kryo,

Exactly it. These days everyone wants anything and everything with no effort expended. I'm surprised people haven't complained to the chipmakers about making chips that'll do what they want just by "thinking" about it.   


...and so the world turns.

If people are too lazy to send in a minidump, then the bugs wont be fixed. Its that simple

I cant understand why this is even being discussed, either people send in the minidump with a small description of what happened. Or the user might have to wait a long time or maybe never to have his or hers issue fixed.

Sins for life Baby. Its only gonna get better with time. I suffer very few mini dumps, I also spent a lot of time correctly setting up my router and network.

I dont know if this is possible but I see why someone would not send in a minidump they would be irritated and not even bother so I don't know if it would take to much time effort but when the minidump pops up have a button or option that says "report minidump?" just to make it easier for all the angry people out there

Minidumps = Bad programing - Period.

This talk of minidumps, I've never encounted one either. Same with all my friends, so when we look on this forum and see mini dumps this and that, we think, it most be their computers (conflicting programs) because we have it on at least 10 highly different PCs/Laptops and no problems (also with a range of patchs). However that also means that it isn't their pcs. Strange, minidumps, as mythical and unknown as UFOS.

I experienced the crashes frequently from the very beginning. We were told on these forums that the kind of crashes we had were the fault of Nvidia, and that they (Nvidia people) were fixing it. I thought that three months was a long time to wait for the fix, but I frequently cheked the Nvidia site, and saw a new driver released on May 16. Sure enough, the crashes ended when I installed it. Unless I missed something, I have not seen this driver release mentioned on these forums, which kind of surprised me. I did make a post about it after playing my first crashless game to make sure it worked.

And I have to agree with a previous poster ... you fellows who go on about how "I've NEVER had a crash, you must be stupid and lazy" can be pretty annoying. It's generally not because you are smarter. You are just lucky. Most of us have tried to be patient and to help get the problems solved. Put yourselves in our shoes, and maybe you would feel a little more sympathetic.

Here's the link for the new driver. I hope this solves the problems for many of you.

WWW Link

It was mentioned when the beta release of the 174 series was made a month or so (?) ago.

Oh? Really? Well, isn't that awful, then! We shouldn't allow Stardock or Ironclad to program again! EVER! I should pass a law, shouldn't I! My, oh my. Why does the government allow this sort of thing.

Well, that's better. We've dismantled Ironclad, Stardock, Microsoft, Apple, Electronic Arts... you know what? I have more people to help! I better go.

Wait.

Erm, now that we don't have any games anymore.

I assume, Mr. Peebuddy, that you're one of them who's taken years to learn to program? I assume you'll be stepping in to fill the vacuum... won't you?

The minidumps are log files that tell the developers what went wrong on your system that caused the crash. Without these, we can't fix problems or even investigate them to any degree.

If people choose not to provide us with information then their problems will likely never be resolved. However, that's their decision, not ours.  No program is flawless.  No human is a perfect.

Peebuddy, Minidumps are good programming, they tell you what's wrong. Most errors that couse minidumps are on the USER'S side. Yes, that means YOU.

./snicker

They had the game in beta for over six months (closer to 9 I think) before release, how could they have gotten much more thorough than that?

This nVidia driver launches the new 175 series : it is the 175.16 of May 16.


Post #32 gives the link for Vista. Here is the link for XP :


175.16 for XP

Its a relative thing. Without those 9 months of beta testing , this game would have get desyncs every 5 seconds.

Also just to clarify. Im not advocating not sending minidumps in. I just recognise the problem of sending minidumps in even if it does defy common sense ,and that maybe there can be some better way of encouraging people to send them.

Forexample for 1.1 , we are having a beta test. People will be getting minidumps. Why not during the beta phase have the minidump say "PLEASE send to developers". Alot of people who dont go to the forums simply dont know that problems can be solved by sending them in. Infact we have not heard an official sticky saying the devs appreciate if you send in dumps. Only numerous SD replies in complain threads BUT many dont read them.

I am somewhat in agreement.

Ironclad and Stardock should do some pro-minidump-reporting marketing :

1. Inform people that minidumps are not the evil causes of their problems, and that they are, on the contrary, their allies in helping the programmers to fix the problems identified by the minidump info ;

2. Insert an automatic procedure to easily and rapidly email the minidump file to Ironclad Support (and perhaps also, the DX Diagnostic text-file).

___________________________________


3. That game was beta-tested far beyond what other game companies usually do, and it was beta-tested for about NINE months (April to December 2007) with the collaboration of many ordinary gamers (such as I), before it was finalized in a closed beta (December 2007/January 2008).

4. I visit the forums of other recent games. Many of them experience grave online MP issues (such as desynch bugs). They don't have minidumps, but they desynch and crash at least as much as Sins does. Minidumps are just an overt effect of a crash, when the developers have chosen to generate an information file to help identify the real cause of crashes. Many other games desynch and crash as much as Sins, in online MP : the fact that they do not generate minidumps does not change anything to the harsh reality of their own situation -- they crash !


Compulsive-repetitive obsessions with the pseudo-evils of "minidumps" are symptoms of impatient ignorance.

There is nothing bad with minidumps : they just report info on a critical situation.

Games that do not use minidumps desynch and crash just the same : the fact that they do not generate minidumps does not solve anything.

Unless I'm mistaking, Stardock doesn't do any programing.

But they do just not for Sins.

They make alot of stuff, GalCiv, The Political Machine 2008, (and some MMO game which name i cant remember atm, but its far into the future before we see it) and all kinds of software like ObjectDock, WindowBlinds, Stardock Central, Impulse, so on and so on

The reality is that complex software has bugs and crashes. There's no escaping it. Games especially, since the game code has to interact with the OS code and the display driver - both of which are largely out of the hands of developers.

One of the first things you learn when you start taking programming classes is that good programming partly means you want to make it easy to find what went wrong. In that sense, I'm quite glad Ironclad went with reporting minidumps as it makes it much easier to find the cause of the problem. It would be much worse if the game simply crashed (as pretty much all the others do) with no info given.

I honestly don't understand the "It's not my job to send these in, I'm not their QA, etc etc" position. Nobody's asking you to be. Many people who play Sins don't experience any crashes whatsoever, or incredibly few. Some people experience them more frequently. In the end, the developers are human and not psychic, and any developer has limited resources with which to test their code. If the game crashes for you and you want it fixed, you should send in the minidump. If you don't send it in and just post "my game crashes", well, there's nothing anyone can do because there's no way to know why it crashed, so if it's something in the game code it can't be fixed.

Auto-mailing minidumps would not work, because the dump files themselves are quite large uncompressed and I'm sure more people wouldn't like automatic uploading of 5+mb of data. It's faster to quickly compress it and e-mail it. Likewise, a central storage database would not be the best idea, as that way if the developers need to follow up for more info or a solution (if the crash was user-side), they have no way to reach the submitter easily. In an e-mail, they just hit the reply button.

There's only so much Ironclad or Stardock can do to educate people that minidumps are not evil gremlins that cause game crashes. All of this info has been available on the forums since launch, it has been explained numerous times. Minidumps are "new" to a lot of gamers so they can be confusing, but some responsibility also lies with the gamers themselves to understand it before they go off writing forum rants and complaints.

Question to Ironclad.

Do you still want 1.04 minidumps?

The problem is that crashes can be caused by a LOT of things. It can be the game, it can be driver issues, network issues, hardware issues, heat issues, electrical issues, or possibly an infection of hostile software.

If you have no idea what crashes your game or how to reproduce it, then your cries will simply fall on deaf ears. No one can fix what you can't find.

The only game crashes I've had to deal with are caused by my own slip ups. I haven't seen crashes occur as a result of the game itself.

Generally the answer is no for old patch dumps, as the code has changed and the dump information won't be directly applicable. If you had a crash in 1.04, try to reproduce it in 1.05 and send in a 1.05 dump. If you can't reproduce it, then yay

cant even play game it minidumps after 1 minute but yet i can play every game i own but this one it kinda made me not want to play it i mean it fun but it unplayablei updated to 1.5 but it didnt fix it

I purchased this game for 50 dollars. Not a alot of money but my expectations are still the same. WORKING PRODUCT....Ill tell you what send me 2 dollars per minidump and Im sure you will recive more. It is no ones responsibilty to help you with your product that I recieve nothing for. Try this, the next time you guys go to work tell your boss dont pay me today ill pay you 50 dollars and still work my shift. I have sent minidump info but it has been months with nothing solved. I see other games this company is designing but in my mind these dont have a chance in hell coming in my home due to the quality of this product.

I've read alot of your posts on this forum, they are all worthless like this one.

- a more constructive post to come later after work... ta ta

@ ShadyZu :


You dare attack a post composed by the the_Monk ?!