Bugs are NOT OK....

First up let me say that I really like - no, LOVE - C2, period!

Secondly, this topic is in no way intended to be a slur. C2 is a fantastic tool and both Ashley and Tom deserve well earned praise - these guys are doing an awesome job!

Thirdly, I think it would be true to say that most people using C2 view it as a real-world production tool - not simply as a toy, and rightly so - it is not uncommon to see Construct 2 referred to as Ground Breaking on the web.

So on with it then:

Now to be sure everyone likes to see new features added - it really is very cool!

But it is also very important to fix known bugs first - or at least I think it is.

If you visit the bugs section of this forum you will notice that certain bugs have been unresolved - even after many updates have been released, in fact some of them have been unresolved since I started using C2 (version r114) - some are minor some are not so minor - but they are all BUGS.

It doesn't matter if a bug is minor, major, or in between, a bug is a bug and should be resolved as quickly as possible and certainly before any stable release is posted.

Now I know Scirra is just a small team - but this tool is no small puppy - so it is only reasonable to be patient for new features. I really think that most C2 users would prefer bug-fixes over feature additions.

What I would like to see:

      1) Stop adding features - just for a while

      2) Iron out the bugs

      3) Release 'Stable' update - with no known bugs

      4) Add next awesome feature

      5) Release Beta - expect bugs to crop up

      6) Start at step 1 again...

Isn't this exactly what happens? What bugs have you found that exist in the latest stable release?

Hi thehen,

Well, I was mainly thinking about the random crashes that are seaming very common - and I know that such are very difficult to trace and fix - but these simply do exist, and many people are having the problem.

IMHO since this does not affect the end product I don't mind dealing with it - but still it needs to be addressed.

A minor bug: There is a problem with Win8 export that I posted some time ago. This bug is only minor in scope but it is a bug - and it DOES affect the end product.

It was introduced some time after r119 and still exists after several beta releases and the latest Stable release...

The real issue for me in this case is that when I first came across the issue and reported it, I was using a third party Metro plugin and was advised to use the Scirra Windows8 object to avoid such problems. So I reluctantly remove the plugin and updated my code to use the Scirra one - and the problem is still there... Hence not only does the bug still exist, but I spent considerable time updating code - all to no avail..

This serves to illustrate that something was changed\introduced that broke two plugins - a third party one and an official one - and surely is worthy of correction before a release is considered stable.

It's a nice ideal, but reality is, from pac man to NASA your going to get bugs, with the diversity of hardware and software configurations possible on a PC,and construct 2 running in a choice of browsers on top of that, it's a bit of a minefield...

Bugs need fixing, but not every bug may affect every user, the current beta's with periodic stable release works and on the whole Construct 2 is a very stable program, for the majority.

Pixel perfick

Yeah I definitely agree, C2 is an excellent tool....

The problem with the crashes is that usually you have no option but to kill C2 with Task Manager - and there is no error dialog to report what caused it.

In earlier days this most likely would have led to the 'Blue Screen Of Death', so they are not trivial....

michael

Why don't you just double click the left top corner new project button. It should close C2 without any problems.

We always do prioritise bug fixes over new features. That's been our policy for a long time. However the reality of software development is it's impossible to make a 100% bug-free program. Even if we fixed all the problems in the bugs forum, there would probably be other as-yet undiscovered problems. So first we must accept we probably will never be able to fix every single last bug; our goal is to reach a high (but not perfect) standard of stability for all users.

Secondly, most software projects have hundreds, if not thousands of known issues or open bugs. Usually they're private. For example, even Windows 8 will almost certainly have hundreds or possibly thousands of issues that Microsoft are dealing with internally. Nobody can see those issues though. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they don't exist. We're different in having a public bugs list, and for a large software project I think we have an unusually low number of open reports.

Finally, most problems still open in the bug reports forum either have no clear resolution, or are potentially a large amount of work for a minor improvement. Here's a quick review of some of the open issues:

• your Windows 8 issue: when the user clicks 'Back', we run a command to re-open the charms bar. Windows 8 appears to ignore this. I can reproduce the issue, but it's not clear at all what we ought to do about it. The problem might lie with Windows 8, since we told it to re-open the charms bar but it did nothing. I can't see an obvious way to even start figuring out how to fix it, apart from starting to research Windows 8 apps in more detail, re-covering the absolute basics, spending some time writing a new Windows 8 app by hand, etc. This could turn out to be pretty time-consuming. Meanwhile the issue is minor - it doesn't stop anyone accessing anything, only makes it a little more annoying. So for the time being the issue remains open.

• occasional random crashes on exit: random issues are usually the most difficult to resolve, because if I can't make the problem happen every time, I can't start investigating it. I have once or twice luckily managed to catch the error in a debugger, and all I could determine was that the UI library we use crashed. We don't control that code, and we can't really report a random issue to the vendor because they also need to reproduce it every time. There's no immediately obvious route to start resolving this, so for the time being the issue remains open.

• there's an old issue that 'every X seconds' used with 'random(3, 6)' doesn't quite do what you expect. This is due to the architecture of the event engine. Resolving this could involve some degree of re-architecting the event engine to make an exception for this specific condition, which could be a lot of work and introduce other bugs. Meanwhile the problem only affects a small proportion of users, and there's an easy workaround. So for the time being the issue remains open.

I could continue like this to cover most of the old issues, except the batch of newest reports from the latest beta which I usually fix almost all of before proceeding to the next build.

To illustrate this, there are currently approximately 2000 closed bugs and 50 open bugs. This means we've closed about 97.5% of all issues ever reported.

Well I must concur - you are doing a pretty good job.

In an effort to help you find a solution to win 8 export issue I did some playing around today, so here is what I have found...

- your Windows 8 issue: ..... the issue is minor - it doesn't stop anyone accessing anything, only makes it a little more annoying. So for the time being the issue remains open.

I agree it is minor - to a degree.

It is annoying, yes, when the panel closes when clicking the back button.

But as stated, it is more than that, because it does stop the user accessing options presented to them. If they click any hyper links they don't work - it just closes the Charms and does nothing else, which is not good from a PR perspective - imagine an average end user clicking a link to send an email for support and it does nothing, what would they conclude from that?

I am thinking that it may not be the plugin that is at fault.

This morning I did a few install\uninstalls of C2 and found that up until r123 the Win8 Export works perfectly, including any hyper links - however with the release of R124 and all iterations after, the export no longer functions as intended.

This would seam to indicate that the plugin is not at fault here, something was introduced\changed in R124 that has broken both Scirra and iunkin's win8 objects.

There are a number of apps in the store built with C2, Mortar Melon, Battleship Islands, Ballo, Blast The Bricks, to name a few, that also illustrate that the plugins do work (the back button and any hyperlinks all function as expected), but these were built with versions prior to at least r119 I believe. This would seam to indicate that it is not Windows8 causing the issue.

So hopefully all this gives you a starting point to know where to look for a possible solution - start with what was added\changed in R124 that could be causing the issue....

michael - can you post that info to the actual bug report thread? It could be quite useful, and it may be a while before I next get round to looking at it, and I might forget what you posted here otherwise.

michael - can you post that info to the actual bug report thread? It could be quite useful, and it may be a while before I next get round to looking at it, and I might forget what you posted here otherwise.

Done.... :)

- occasional random crashes on exit: random issues are usually the most difficult to resolve, because if I can't make the problem happen every time, I can't start investigating it. I have once or twice luckily managed to catch the error in a debugger, and all I could determine was that the UI library we use crashed. We don't control that code, and we can't really report a random issue to the vendor because they also need to reproduce it every time. There's no immediately obvious route to start resolving this, so for the time being the issue remains open.

Ashley, this is what I had in mind when I started this thread, and I probably should have worded the topic title a little better (sorry!) - I don't mean to imply that you guys think bugs ARE ok, but more of what can we do to try to resolve this particular problem - because such are difficult to get to the bottom of.

Aside from the random crashes when exiting C2, there are others that occur when doing certain things - clicking below properties was one I can recall from other threads.

I have also had one several times that turns all the buttons on the ribbon to black squares and the event sheet just becomes a bunch of vertical lines. This one occurs when clicking the Preview Button, it is being caught (you get the error sound), but the error dialog must be behind the C2 window and thus you can't get to it because it always results in a complete program lockup, with the need to kill C2 using Task Manager. However you don't know this (except for the error sound) until you close the preview, the preview itself runs without any issues.

These particular problems all seam to point the finger at the UI - but as you say it is difficult to trace.

So perhaps you could open a thread with the sole purpose of trying to detail as much info as we can about these crashes. Maybe you and Tom have some ideas as to what we as a C2 community can do in order to pinpoint what is causing the issues....

Also remember why we beta. Ashley is adding features and fixing bugs, as we all wish him to do. He is not, however, using it everyday for it's intended purpose. That is hopefully why everyone is choosing to participate in downloading the beta version, to assist in finding the bugs.

We are responsible to learn all the symptoms, consequences, and possible causes of the bug because Ashley isn't in the drivers seat. And I personally don't want him coming out from under the hood (bonnet?) to test drive.

We do post to the threads when we confirm or have additional symptoms to report. There are a half dozen threads on the crash on exit bug, all with around 20 replys.