Random memory corruption bugs
are a thing of the past.
With ReplayDIRECTOR™, if you find it once,
that bug is dead.
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Towards the end of a project is when everything comes together. It also tends to be the time when everything can fall apart!
When complex systems interact in real-time environments, the results can be pretty unpredictable. This is what happened with a bug that plagued Project: Snowblind.
The Xbox team was seeing a strange, a very rare memory corruption bug that sometimes only occurred after 10-15 minutes of game-play.
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John Chowanec, Lead Producer
‘Project: Snowblind', Eidos Ltd. |
“We couldn't get the problem to happen in the debugger...”
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Meilin Wong, Developer
‘Project: Snowblind', Eidos Ltd.
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The Xbox team was seeing a strange, a very rare memory corruption bug that sometimes only occurred after 10-15 minutes of game-play. They could not get the problem to happen in the debugger, no matter how hard they tried.
Finally, Meilin had Replay at her disposal and she decided she would track down this bug once and for all.
She had one of the best members of the test team work hard to reproduce the bug while Replay was recording transparently in the background.
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“It turned out to be an occasional array overwrite that would cause random memory corruption…”
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”Once I had the bug recorded, I was able to Replay the bug over and over again until finally, we traced it back…”
With the bug recorded, Meilin Replayed the recording in the debugger and watched the crash. Then, she added more debugging info, and Replayed it again. |
John Chowanec, Lead Producer
‘Project: Snowblind', Eidos Ltd.
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Finally, with breakpoints set, knowing the crash would happen at precisely the same spot, Meilin single-stepped through each line of code in the debugger until…
“We found the crash! … Replay *rocks*. I doubt we'd have found it otherwise. It turned out to be an occasional array overwrite that would cause random memory corruption!”
Another bug dead. And soon there would be another successfully shipped product.
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