Idea

Fully agree.

To share another example. I'm currently investigating why I have 100% CTD when loading default World Update CDG LFPG. I found that at least two freeware scenaries (KAVX and KEMT both by Foxtrot), when active in my community folder, even with the duplicate modellib.bgl file fixed make direct CTD when loading LFPG. Would love to know the last function call, the last file loaded or searched...

Valid point :) But to be honest it should not CTD in the first place. I do not want to dig in logs :)

Hello,

We agree with tsgucci: chasing and fixing CTD is our priority (& duty!), before exposing logs about them. So, this isn't planned anytime soon. :)

@SonantAlpaca I believe the question is whether there is any tooling to chase bugs induced when using our add-ons, especially in the context of supporting our customers. In effect, when there is CTD, without a proper trace, it is impossible to tell whether it is a bug in FS2020 due by FS2020 missing a check somewhere, a bug only induced because of using a combination of add-ons, or because a file is missing or malformed and in which case which file it is. So as long as we as 3rd party devs are in the dark about what's going on in the customer computer, we can't provide any support for our own products on FS2020 and although it would be easy to just say "It is FS2020 fault, no wonder but we can't help", which is not good an answer for customer support nor enticing to support FS2020 add-ons because we know we can't help our customers with FS2020, we rather help both our customers finding solutions and in doing so, also giving you the information back to help you.

Which leads to the point of having at least a log file of what is happening, like with most games and apps (and P3D and XP11 to cite 2 simulators where the log file is THE principal support tool in practice).

Now since you're mentioning fixing CTDs, there is something which is still unclear: in QA it is said Microsoft is receiving CTDs dumps and they dispatch them to Asobo. The question I have:

- No one I know in Europe has ever been presented a GPDR acceptance for this.

- No one I've been tracing this with when using network or other tools has seen any such CTD dump being sent to Microsoft from their computers.

In practice, how does it work then?

PS: re-reading the initial question, it might be asking about being able to open a dump file locally, which would be useful almost only if also having the .pdb that goes with it. I believe we all understand you won't provide this but I don't think this is what 3rd parties are really looking for either.

Today for example and for some reason, as I was tracing Aprons in the scenery I started working on a couple of days ago got many CTDs... Yesterday and other times Dev Mode is stable and I could work on scenery projects for an hour or more. Also the strange thing is that today I disabled all addons, yesterday all addons were there...

it might be asking about being able to open a dump file locally, which would be useful almost only if also having the .pdb that goes with it. I believe we all understand you won't provide

Is it really such a big deal to provide a .pdb file for MSFS. ? - or at least supply one to selected Beta testers or trusted developers -- who could make use of it, after maybe signing a NDA, (or whaterver is needed )

I just occurred to me when reading another topic about a similar question that in dev mode there is a console that you can read, and if I understand various Asobo answers correctly, THIS is the logging tool to use for debugging. This is helping but it seems to me we might be talking about different things which seems related though.

@SonantAlpaca most of the reasons I can see for a log file can boils down to the actual shortcoming of the console in some cases:

- It is only in-game, while the game is running. Once it crashes, or the user quits, there is no history a 3rd party vendor can inspect to assist their customers.

- The in-game log window lacks advanced search and other text filtering you can more easily do with any text editor (think notepad++ for example).

- when the game crashes, although the dmp file is storing the stack and a few other infos (if any is really sent because I've never seen any trace of anything sent?!), it lacks the semantics of the log file which are important sometimes (what is loaded, what is active, what did the user change, what did the user do - like changing a setting or a preference etc...)

As an example of what could be a log file that probably most vendors are looking for, there is an actual very good example which in practice is very effective for support: the X-Plane log file. Just searching the following forums for "log file" should give plenty of exemples and why it is useful for vendors: https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/

It would be nice to have a log file.

And would save me a lot of time on my aircraft development.

Example just tell me which .xml file is crashing