added to MediaWiki → https://wiki.egosoft.com/wiki/X4:CrashReport_Dump
Introduction
When a game (or application) crashes, the developers usually have a hard time trying to figure out what caused the crash. There are dozens of different reasons for a program to crash. It can be a bug in the game/application itself (f.e. trying to dereference an invalid memory address, failing to handle an exception which occurred, running into undefined behavior which ultimately ends up in trying to allocate too many resources (like memory), etc.), a bug in a 3rd-party program/tool which is either used by the game or hooks itself into the game to perform its own functionality (like improving graphical effects or recording the video/audio to be able to stream it), hardware failures causing undefined behavior in the application or on the OS layer, and countless of other possibilities.
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The dumps contain useful information (like most recent callstack and stack memory information, the modules (aka: DLLs) running on the machine, some basic information about the OS and the machine/environment the crash occurred on, etc.). This is a good start for the developer to tell different crashes apart and usually by itself is good enough a hint to identify (and if possible fix) the cause of the crash.
Crash dumps in X4 Foundations and redirect pages
In X4 Foundations we generally generate so called mini dumps instead of full dumps. Mini dumps only contain the essential information about a crash and only the stack data. They do not contain a full memory dump of the heap the game uses. By default when a crash occurs information about the exact location in the engine the crash occurred in is sent to a server. The server looks up the details and checks if the crash is already known and whether additional details (the troubleshooting pages) are available. If so, the browser will open the corresponding troubleshooting page pointing out further information about the crash (like potentially identified workarounds, status updates on the state of the crash investigation, step-by-step-instructions for the user to resolve the issue itself (if it's an issue outside the game like a driver installation issue on the local machine), etc.).
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If you don't want the crash details to be uploaded to the server at all, you can opt out of this functionality in game through the Options Menu -> Settings -> Privacy Settings and set Send crash reports to NO.
Please be aware that if this is disabled, you also won't be redirected to the troubleshooting pages anymore.
Privacy Policy and crash reports
We do not intentionally include any personal details by default when crash reports are sent to us. While it cannot be ruled out entirely that crash details don't include any personal information (f.e. if it ends up on the stack data which is part of the crashdump), chances of this happening are very slim (as the game usually stores personalized data (for the online functionality) only in encrypted ways and hence they also would be encrypted, if they happen to end up on the sent stack data).
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Be aware that enabling this setting is really just useful, if you've been asked by support to do so. Enabling it yourself without an investigation of a particular crash being in progress, the added data is of little use to us. Also be aware that while the identifier is personalized data, we do not have means to identify the user directly just through the identifier alone.
Locating local crash reports
Regardless of whether you selected to send crash reports automatically to the server or not, the crash dump is also stored locally on your machine. The game stores the dump file alongside the location of the game executable (X4.exe) and names the files in the following format:
X4_r[VERSIONNUMBER]_[TIMESTAMP].dmp
(Sidenote: Before 3.20 the name contained an 'r' after X4_ - as of 3.20 the filename was changed and the 'r' was dropped.)
For instance, for a crash happenning happening with version 3.10 of the game at 15:10:20 on 2020-03-23, the corresponding dump file the game creates would be: X4_r310310_2020_03_23_15_10_20.dmp.
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Locating the particular path the crash dump file is located is quite easy.
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Steam
- In Steam go to LIBRARY (1), right click X4: Foundations (2) and click on Properties... (3)
- In the "X4: Foundations - Properties" window click on LOCAL FILES (1) and then on BROWSE LOCAL FILES... (2)
This should bring up the Windows Explorer window in the folder where the X4.exe (and the dump files) reside.
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GOG
In the GOG Galaxy client select X4: Foundations (1), click on MORE (2), select Manage installation (3), and finally click on Show folder (4).
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