KSP Crash Manager Idea

[Xrave]

Hey guys,

I'm a huge fan of the mods the community is throwing out, but frequently mods cause my game to glitch out and crash after 40 minutes or an hour of gameplay. These bugs are not easily identifiable, and crash logs are pretty obscure for normal people.

Here's my idea: a script/mod inside or outside KSP that you run after each crash. It grabs the latest crash log and records it and the mods installed to database.

• It records the log file (and maybe even the crash exception error message), and correlates it with mods installed.
  
• It sends the record of to the aggregation server.
  
• On the aggregation server, we can use filtering to figure out which mod is causing what kind of crash, and log output of those crashes.
  

I obviously haven't fleshed this out, but I'm wondering if there is community interest to talk about a project like this one and have a discussion about whether such a system can be technically feasible at all. Obviously, parsing KSP's log is kinda prohibitive and I'm not sure if it even logs the error when the application crashes, and from what i see, the Unity error msgs to the Mac OSX console is not saying much.

-Xrave

Edit:

Even frequency of crash can be a indicator (say you don't install A, and you crash after ~90 minutes, and after installing A your crash frequency went up to once per 30 minutes)

Although, for me personally, i think i might just be running out of memory. *hmm*

Edited May 23, 2015 by Xrave

[hab136]

Crashes to desktop are 99.999999% of the time from running out of memory. It's not that mod A or mod B or C or D is a problem, but just the fact that you have A and B and C and D installed and you're using up all your RAM. The more mods you have installed, the quicker you'll run out of memory.

When a mod has a bug, it normally only takes out itself, or does something ridiculous (ship explodes, planet disappears, instantly accelerated to speed of light, etc). A bug in a mod will almost never causes a crash to desktop.

Currently the major memory leak in the game is the overheating gauges; if you turn those off you'll have a lot less crashes. This is slated to be fixed in KSP 1.0.3, which last I heard was about 2 weeks away.

[Ser]

I have a great suspicion that out-of-memories tend to cause some of your mods to log a NullPointerException before crash. You remove them and next time goes the next one. So it is possibly not so simple and you should look at error.log and memory amounts every time you got crash and NullPointer at the end of your output_log.txt.

I'm not sure, but it is very likely to be true.