Welcome to the Elemental beta. First, let me say that if you haven't ever been part of a Stardock beta program, you're in for quite a ride.
Our betas are real betas. Some would even say they're not even that as the games send to start out very very rough and before your eyes, you will see your ideas and suggestions come together to make a great game.
CREATING THE TITLE OF YOUR REPORT
There are 4 basic types of reports. When you create a post, prefece the title with one of the 4 tags:
[BUG]
[CRASH]
[PERFORMANCE]
[SUGGESTION]
Example: [BUG] Kingdom of Altar mining bonus not working
THE BODY OF YOUR REPORT
Once you have created the title of your post we will want to get specific.
Screenshots are very helpful. My program of choice is called Jing. http://www.jingproject.com. It will take screenshots and host your screenshots.
If your report involves a bug, telling us how to reproduce it is important.
Each time you run the game it will generate a file named debug.err in My Documents\My Games\Elemental; you can open it with notepad and post it as with the dxdiag report. Note that it will be replaced each time you run the game, so make sure to grab it right after a crash or major problem without running the game again.
If your report involves a crash or some hardware compatibility issue you think then make sure you run dxdiag.exe (just go to the start menu and run it) and make sure you post the data on pastebin.com or a similar site and link it in your report (please don't post them inline as it makes threads unreadable very quickly).
If it's a suggestion, please keep scope in mind. If it's something that is going to take months to do in order for your idea or request to be done, it's probably not going to happen.
Good luck and have fun!
Example of using Jing and its build in screencast to take an easy screenshot.
(Edited by kryo for extra reporting details.)
so I guess we don't need to report that AI started too closely together?
Jing is pretty handy. I've always just posted screenshots on my website or on photobucket, but its great to have a website that handles that for you in addition to adding text.
Jing looks like a nice tool, going to check it out. Thanks for the tips on how to file a bug report.
Another great free image hoster is www.imgur.com .
I already have SnagIt 9 for work stuff, so I should be able to just use that.
There is a lot of people waiting to test the betas, so I am wondering how do you think to organise a so high number of reports.
It would be more easy for all of us if under the 4 main sections there were more sub-sections, and then again more sub-sections. I am thinking in something like "BUGS->RESOURCES->MINING", or "PERFORMANCE->GRAPHICS->ATI" style.
But I´m sure you have already thougth on something better.
Nifty...though I do think it would be well served to wrangle a, perhaps weekly, "aggregate post" for all that everybody has discerned at that point in time for each given subject area. Surely a handy thing for the many people that won't have a chance to dig into this outside of the weekends so as to avoid clicking through perhaps tons of topics to get a feel for what's out there in the open.
Thanks for the info on Jing, that looks useful I'm like Landi, I've just put my screens on photobucket, but this should make it easier.
I know this is supposed to be the painful version, but I can't get over how cool the cloth map graphics are. But I promise to flog myself if I find I'm enjoying it too much.
I am using fraps, and I have Photoshop too, so it's not hard to make a screenshot like this, but I might download this jing stuff, because the built in sceencast makes the process faster.
i think that this topic must be pinned
bookmark
IMO it would be nice to have some kind of publicly viewable Trac (or similar) going for bug tracking, although that may be too FOSS of a mindset for me to have.
Just a thought, perhaps it would be prudent to sticky this thread. For future reference.
Pinning this thread seems like a very good idea.
I'd also like to know whether the devs prefer to see a bunch of individual reports or whether it would help more to add to an existing thread that sounds like the problem you're having. (At the moment, I'm one of several folks having a CTD pretty promptly after the splash screen appears, so I just posted my debug.err in someone else's thread about 'the same' problem.)
Yes, stickying this would be a great idea. It's already getting buried under bug reports.
From IRC:
Question: Should I post my own bug thread or pick a random one from the growing set of CTDs that sound like mine?
Answer (by Kryo): Depends on whether it actually is the same crash or not
Added a bit more details to Brad's post and stickied.
Before I checked in on the forums here I clicked on the link that was placed in my start menu (http://fogbugz.stardock.com/default.asp?pg=pgPublicEdit) and submitted a few bugs using it. Should I not use that system?
Also do you have any guidelines on the level of bugs you want to see? I wrote down everything I came across and started to enter them but most are only minor issues. I do not want to fill up the system with things like dialogs not remembering state correctly when you hit next/back if you only want to see major crash reports or the like.
That's primarily for submitting bugs that need attachments. I'll update this thread or make a new one tomorrow covering that in more detail (crash dumps). But as long as it is cateorized correctly, go for it. Though at this point, if it's a suggestion and not an actual bug, those would be better off here even though there's a suggestion category there.
Is there any way to change the default forum search behavior for the Beta forum to limit search to the Elemental Beta forum only? I really don't want to duplicate bug reports, but when I tried searching, I was getting pages about Galciv II.
The volume of posts is actually large enough that it might be worthwhile considering splitting the forum into bug/suggestion/etc. subforums.
http://pastebin.com/
This is a good way to link to your dxdiag.txt and debug.err files instead of posting them inline.
What exactly is a debug? How do I generate a debug report and in what situations should I make one?
Sorry if I am being dumb but how do I upload my diag.err to pastebin? Since I don't seem to have a program that will convert it to text.
The debug.err file is generated by running Elemental and contains some diagnostic information about your computer, and also lists information about how the program is actually running. This includes info like loading textures and game data and sound files, and lots of other internal game stuff that doesn't make much sense to us, but sure does to SD.
You don't have to generate the report, it is automatically created each time you run the game. The file is located in My Documents\My Games\Elemental\. When you have an issue, copy the contents of the file to pastebin.com and link to the resulting URL in your post.
Situations to post one include crashes, freezes, graphics glitches, pretty much anything. If you just link to the file and don't post it inline, people can just ignore it if its not relevant.
@TheGreatTurtle
You can open up the debug.err file in notepad or any other text editor. I'm guessing windows is saying there's no program installed for .err files, right? Just try to open it, and select notepad as the program to always use to open the file. The file's just plain text, so anyone can read it.
Unless your debug.err is corrupted or something... that's a seperate issue.
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