The 3rd Age

Westernesse

Westernesse

Numenor awaits, with new armies, units, factions and heroes; witness the darkest Age of Middle-earth

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Advanced Debugging

Tutorial for Battle for Middle-earth BFME, Battle for Middle-earth II BFME 2, Battle for Middle-earth II: Rise of the Witch-king ROTWK

Avatar of ched

ched

Category: Code
Level: Expert
Created: Monday June 11, 2007 - 15:25
Updated: Sunday June 17, 2007 - 13:29
Views: 5781
Summary: Debug these errors that the engine does not report

Rating

Staff says

3.6

Members say

4.0

Average

3.7/5.0

6 votes

Page 1 2 3 4
While EA was kind enough to include a very basic debugger, running before the actual game boots, and that reports any 'common' error (typos, misreferences ...), there are some errors that we have to handle, the 2 main ones being Worldbuilder errors, and game.dat breakdowns.

We know for a fact that EA has some tool to handle game.dat errors, since such errors create a file after the process has shut down. That file is a memory dump, also known as Core Dump.

Error popup
User image

(note: this error will occur if the game cannot access your INI files correctly, probably because you have set them wrong)

Dump file
User image


Now, if all errors were like this, we would all love our job as coders, and simply follow the instructions given by the debugger. But some errors will just create a dump file, and won't report anything to you; this tutorial is thus here to help you solve these problems, so stop hitting your head on that wall and read on ;)

page 1: Introduction
page 2: Setting up the tools & the testing environment
page 3: game.dat errors
page 4: Worldbuilder errors

Links / Downloads

 HitsAdded
Load Sequence for WB - Process Monitor Log1040June 17, 2007 - 13:29
Known game.dat errors1344June 14, 2007 - 14:10
Process Monitor1335June 11, 2007 - 15:27
WinMerge1184June 11, 2007 - 15:27

Comments

Display order: Newest first

halbarad - Saturday August 11, 2007 - 8:09

wise words indeed,

though it may be worth mentioning that sometimes the best (or only) way of debugging is to brute-force it: to slowly change back all the last things you edited until the game works again, not nice but sometimes necessary (is currently having to do it)

Sulherokhh (Team Chamber Member) - Thursday August 9, 2007 - 3:34

Heroes. All of you. :D
Thank you for writing it down.

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