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  • Posts: 17524
The point of a minimal game is more than making it easy on me, though that's a large motivation. If you follow, it makes the difference between 10 bugs fixed that afternoon vs. 2-3, and over even just a week, that's the difference between making progress or stepping in place.

It also forces you to think a bit about the bug, what causes it and in doing that, you get me a better quality report that I'll rarely need to ask for more info on. Eliminating the back and forth is time saved for both.

Almakos

  • Posts: 632
I am not arguing with that. Just sometimes I find myself in situation like I have a bug, and I performed certain actions to get it (resized scene size for example or tweaked some settings).
And now it is perfectly reproducible and I can easily explain how I got it. But the problem is that it is my working version of game and I would not like anyone except Stencyl dev team see my game at this point (for various reasons).
So now I have to stop my dev process, devote chunk of my time to create blank game, create some placeholder art, put all together compile (on iOS for example), run, make sure I didn't miss something and that bug is still there. It can take up to 30-45 minutes of my time which I almost don't have. On top of that I should report this bug, attach game etc etc etc. So why would I waste significant piece of my own time just to report a bug if I could do all that in matter of 5 minutes?

I have found myself in this situation several times already, so that's why I think it would be very useful for both sides if I could upload my game to Jon directly....
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Jon

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  • Posts: 17524
The main reason is that I've historically had a poorer success rate debugging off a full game, so I end up asking for a test game. If you put yourself in my position, I'm sitting on what looks like 100 unresolved bugs - barring showstoppers, I'm naturally going to go after the bugs that are easier to take care of first. The harder it is to work with, the longer it'll take for me to get around to it. This is the reality of working (nearly) solo - momentum carries when I make progress, and I lose momentum if I hit a patch of bugs I have to send back without resolution or don't fix.

The one exception is that if it's a toolset bug, I gladly welcome full games, e-mailed privately, but for engine stuff, it just turns into a nightmare a lot of the time, and I end up passing it right back

What I've seen lately from some is that they already have a base test game made, and they just copy it and tweak it to fit the case. Most bugs are replicable in Flash, so you don't have to sit around for the long iOS compile.

« Last Edit: October 31, 2012, 05:42:00 pm by Jon »