Read First!

prastle

@LaFayette Also I have been afk for a week. Thus I have not read everything. We need a hot link from the forum to the git hub error reporting page that auto creates a tracking number that is added to the forum page. If this can be done without requiring the reporter to have a git hub account that would be great! Unless this has already been done.

LaFayette

I want to say there was some debate on whether to allow for a "free-form" error report. I think I gave it a try and abandoned. It is actually a bit more difficult.

One needs to describe in much more detail the information you would want. There is concern that these reports would not contain everything needed to be useful and actionable. Designing the UI quickly become really questionable/difficult.
The github issue is created by the bot account, responses to that thread are not going to go back to the user unless they proactively follow the thread.

I think the question is which of three options do we want:

(1) allow an in-game error report with the above problems
(2) keep current behavior where in-game error report opens github issues (bug tacker)
(3) change game so that the "report a bug" opens instead the "bug report" section in forums

@prastle

We need a hot link from the forum to the git hub error reporting page that auto creates a tracking number that is added to the forum page.

That is done, when an error report is created, the server responds with a link to the new github issue and the clickable link is displayed to the user.

Captain Crunch

@LaFayette I basically thought a person would play this game and if they found a bug in the map they are playing that they would come to this forum (or the other forum?) and then be told to post a save game and then hopefully if the bug is important enough then some admin or dev would post the bug at Github for them?

I am one who totally wouldn't want to give my email address to another forum or site like Github so my above assessment is the minimum I think any game would need. Anyways, yous got this covered and the 1.10 release sounds good so is everyone happy?

ubernaut

@LaFayette maybe make an option to choose between current behavior and rudimentary auto report?

what happens now if someone tries to report a bug and doesn't have a github account?

LaFayette

Thanks for the feedback @Captain-Crunch , to reply:

@LaFayette I basically thought a person would play this game and if they found a bug in the map they are playing that they would come to this forum

That was the old way we attempted it and made a lot of sense when the bug tracker was the SVN bug tracker and was really hard to find and/or even use. At that time we had multiple forums, and the bug tracker itself was scattered, the effort to look at 'n' places was pretty sizeable. For about the last 3 years the hope/goal was for bug reports to land directly in the bug tracker. Old habits are hard to shake and I'm not sure if it's realistic to have bug reports to always land exactly where they are supposed to go.

Second, map bugs are treated differently from game engine bugs, the two can be hard to distinguish. The game dev's are not going to be in the best position or necessarily able/wanting to fix problems with any/all maps that are pushed.

bug is important enough then some admin or dev would post the bug at Github for them?

I don't think the bar is 'important enough', if something is a problem it should be tracked. One nice thing about being in Github is any dev in the world can jump in. Having a queue of low-hitting, not too difficult to fix bugs is a great thing to have. New devs could consider those to be "trainer" bugs to get their feet wet working on TripleA. A new dev would not want to come in, ramp up on how to develolp and test in TripleA to then do major surgery for a risky change that could be rejected because it is too risky (TripleA is a 'brittle' code base, meaning the most innocuous changes can often cause catastrophic bugs in places you would not think to look; this basically makes it a PITA to work on the TripleA code and you spend 90% of time verifying and testing and not coding, which most dev's really do not like (a ratio of 40% verifying and testing is more reasonable and typical, over that and it speaks to problems in the code base and lack of automated testing.. It's a long effort to reduce the overhead/brittleness and get the amount of automated testing in so we can spend more time code and less verifying)

I am one who totally wouldn't want to give my email address to another forum or site like Github

FWIW, they'll securely store your email address 1000% more than TripleA forums would. Compromising the forums could happen, a site like github where many millions of dollars are involved, payed security experts, and many attackers to fin vulnerabilities, github.com is far more secure to store your email than forums.

Anyways, yous got this covered and the 1.10 release sounds good so is everyone happy?

We're still left in a state where the game menus tell you to post bugs in Github, the lobby tells you to post bugs here. Second, looking at the bugs here, I've no clue what has been addressed vs not. If the idea is we can have the community handle bugs, but if you go away for a week or two and then have to re-read all the bug posts anyways (and then are not sure if someone else has picked them up), it's not terribly effective for either dev's or for people reporting bugs.

My earlier post of re-writing this 'read-this-first' and adding a more clear protocol for forum bugs I think still holds.

LaFayette

@ubernaut said in Read First!:

@LaFayette maybe make an option to choose between current behavior and rudimentary auto report?
what happens now if someone tries to report a bug and doesn't have a github account?

Current behavior in 1.9 is typically "here is a link for reporting bugs".
The auto-report uses the triplea 'bot' account from the backend and does not rely on a personal github account.

You can see some examples of what an auto-report looks like when it lands in github issues here:

ubernaut

@LaFayette so currently there is an auto report option for people without github accounts? if so im not sure i understand how 1 is different from 2.

LaFayette

@ubernaut The auto-report sends data to the TripleA backend which uses its own github account to create the ticket. So yes, no github account required.

Re: 1vs2 - Option 2, currently you have to have a java exception for the auto-report window to show up. Option 1 is in addition to option 2 and would replace the "report a bug" menu item to instead show the auto-report window. Today and with option 2, the 'report a bug' menu item just gives you a link.

ubernaut

@LaFayette gotcha thanks seems like 1 would be better unless you figure more people would opt for the auto report even though they have github accounts.

LaFayette

@ubernaut I don't think creating a github account is actually a barrier for most people. Those participating on the forum here, I respect that the half dozen do not want to divide their attention just as I don't want to divide my attention between most locations.

The real problem with a free-form auto-report feature is ensuring there is good quality to the bug report. The github bug report gives you a series of optional questions that make it easy to know what to include. Without that, a free-form field becomes very daunting to know what to include. If not daunting, there is no way to track it back to someone, so we can't ask for a save-game, or maybe even which map, which phase of game play.

I tried to create a UI that would help guide a user through that series of questions, it started to seem like a lot. In the end the effort is duplicated some, if creating an account on github is too much, there likely is not going to be enough follow-up for a free-form bug report.

LaFayette

Just to contrast, on a game-crash, there is a 'java stack trace' which developers can look at without anything else and often create a fix. Hence the current auto-report feature in prerelease can submit that info to the backend without providing any additional information. The extra info is really gravy and helps the dev team know where/how the problem occurred (sometimes necessary, some traces are really hard to reproduce)

ubernaut

@LaFayette makes sense to me

ubernaut

i think there is something wrong with the battle calculator currently the one land unit must survive checkbox doesn't seem to have any effect on the results.

prastle

@ubernaut and all please read first post!

prastle

@prastle bump link fixed in first post