Win7 v.s. XP for development - log files.....?

[MrLoathsome]

Yesterday, I was having an issue with some state code in a scriptedpawn, that was pretty much just locking up UT
completely. No nice GPF, or message about runaway loops or anything. Total lock up. Had to kill UT with Task Manager....
There would be no clue in the log file at all. (truncated when UT locked up I suppose)
It was kicking my ass.

This was on my Win7 box, and I got to the point I installed a utility to check if my graphics card was overheating. Was out of ideas.

After about 2 hours of that, out of desperation, I copied the exact same file over to my spare XP box, and tested it there.
Same crash happened after a bit of course, however this time there was more information in the log file which pointed me directly to the
cause of the issue, which has now been fixed. 1st test. And I had ran dozens on the Win7 machine...

Was just wondering if anybody else had seen a similar thing occur?

Where XP saved more log info before a crash than Win7.

[AlCapowned]

I had a similar problem with Vista not creating full log files. Did you run UT as an administrator? That's how I fixed my problem.

[Dr.Flay]

I agree with AlCapowned, I would suggest permanently setting the exe or shortcut's compatibility option to run as admin.
If needed you can also force WinXP compatibility in the same place.

[MrLoathsome]

Well... Both of those are already done. My UT shortcut on the Win7 PC has both XP Compatibility mode and Run as Admin checked....

[Dr.Flay]

Hmm, this is a pain with a few progs under the newer windows.
Have you disabled or toned-down windows "UAC".

Windows now tries to be cleverer at stopping and capturing crashes, so as to provide better crash-support. Unfortunately you are experiencing the... err... "side-effect".
1 step forward, 2 steps back.
Needless to say, I'm not looking forward to Windows 8 !

[anth]

This has nothing to do with admin rights. There's an outside chance that enabling WinXP compatibility mode might fix it but I wouldn't count on it. What is really going on is disk buffering. To avoid unnecessary I/O, the operating system will only write data to files when either:
* the program that wrote the data has closed the file
* the program that wrote the data has exited normally
* there's a chunk of data of at least 4kB that hasn't been written to the file yet
* the program that wrote the data explicitly requested for the data to be written immediately

So what is actually going on here is an abnormal termination of the program (UT.exe) and there was no chunk of at least 4kB available to be written to the log file. As a result, in the worst case scenario, you might be missing up to 4kB-1 bytes of data.

If you expect UT to crash, what usually helps is to play in windowed mode with the log window open.

[MrLoathsome]

Excellent answer Anth. I was pretty sure that was exactly what the issue was.

Haven't tried any testing in windowed mode with the log open. May do that next time.

[Arkon]

I know this thread is almost a year old since the last post, but I just did this after Dr. Flay warned me about log files not being written in Windows 7. Funny thing is, I recently checked the log files, and noticed there were no logs written for the past five days, since I upgraded the server to Windows 7 Ultimate.

Here's what to do, and it worked for me:

- Step 1: If you have UnrealTournament folder in the Program Files folder, move it to the desktop.
- Step 2: Run as administrator (may not even be necessary, but do it if the first step doesn't work by itself).

Problem solved!

[Dr.Flay]

Generally the issue is truncated log files, not lack of log files.
Some AV programs are very protective over the contents of the "Program Files" folder, and will remove/replace "unauthorised" files.

NOTE: All software older than Vista, should be installed and launched with the elevated Admin status, or you will have issues with prefs and log-files being saved.
You could also switch off "Windows UAC", as you are not using the PC as a general machine.

Outertech Cacheman can help tone done Windows settings.