How to submit crashdumps

While the dev team is still working on getting steam's automatic crashdump system up-and-running, here are instructions on how to get crashdump files which you can send through the support forum. If you send us a crashdump file, we can fix the bug. Without it, it is nigh impossible. The steps below only need to be done once, after which crashdump files will appear whenever Empires crashes.

1) Install DebugDiag
2) Start up "DebugDiag 2 Collection"
3) Start up Empires
4) Alt-tab back to DebugDiag
5) Click "Add Rule...", select Crash, then "A specific process"

6) Select "hl2.exe" from the list of processes; it is only present if Empires is running when the window opens

7) In Advanced Configuration, select "Action type for unconfigured first change exceptions: Mini Userdump" and in both fields below it, put 100. (Mini dump files are about 200 KB, so that's about 20 MB)

8) Select a name, e.g. "Empires crash dumps" and a location; you will visit this folder whenever you want to send a crash report.

9) Select "Activate the rule now" and click finish
10) To the popup you get about Symbol Search path debugging, choose "Yes"



After these steps, whenever Empires crashes, you can open the mini dump directory you submitted, zip up and remove all the files ( so that you don't submit the same crash logs twice ), and start a thread in the support forum with the zip file attached. The only thing we really need is the .dmp file that contains the crash report, but there may be multiple files generated, and the .log also contains some useful information, so it is best to just submit everything. If there is too much to send, sort by last modified, send us the most recent stuff and discard the rest.

Now, there are some false positives. When you start up Empires, 4 log files are generated for exception 0X406D1388, which is apparently thrown and handled by the engine. This is a big problem, because the 100 limit we set earlier will fill up in 25 sessions, so if the 26th session crashes, we get no crashlog, and no bugfix.

There are two solutions possible; the first is to put 999999 as your limit, and watch the folder yourself to check it doesn't occupy your whole disk after a while.

The other is to delete the contents of your crashdump directory every time you start the game, by using this custom gamelauncher:

Paste that into a text editor such as Notepad, adjust the crash directory (and possibly your game directory, if you don't have Steam installed in the default directory), and save it as Empires-launcher.bat (be sure to select "All file types", not .txt). Instead of launching Empires through steam, double-click the bat file.

These instructions were based on this Microsoft blog.

 

It runs as a service in the background all the time; whenever an exception is thrown, a mini-dump file (.dmp) is written to the directory you specified, and then the exception is allowed to propagate. Sometimes, this exception will lead to a crash. Please open DebugDiag 2 Collection again and press "Edit rule". Check that the action type specified is "Mini Userdump". When I had it set to Full Userdump, I experienced 10s freezes like you described. If that's not the case, I'm afraid your system is simply that slow at writing the userdump file. Perhaps check the performance of the disk where you specified to write logfiles. If that's over usb or on the network, or if you have a better disk to use (SSD?), then perhaps you can decrease the time it takes to write a dump file.