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[Jeoshua]

Bloat283   DEBUG OPTIONS    (Future)    Various ways to fiddle with internal settings.

Mr Toady, I beg to differ.  Debug options are not bloat at all.  They should be very important.

If there were a command line option of some sort that made the engine spit out some kind of log of everything it was doing, not just failing at, it would make debugging alot easier for mod creators and probably for you as well (presuming you don't just watch the code running somehow in your Dev Environment).

I am often plagued by things causing crashes, in worldgen or other places, that do not cause any kind of output into errorlog.txt.  If there were an option to give a running tally of everything the game engine was doing, it would make these kind of crashes much easier to diagnose.

[Bohandas]

Sounds good to me. The output file might be excessively large though; DF does a lot of stuff.

[Jeoshua]

Verbose debug files are always excessively large in every program.  That's why they're useful, since they give you so much output you can see what IS working along with what ISN'T.

How I foresee it being useful is with a persistent reproductable crash.  Once you realize what makes the error happen, you don't always have a clue as to why (like using a certain worldgen seed along with your mods).  You then run "Dwarf Fortress.exe -verbose" or whatever to turn on the debug mode.  Then quickly do what you needed to do to recreate the crash while the game spits out a running log of what it's doing.  Then, once it crashes, you look at the file to see where it went wrong (aha! When that creature attacked that entity in worldgen, it crashed!) Plus, the beautiful thing is that you generally only have to look at the end of the file to see where the program crashed.

[G-Flex]

Debug/testing tools in general would be a great asset to both Toady and the players/testers, I think. Even the arena mode has proved invaluable for testing things.

[IT 000]

I would support certain debug options as long as it wasn't "gimmee 1000 of this" kind of debugs. More like "StartSiege" kind of debugs.

[Jeoshua]

It would work well if it was object based.

Like how pathing currently works in saying creature #9218414 ["DEMON_12"] --> Pathing error, or whatever.

Worldgen stuff would be like Sieges or Creature attacks... anything the game has an extended calculation for, output what procedure it's running and what it's running it ON.

Anything that would normally generate something in Announcements if it were in Fort or Adventure mode, that kind of stuff should go in.  But not once it's done, AS it's being done.  That's the crucial part.

I actually just had a thought.  You know the Current folder?  Have you ever watched it grow and shrink as the game goes on? It would be nice to know if that stuff could be used to diagnose this very thing.  Nobody understands the file format except the DF Program, tho.

[sockless]

Bloat doesn't mean that.

In the dev pages, bloat is a positive thing, something that would be nice to have, but not necessary for a fully functioning game.

Also, can people please stop referencing the old dev page?

Toady has discontinued use of it, he doesn't upgrade it and he doesn't reference it. I think he didn't like having a giant checklist of required features in game. The new dev list got rid of the different categories, and instead is a lot more short termed, featuring what he wants to add into the game next.