Config Errors Displaying

[badluckburt 78]

Vanilla arma has config misconfigurations too, of course it's less but it's there anyway in some cases.

 

BIS does actively fix config errors though, almost every changelog mentions a few. Anyway, I hope the devs will consider changing the way these errors are reported now. And this is some more motivation for me to get a config editor going.

[laxemann 1673]

I'm all for showing errors in a non-obstrusive way, I guess we can get a consent here. I think rebel's main issue is the fact that you're not able to play while the famous "config error of doom" is opened. This, in fact, already annoyed the fuck out of me a few times, too.

I actually wish there would be a screen-filling error message popping up when the scheduler is getting out of control like in most poorly-written missions. Maybe some people would stop claiming that ArmA is performing bad in multiplayer sessions.

[lexx 1363]

And I understand that, all I'm saying that all those pop-up blockers were there to streamline the web experience. Why don't you want the same for the immersive videogame experience?

 

Well, yeah. Adverts on the web wanted to sell you some crap, while the error messages are telling you that something is wrong. Modders have to fix their shit, then you can have that "immersive videogame experience" as the popup error goes away and surprise, the error isn't there anymore either.

[Alwarren 2767]

Seeing so many people saying pop-ups are okay makes me think that maybe all those web pop-up blockers in the 2000s were wrong.

 

You are being childish here, and you know it.

I never said you should have to click anything, I am fine with just displaying it like the script errors. I am NOT fine, however, with allowing users to disable error messages. They should be forced on people. I am a mission maker myself, so yeah, I have showScriptErrors enabled at all time, and it is frighening how many missions actually do work even though their scripting is horribly broken.

 

Your post there is the another prime example why discussion on this forum has become so tedious. If you don't get your way, you resort to stupid exaggerations, or name calling. Just look at that sorry Apex Weapons Feedback discussion. If we could all just stay objective instead of posting things like this, we would get results much quicker.

[Alwarren 2767]

 

in the past the engine did not check for these type of error. as they need it more strict for Eden, etc, they are enforcing the correct policy

 

inheritance definitions need to be defined in the scope the class has originally been defined.

 

Is there any document actually describing the inheritance rules? I find them to be mildly confusing most of the time, since things like Mode_Single for example seem to be defined outside of Default. I have not seen any document that really describes this in detail.

[rebelvg 281]

Well, yeah. Adverts on the web wanted to sell you some crap, while the error messages are telling you that something is wrong. Modders have to fix their shit, then you can have that "immersive videogame experience" as the popup error goes away and surprise, the error isn't there anymore either.

You're being really naive saying that modders HAVE to do anything. Most mod groups don't even accept reports from the forum.

We are people, errors will always be there. Even in the main game, more likely in the 3rd party content. 95% of them are not game-breaking, just some minor misconfiguration.

So you think that annoying the player is gonna help? (Only 5% of the players will even consider reporting).

Recent example would be that "author is not a value" thing, that eden couldn't read an author array from cfgpatches (it's fixed on the dev atm).

Everytime you save a mission you see that error and you have to close it.

Which comes back again to the point - if it's not gamebreaking, why show it at all, if it is, well, I guess the player will see that something doesn't work right. Error != not working. I know tons of examples of the code that doesn't produce any errors, but it just doesn't work.

 

You are being childish here, and you know it.

That was an exaggeration but it comes down to one thing, both are annoying so people found ways to get rid of them.

 

To be fair, my first post was a bit of an overstatement, I wanted a discussion on this topic, didn't know it will produce such a backlash.

Middle ground here is to show config errors in a less annoying way, without clicking close each time, that's all I wanted from the start (well it was in my second post technically).

[Alwarren 2767]

Middle ground here is to show config errors in a less annoying way, without clicking close each time, that's all I wanted from the start (well it was in my second post technically).

 

Absolutely, I fully agree with that.

[.kju 3244]

 

 

inheritance rules

 

1. Replicate the existing structure (best use AIO config, or extract configs from pbos)

2. there are certain hardcoded root and subclasses the engine expects. the rest just follows general scope practice

[Vasily.B 529]

You are being childish here, and you know it.

I never said you should have to click anything, I am fine with just displaying it like the script errors. I am NOT fine, however, with allowing users to disable error messages. They should be forced on people. I am a mission maker myself, so yeah, I have showScriptErrors enabled at all time, and it is frighening how many missions actually do work even though their scripting is horribly broken.

 

Your post there is the another prime example why discussion on this forum has become so tedious. If you don't get your way, you resort to stupid exaggerations, or name calling. Just look at that sorry Apex Weapons Feedback discussion. If we could all just stay objective instead of posting things like this, we would get results much quicker.

I dont get what is your problem. If you want to have it enabled, JUST ENABLE IT, if someone do not wish it, he can DISABLE it. problem is gone. I dont like when someone is making problem out of nowhere and from nothing. Players speak their opinion, and its good idea, it hurts noone.

[Alwarren 2767]

I dont get what is your problem.

 

That much is obvious.

 

A good fifty percent of missions have scripting errors that are never detected because in the old editor scripting error reporting was disabled by default. But then these are missions, and hence the problem is strictly local to that mission. You fuck up your own mission only.

 

However, addons are something different. If they screw up, your entire game might be screwed. And even worse, the problem might only show itself if you load some other mod and the faulty addon has made a mess of inheritance.

There errors must be fixed. If these is any way to make them go away without fixing, people will use that. I'll probably face quite a bit of work with the CUP weapons and popup errors we get in APEX; it would be easy and tempting to say "just disable the warnings". However, that is not what should happen, people should fix their addons.

 

Is that inconvenient to you? Yes, maybe you will see an error message on your screen once in a while. If it annoys you, then you annoy the addon maker and things get fixed.

 

My problem is that sometimes addon X gets blamed for Addon Y's problems. That is not how it should work.

 

Players speak their opinion, and its good idea, it hurts noone.

Your point being? I just gave my opinion. Don't allow to disable it. If you do, you are inviting sloppy addon making, just as we have seen a decade of sloppy mission making. A lot of mission makers weren't even aware there was a problem in their mission, or were not aware of the -showScriptErrors command line switch. Which is why this behavior should be enforced. Only a clean game is a good game.

 

In the end, this only benefits you as a player, so I really don't understand why you want this suppressed.

[Vasily.B 529]

 

That much is obvious.

 

A good fifty percent of missions have scripting errors that are never detected because in the old editor scripting error reporting was disabled by default. But then these are missions, and hence the problem is strictly local to that mission. You fuck up your own mission only.

 

However, addons are something different. If they screw up, your entire game might be screwed. And even worse, the problem might only show itself if you load some other mod and the faulty addon has made a mess of inheritance.

There errors must be fixed. If these is any way to make them go away without fixing, people will use that. I'll probably face quite a bit of work with the CUP weapons and popup errors we get in APEX; it would be easy and tempting to say "just disable the warnings". However, that is not what should happen, people should fix their addons.

 

Is that inconvenient to you? Yes, maybe you will see an error message on your screen once in a while. If it annoys you, then you annoy the addon maker and things get fixed.

 

My problem is that sometimes addon X gets blamed for Addon Y's problems. That is not how it should work.

 

Your point being? I just gave my opinion. Don't allow to disable it. If you do, you are inviting sloppy addon making, just as we have seen a decade of sloppy mission making. A lot of mission makers weren't even aware there was a problem in their mission, or were not aware of the -showScriptErrors command line switch. Which is why this behavior should be enforced. Only a clean game is a good game.

 

In the end, this only benefits you as a player, so I really don't understand why you want this suppressed.

My point is simple. I'm user. Im playing over 10 mods. If these error appear, i find out which mod's is it fault, i'll report it and what? I need to see that error(s) EVERYTIME untill mod developers will fix it, which is sometimes very long, and till the update i dont want to see that error. I cant fix it by myself, beacuse of rights for mods are strictly limited, i cannot edit mod files without permission, which i never get.

[badluckburt 78]

I dont get what is your problem. If you want to have it enabled, JUST ENABLE IT, if someone do not wish it, he can DISABLE it. problem is gone. I dont like when someone is making problem out of nowhere and from nothing. Players speak their opinion, and its good idea, it hurts noone.

 

The problem stems from being able to 'hide' errors. It makes it possible for people to whip together shitty missions and addons and never look back, then people who disable errors because they 'annoy' them will come here and complain to BI about shitty performance and all that jazz. Being forced to face errors means that you either fix them or people will eventually abandon your mission / addon when they're fed up coping with it. It may be the programmer in me talking but I'll be damned if I let errors go unfixed. Errors are your enemy and exist only to be eradicated. I'm all for less obtrusive but nothing should be hidden, even if doesn't 'break' anything (the hamsters in your CPU might be the only victim).

 

I disagreed with BI when they put the message in-game that says you're running a modded version blabla, performance may degrade or something along those lines but now I'm beginning to see why it's there.

[Vasily.B 529]

The problem stems from being able to 'hide' errors. It makes it possible for people to whip together shitty missions and addons and never look back, then people who disable errors because they 'annoy' them will come here and complain to BI about shitty performance and all that jazz. Being forced to face errors means that you either fix them or people will eventually abandon your mission / addon when they're fed up coping with it. It may be the programmer in me talking but I'll be damned if I let errors go unfixed. Errors are your enemy and exist only to be eradicated. I'm all for less obtrusive but nothing should be hidden, even if doesn't 'break' anything (the hamsters in your CPU might be the only victim).

 

I disagreed with BI when they put the message in-game that says you're running a modded version blabla, performance may degrade or something along those lines but now I'm beginning to see why it's there.

^^Post above yours is my answear. If i got faulty mod i would like to disable those errors untill mod developers fix it. If someone dont need to (mod creators) he can leave it enabled .

[badluckburt 78]

i cannot edit mod files without permission, which i never get.

 

This isn't 1984, Big Brother isn't watching you from the other side of the monitor so whatever you fix in your own home and stays there is fine. Just don't release it :)

 

Another option is just not use the mod until it's fixed.

[Vasily.B 529]

This isn't 1984, Big Brother isn't watching you from the other side of the monitor so whatever you fix in your own home and stays there is fine. Just don't release it :)

 

Another option is just not use the mod until it's fixed.

So to not use whole game, beacuse my only interest in arma are mods with modern eqipment, not futurealistic toys from BI (with whole respect). I'm not a modder, so i cannot fix those errors by myself.

[badluckburt 78]

So to not use whole game, beacuse my only interest in arma are mods with modern eqipment, not futurealistic toys from BI (with whole respect). I'm not a modder, so i cannot fix those errors by myself.

 

The vanilla Arma 3 stuff can't captivate me either so I'm with you there. I still think the errors should be shown without requiring interaction from the player to continue and I'm going to leave it at that :) I understand your perspective but in my opinion it's not worth the trouble it's going to cause with people who have no clue what's going on. There's enough pros / cons in this thread by now for the devs to have a pow wow and decide what they're going to do so I hope that in the end, we'll all be happy with the solution.

[Alwarren 2767]

So to not use whole game, beacuse my only interest in arma are mods with modern eqipment, not futurealistic toys from BI (with whole respect). I'm not a modder, so i cannot fix those errors by myself.

 

I know it will be hard to understand this, but the world is not made of you and you alone. Error messages serve the community and make modders produce better mods, and this is really the last thing I am going to say about this.

[x3kj 1247]

If you don't like error messages and the mod maker is too slow for your liking, learn how to fix those problems yourself, send your fix to the mod maker and if that one is clever enough, he will thank you for it and release it soon. THAT's how you deal with error messages. Not by putting blind folds over your eyes, or complaining about "slow modders".

[das attorney 858]

From my perspective, I have made a mod that is subject to these errors, so I am glad to know about them so I can fix my stuff up.

 

I usually leave it for a few weeks though as sometimes Dev Branch throws errors that they resolve internally.

 

Nonetheless, if I've done some lazy config or somesuch then I'd rather know about it so I have opportunity to fix - also if it shows up for users, then they can give me a nudge if they notice something I don't as well.

 

I don't think I'd like option to disable the messages as I probably would switch them off when playing online and then my tiny little mind would forget that and assume everything is ok forever with everything I use or create.

 

As someone else mentioned, they help modders and users to know when stuff is broken.  IRL I once drove a car that the brakes failed on.  I wish there was a little pop up message when I got in it that told me they were fucked!

[TheConen 78]

Errors shall never be ignored. Every good programmer knows that. Warnings however are another thing, and - oh wonder - warnings get written to the rpt instead of pestering the player. So BI did everything right here. Period.

[andersson 285]

Intrusive pop up = pestering the player -> they pester the addon maker -> error will get fixed or mod not get used -> game will not suffer

 

Hidden in a report = most players live in blissed ignorance -> addon makers might not fix the addon -> over time your game will degrade into a buggy mess -> BI is blamed

[Vasily.B 529]

If you don't like error messages and the mod maker is too slow for your liking, learn how to fix those problems yourself, send your fix to the mod maker and if that one is clever enough, he will thank you for it and release it soon. THAT's how you deal with error messages. Not by putting blind folds over your eyes, or complaining about "slow modders".

I'm not complaining about slow modders, you misleading my answear. Im complaining about errors, throwed out of nowhere. If i aquire them, i report them, i would like to disable them - IS IT CLEAR? To not see them when playing. But errors throwed just like the scripts on the right upper side of screen would be ok, for one diference, errors about mods could be displayer on right down side of screen. with no need for player interwention

 

I know it will be hard to understand this, but the world is not made of you and you alone. Error messages serve the community and make modders produce better mods, and this is really the last thing I am going to say about this.

If you are answearing this, you should see im not the only one who wanted this feature - i'm not the author of this idea.

As for this idea - it isnt bad.  You could unhide those reports for week after some mod/game is updated to catch most of arrors, then after you saw them all, you can disable it.

[R3vo 2654]

I'd like to see a specially designed display for script & config errors which would maybe have a history function and displays more details about the cause, like mod name etc. (If that is possible). Additionally, that display should not interupt the gameplay by forcing the player to press the ok button. It should simply pop up somewhere on the screen.

[rebelvg 281]

As someone else mentioned, they help modders and users to know when stuff is broken.  IRL I once drove a car that the brakes failed on.  I wish there was a little pop up message when I got in it that told me they were fucked!

Exaggeration. No error in arma will ever put your health at danger.

 

 

Errors shall never be ignored. Every good programmer knows that. Warnings however are another thing, and - oh wonder - warnings get written to the rpt instead of pestering the player. So BI did everything right here. Period.

Don't put all eggs in one basket. When I code I use IDEs, they show me everything that is wrong with my code. When I play the game, I don't necessarily want to see any errors, well cause it's an immersive first-person game where tension can build up without anyone firing a bullet for an hour.

 

 

Intrusive pop up = pestering the player -> they pester the addon maker -> error will get fixed or mod not get used -> game will not suffer

 

Hidden in a report = most players live in blissed ignorance -> addon makers might not fix the addon -> over time your game will degrade into a buggy mess -> BI is blamed

Theory that doesn't work in practice. Most error pop-ups don't show any relation to any mod. Showing them to the 80% of the players is useless.

I'll post a few examples.

http://i.imgur.com/uIrjZKT.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/gzouMeY.jpg

There's literally no hint for what caused these. I know what caused these, do you think other 80% of the players do?

Do you know that scripts can call a non-existent class and it will produce an error pop-up? So basically if some mission is trying to access a class that doesn't exist, error pop-up will show. It's not even a mods fault, it can be just a typo, or that class was renamed or removed.

How are you gonna report something that you don't even know where it came from?

 

Mods overwriting base classes, mods forgetting to configure cfgpatches required addons section causing all kinds of stuff (stuff that don't even show errors).

Game will never be error free. Have anyone of you even looked at the any source game console and how it is filled with errors (in fact console like that would be useful as hell in arma, you can open or close it at any time you want)? Have you looked at the source engine source code? It's filled with workarounds and hacks. You're saying about blissed ignorance when in fact you are ignoring one big thing, it's impossible to fix everything, it's not a perfect world. Modders don't owe you anything, developers of the game don't even owe you anything.

 

I'm not arguing for a standard, I'm asking for an option. For people to choose. Hide all errors, show all errors, show all errors without a pop-up manual close thing. I'm sorry, but players are not potential testers, we're seeing more and more AAA devs using that logic and look what it did to the industry, kickstarter, greenlight, half-finished games that are never gonna be finished and are forever stuck in a greenlight limbo. This is a bit offtopic here anyway.

 

Why do people even bring performance into this discussion?

You know you can write a disaster while loop in a non-scheduled environment that will kill all your performance and it will not show ANY errors.

[Sniperwolf572 758]

I'd like to see a specially designed display for script & config errors which would maybe have a history function and displays more details about the cause, like mod name etc. (If that is possible). Additionally, that display should not interupt the gameplay by forcing the player to press the ok button. It should simply pop up somewhere on the screen.

I mentioned this a year ago in Skype chats, and even started writing something I was going to propose here, but I never really found the motivation to finish it, as it didn't seem like anyone would have given it the time of day.

I'd kill for a source-style console. RPT already logs all the info such console would need. I'm not sure if writing to the RPT is still not async, but in reality, all this really needs is an ingame dialog that can be called up with a keypress that displays the same info the RPT's do.