Debug Shipping Builds

Development Platform & Builds Debugging, Optimization, & Profiling
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1

Hello UDN team,

I have a general question about how I can track down errors in shipping mode. I have a bug here that doesn’t occur in all the other build configurations, only in Shipping. It only occurred a few weeks back and I am sure the functionality in question used to work in shipping too. Now I find myself lost for a possibility to debug.

There are no debug outputs on screen or in the log.
I can’t use the debugger as there are no PDBs and heavy optimization on.
I can’t print to stdout as the game detaches from the console.

Are there any practical methods to track such things down?

All my best…

Stephan

2

Should have known. Two days of debugging and it turns out it was simply me misunderstanding assertion macros. This:

uint64 some_id = 0;
check(n_settings.Get("some_id", some_id));

Is really not such a great idea as it never gets executed (as opposed to only not get checked) in shipping mode. Better would be:

uint64 some_id = 0;
bool have_id = n_settings.Get("some_id ", some_id);
check(have_id);

So my issue is resolved. Yet the question would still be interesting as sometimes It is necessary to output things from shipping builds. I leave it open in case there are interesting suggestions.