So the game crashed and the Cryptic Error thing wants to send a report. That's fine, at least on the surface. It pops up a little box that asks what were you doing when the crash occured. I type in a short description hit the Submit button, and figure it's done. It disappears from my screen, but the little Crash Report icon is still in my tray.
So I double-click on it, and it pops up a window telling me:
Initializing...
Attaching to crashed process...
Harvesting data from crashed process...
Mode: Customer
Communicating with Cryptic Error Tracker...
Preparing Diagnostic Information...
Writing Mini Dump...
Writing Full Dump...
Terminating crashed process...
Sending Diagnostic Information...
Sending Mini Dump...
Dump send succeeded.
Sending Full Dump...
Below that is a progress meter showing me how much of that "full dump" is complete, and it's sending 651669802 bytes!!:eek: That's right, ove six hundred MB. Good lord. Six hundred megabytes of WHAT???
Someone said in another thread that when they save screenshots they sometimes get a quicktime file, so maybe the Crash Report is sending a short video showing what you we're doing at the time? Just a thought.:o
I'ts posting a dump of the game and relevant kernel memory.
I'd wager the beta has debugging symbols on. This, combined with log data and memory dumps, allows the devs to attempt to "work backwards" from the crash and find/fix the problem.
Gone are the days where a game consumes 512kb of RAM, however... dumps are BIG now. This stuff is usually (ok, i've never seen it NOT done) stripped out from release builds of, well, pretty much any software.
(this also means that you can expect a performance increase simply by it being released - debugging accounting takes up CPU cycles and RAM)
Comments
I sent one that 790 megs yesterday! :eek:
I'd wager the beta has debugging symbols on. This, combined with log data and memory dumps, allows the devs to attempt to "work backwards" from the crash and find/fix the problem.
Gone are the days where a game consumes 512kb of RAM, however... dumps are BIG now. This stuff is usually (ok, i've never seen it NOT done) stripped out from release builds of, well, pretty much any software.
(this also means that you can expect a performance increase simply by it being released - debugging accounting takes up CPU cycles and RAM)
EDIT:
Some reading for you while it uploads your dump:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_dump