Guides

Crash Reporting for Playtests and Early Access

The moment you open your game to a real audience, before launch but past your own machine, something breaks that you've been getting away with the whole time: manual crash triage. Up to now you've been close enough to your crashes to mostly keep up. A

Crash Reporting for PlayStation

When a PlayStation build crashes, you're debugging a console you can't treat like a PC. No log folder to walk a player through, no remote shell, often no way to reproduce it on the dev kits you have on hand. And on a platform where stability

Crash Reporting for iOS

iOS crash reports are technically available and practically useless until you symbolicate them. Apple gives you a .crash file full of memory addresses, and the only thing that turns those addresses into your function names and line numbers is the matching .dSYM. Miss that match and you're staring

Crash Reporting for C++

Native C++ doesn't hand you a stack trace when it falls over. It hands you a memory dump, if you're lucky, and a pile of addresses that mean nothing until they're symbolicated against the exact build that crashed. That gap is where most C+

Access Violation Crashes (EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION): What They Are and How to Fix Them

If you write native code long enough, EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION becomes an old, unwelcome friend. It's the most common way a C++ program dies, it shows up as the cryptic code 0xC0000005, and on a good day it points you straight at a null pointer. On a bad

Stack Overflow Crashes: Why Your Program Ran Out of Stack (and How to Find Out Where)

Not the website. The crash. The one where your program is humming along and then dies instantly with no useful error, or on Windows, EXCEPTION_STACK_OVERFLOW and status code 0xC00000FD. Usually it means a function called itself one too many times. Sometimes it means you asked the stack to