Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Authors: Always Check Log.txt

If you are developing an add-on for X-Plane, you should always check the log file (Log.txt) after running.  (Remember, the sim must quit before the log file is completely written to disk.)

There are three times you should check the log:
  1. Any time your content doesn't look the way you expect.  (Perhaps the error is described in more detail in the log file.
  2. Any time there is an error (especially the "a problem with the package X" message, which is always accompanied by details in the log).
  3. Right before posting your work as a last check.
Posting errors to the log gives us a way to provide verbose feedback to authors when the sim hits a problem without making the user experience too horrible; minor errors are logged and major errors are mentioned to the user only once per package and logged.  

The flip side of this is that if you are working on content, you need to seek out these error log messages; the alternative is to have the sim quit every time something goes wrong.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

If only X-plane 9 would spill out scenery loading messages like version 8 did.

Seeing which DSF package actually got loaded would be helpful if there is more than one custom scenery for a certain area

Can't you put this info back in the log?

AWC said...

Yes please bring that feature back-

it made it so much easier to find were a problem was when you ran across it on a long flight.

now you know there is a problem but have no idea were it is- with 350 scenery packages it is almost impossible to track down an error that shows up on the log when on a 6 hour flight.

Benjamin Supnik said...

It got turned off by accident...should be back in the next 902 beta (beta 3? RC1?)