Debugging/Logging Techniques for End Users
- by James Burgess
I searched a bit, but didn't find anything particularly pertinent to my problem - so please do excuse me if I missed something!
A few months back I inherited the source to a fairly-popular indie game project and have been working, along with another developer, on the code-base. We recently made our first release since taking over the development but we're a little stuck.
A few users are experiencing slowdowns/lagging in the current version, as compared to the previous version, and we are not able to reproduce these issues in any of our various development environments (debug, release, different OSes, different machines, etc.). What I'd like to know is how can we go about implementing some form of logging/debugging mechanism into the game, that users can enable and send the reports to us for examination? We're not able to distribute debug binaries using the MSVS 2010 runtimes, due to the licensing - and wouldn't want to, for a variety of reasons.
We'd really like to get to the bottom of this issue, even if just to find out it's nothing to do with our code base but everything to do with their system configuration. At the moment, we just have no leads - and the community isn't a very technically-savvy one, so we're unable to rely on 'expert' bug reports or investigations.
I've seen the debug logging mechanism used in other applications and games for everything from logging simple errors to crash dumps. We're really at a loss at this stage as to how to address these issues, having been over every commit to the repository from the previous to the current version and not finding any real issues.
