Just to let you guys know I can promise the debugger will be better in V1.058 that in V1.057. I had a few spare hours on Sunday and dug in deep to find the cause. It was a well hidden bug. I had to trace through two DLLs and the compiler to find it, and the bug did not exist in debug mode, just release mode, had to use all my assembly tricks to find out what it was. The bug was caused by an assumption that a debug program has an application name, which in test mode it does not, and a piece of code which removes the last four characters of this name would be used to modify the name. Alas the code actually wrote into four bytes outside the address space of the function and wrote into the stack information causing register EDX to be changed, so when the function returned to the main body of code, a simple for next loop went do lally and accessed an impossible area of memory, ergo, access violation. The buck stopped with the setup.dll which will be included as part of upgrade 5.8 along with some other things we might decide to do. We tend not to promise things these days as it gets us into trouble, but I can promise that the debugger has changed for V1.058 and I think for the better. As a side note, it can now parse and debug the entire FPSC Game Engine source code (18,000 lines).
Additionally, upgrade 5.8 will focus on stability, not additional features so the ability to view user defined types and arrays will have to wait for another upgrade release. I think we can all agree stability is paramount. Releasing this upgrade is high on the list after FPSC-EA, even if it is just to give you the new debugger!
"We are the knights who say...eki eki eki fatang loopzoing, zanziga....ni"
