Debugging with MSVC & STEAM is possible

[stefanhendriks]

Perhaps already known, but then again:

You can trace crashes by line number using MSVC. You do not really need to set it on 'debug mode'. What i did was set the configuration on Release Mode and changed a few options on the compiling settings:

On the C/C++ Tab:
Debug info is set to : Line Numbers Only

On the Link Tab:
Check the "Generate Debug Info"

THats it. Whenever your bot seems to crash, you can click on the button to 'trace the error'. MSVC will open in Debug mode. SHowing you some ASM crap probably, but you can backtrace that (below you can see the 'route of functions') and find your exact line number where it crashed.

[Rick]

I know Its just that I hate that > 50% of the time I only can see the 'ASM crap' and not my only functions :-\

[@$3.1415rin]

well, If I wanna debug, I use mostly the debug mode ... well, it isnt running that smooth like the release dll, but it's also still playable on my celeron 466 ( next week I'm gonna be back at my 3ghz )

@rick : you noticed the call stack window where you can see which of your functions called maybe some nonsourcecodeavailable function ?

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

Originally Posted by @$3.1415rin

nonsourcecodeavailable

rhaa, those pesky Germans definitely can't help with that awful habit of melting words altogether even in non-german languages... unreadable
j/k

[Rick]

Originally Posted by @$3.1415rin

well, If I wanna debug, I use mostly the debug mode ... well, it isnt running that smooth like the release dll, but it's also still playable on my celeron 466 ( next week I'm gonna be back at my 3ghz )

@rick : you noticed the call stack window where you can see which of your functions called maybe some nonsourcecodeavailable function ?

Yep But still sometimes when the game crashes it only should something like HL<nr> instead of anormalandreadeblefunctionname. I even had that it that the game 'hangs' and you have to go manually back to the debugger. But well atleast there is a remaining 50% when the debugger tells me info

[@$3.1415rin]

yes, sometimes it crashes inside hl. that's often caused by flooding the engine with messages or providing bad pointer.

the debugger is anyway no always helpful, especially if something overwrites some data and half a minute later another part of the bot crashes ...

[stefanhendriks]

sometimes the hl.exe will just dump you on windows without any notification. So it immidiatly drops out and leaves you guessing what went wrong.

I hope HL 2 or something will have a much better debugging option for us coders.