I think there is a fairly vast problem with trying find bugs... on controlled computers, you might never find a certain bug, only to release the game and find a million and one bugs, due to the fact the all of a sudden the game has to cope with not only different hardware profiles, but various levels of windows updates (or lack there of), various levels of already corrupted windows installations (isnt windows notorious for just getting itself corrupted and broken in no time at all? - and unfortunately there comes enduser problems too... especially those who install everything they find on the internet... )
What i think would also be valuable, is to have some of the testing information available to the prublic.. e.g. what windows updates we present during testing - since the game still interact with some windows variable files and libraries,
Another idea might be to make the game check the version of libraries or necsesary updates during installation and add them if needed.
I dont know if it is just me, but since i test a lot of online games (or at least have to troubleshoot them - since i host online gaming sessions a lot), i find that there are a couple of things that make computer gaming more stable in general (other than the antivirus factor).
1. removing general spyware from the computer - they change some libraries and just add to the amount of headaches in general - a decent remover that i found is "Spybot search and destroy"
http://www.safer-networking.org/index.php?page=download2. Installing the game related updates from microsoft, Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) Article 327979.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...ad24-6a4d1c5df8ff&displaylang=enAlso SafeDisc Windows XP Fix (even though they say its only for microsoft games, it fixes this problem in quite a large amount of other games too
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...84ce-1df707d7a2e9&displaylang=enI know i have a completely different view to game debugging, but sometimes you need to debug the computer FIRST and then see what bugs are left!!! <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/devil.gif" alt="" />
