How to use the bug tracker

Black Mesa Archive In-game Issues (Mod)
#1

I’ve set up a bug tracker at this address in order to help developpers to solve bugs.

A BUG TRACKER IS NOT A FORUM.[/SIZE]

This is the main reason that I (and some other people too) think that this is NOT the right place to do bug reporting. There are, at the moment I’m writing this, almost 3000 different issues reported, and an important part of them are duplicates.

Worse, it’s almost impossible to mark these items as solved, or to assign them to some developer.

This is why I try to help BMS developers by using the appropriate tool.

You can help them too, by using this very same tool. NO ACCOUNT creation is required.[/SIZE] (you can use one of your already existing accounts)

And for those who are still in doubt, a developer has already agreed that it would be a better solution.

Oh and the guidelines for reporting bugs (#1, #2, #3) still apply to the bug tracker of course.

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So, now, how does the bug tracker really works ?[/SIZE]
Well, that’s simple :

What’s like the forum :

  1. Log In (using any provider you want, google, yahoo, AOL, etc. See here to know why).
  2. Create a new issue.
  3. Set a name for it.
  4. Fill its content (description of the bug and related informations).
  5. Attach files related to the said bug (select them ALL in one time in your browser dialog, or you won’t be able to attach them more than one at a time).

What’s NOT like the forum :

  1. Set its TYPE. That means : tell if it’s a bug, an enhancement, a proposal (these two are really similar; to help you choose, I’d say : a proposal is a change that is not necessarily an enhancement), or a task. The latter is won’t be used for the moment.
  2. Set the priority of the bug ACCORDING TO FACTS (and not to your liking. If everyone sets bugs to critical, it will take WAY more time to solve them, since the developers will have to sort them out first). That means :

[list=1]
[*]Blocker if you have to uninstall/reinstall the game to solve it.

  1. Critical if it affects the whole game, like severe crashes that corrupt savegames, for example.
  2. Major if it prevents you from continue playing (not PROGRESSING, that’s a minor one if no crash happens), like a crash return-to-desktop (segmentation fault for example).
  3. Minor if it is annoying (even really annoying) but doesn’t crash the game.
  4. Trivial if it’s some cosmetic issue (like a weapon wrongly displayed or so)

Indeed these instructions are GUIDELINES and you’re allowed to choose the severity of the bug according to your judgement.[/:m]
[]Set the affected component. If you don’t know, let it as default.[/:m]
[]Set the version, which is, for now, 1.0.[/*:m][/list:o]

And in the end, validate the issue, of course.

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Let’s help them making an even better mod! :slight_smile:

EDIT: Since mirroring all these bugs take a LOT of my time, I will NOT mirror additions made to these threads after my post saying to “continue discussion on the bug tracker”. Thank you very much.

#2

Please excuse the noob question, but we can post links to images and Youtube videos on bitbucket, right?

I am asking this, because there a several bugs I’ve prepared a bug-report for, in the last days - I don’t want to post them unnecessarily or without ‘proof’.

EDIT (04:28 PM): Nice, thank you! :slight_smile:

#3

Yes and yes. And you could also post attachments to comments there.

#4

What if you have multiple issues to report?

#5

This is a great idea, I’ve always thought that bugs should be reported in a more organized fashion and are not up for discussion, every time a bug gets posted here, there is a discussion about it, most of the time not solving the problem and just taking up server resources.

#6

Create a separate issue per a problem.

#7

The problem is not discussing. It’s flaming and duplicates :wink:

Hopefully the bugtracker will solve that :slight_smile:

Thanks again, mate.

#8

As long as we don’t forget to use said bugtracker (myself included)… :wink:

#9

Well, I hope either the devs or the moderators will find the time to make this thread sticky (and correct what is inexact, if there is anything) :wink:

#10

Sometimes it doesn’t matter if a thread is ‘stickied’ or not, some people still miss it - no high hopes there…

EDIT (05:16 PM): Off-Topic (sort of): Talking about bugs, does anyone still remember where you pick up your first grenades (M203 Grenade) for the grenade launcher aka MP5?

I need them to re-produce a bug scenario.

If you find them before the chapter (Chapter 6, “Blast Pit”), in which I encountered a possible exploit or bug, it is valid for my report. If you do not, it is invalid.

Thanks in advance. :slight_smile:

EDIT (06:06 PM): Just checked the Wiki - it appears that “They are uncommonly found throughout the Black Mesa Research Facility.” is not what I was looking for, unfortunately.

(Source: https://wiki.blackmesasource.com/M203_Grenade)

#11

I’m sorry to say that, but even if the “public tracker” option is checked in the admin section (verified), you will have (for now) to log in to comment bugs…

I’ll send an email to bitbucket to see if we can change this.

Well, I did do some research and… found this. In a few words, that means that the behavior of NOT allowing anonymous comments is intended, as an Anti-SPAM mesure.

Let’s hope anyone will be able to use an existing account to make comments.

#12

Good idea

#13

Seems not. I have got a LOT of criticism from several users, to some extent that now I don’t mirror anything anymore. I was delighted to see that one user or two have contributed to the bug tracker but I don’t think it’s enough to be significant. So, I don’t think this is a good solution in the end, people here seem to need an official thing, with “OFFICIAL” written everywhere in blinking red huge underlined aggressive font on some not-less aggressive laser green or yellow background…

So the real solution might be either for developers to endorse my initiative (and better yet, provide a way to login with the forum credentials, if even possible with OpenID), or, ideally, to install their own bug tracker (mantis, trac, whatever) on this/their server.

#14

The solution is OK IMO, it’s just suffers from the well-known Murphy law that no matter how clear and easy to use you made some thing there always would be people (a lot) thinking it’s too hard and isn’t needed at all.

I’d vote for Bugzilla or, to a lesser extent, trac as a issue management system if I were asked about, as personally I’m not the fan of how does systems like bitcuket, google code or github handle issue management.

Still I do think that having an issue tracker for managing bugs is something that must be used when you try to deal with the incoming issues for a project of a larger scale, like BM is. People like me, who had been reading almost every issue that had been posted to this forum so far are well aware that we’ve got a constant flood of issues reporting the same bugs and not-a-bugs as people do not want to bother with searching forums before sharing their frustration about BM failing in some way. Most of them also do not follow reporting guidelines and do not post their system specs due to either being too lazy to read “BEFORE YOU POST” and “How to report an issue” threads or thinking that “this info is not relevant”

Having an additional barrier in form of bug tracker registration procedure would be of a great help IMO. Yes, it would somewhat reduce the amount of the bug reports received, but it would make the reports that would actually land into bugtracked better. Reports like “BM crashed, help me pleaz, bump, bump!” are really nothing more than a simple spam - they are useless. It’s a well known fact for any programmer or issue manager who had ever been working with bugtrackers for large scale projects like Wine or KDE or Gnome.

As for now, I urge people who really want to help BM became better to post their reports to the existing bugtracker instead of the forums up until the moment devteam would step in with some new info on the topic. And I urge them to actually register on bugtracker for a personal account and do not use existing “shared” one - in case devs or support volunteers would like to request some additional info you’d get a mail message if you had spend 2 minutes registering the account there - so you wouldn’t have to manually monitor the issue you had reported for getting status updates.

#15

Yeah me neither. I’ve never been a huge fan of SaaS…

What I prefer is those who post their “bugs” at the end of the “How to report an issue” thread :smiley:

I did not grok that, maybe because I’ve never been part of such a project. But it makes sense and I think you’re right.

Good idea. Yet the email notices can be pretty annoying as they can spam your inbox if your bug gets high activity… So even if you create an account at bitbucket, you might end deactivating email status updates… But I agree that this is better than using an existing openid account; as even if you disable updating, you can reactivate it and filter it on your mail server at any moment.

#16

Now we got about 1000 bugs and issues.Are they going to be filtered and posted to bitbucket?

#17

NO.

#18

@Georges: first off, kick-ass effort with the tracker, thanx!
I read that you found out that ppl are confused by the “unofficial” nature of the bitbucket-tracker. Well, Bitbucket got a nice REST-Api so it should be possible to “harvest” bugs via a form here on this forum and still have them shoved into Bitbucket to let the dev-team have a centralized bug-repo. cheers

ps: bug count dropped from ~1000 to 140 within a few hours today (sun 09/30). Consider the above suggestion obsolete if there ain’t enough “meaty” bugs to report in the first place

#19

Thanks for your comment :slight_smile:

Actually, most of the bugs aren’t mirrored from the forum. So the ~1000 issues are mostly here. Yet, as I’ve seen a LOT of duplicates while mirroring the first ones, I think there are maybe 200 or 300 different bugs in total.

We’ll see how many bugs are found in the end :wink:

#20

Nice to see that, according to the bug tracker, the first bugs have been resolved!

Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.