Bug report/feature request format suggestions

[jcompton]

I think I'm still the world's leading reporter of WeiDU bugs and requester of WeiDU features but I'm certainly not the ONLY one anymore, so I thought I'd share these handy hints and tips to make your efforts to push WeiDU towards version 1000 happy and speedy.

Bug Reporting
Many, I'd go so far as to say most, bugs in WeiDU are a result of trying to do something that Wes has never tried to do in one of his mods--otherwise, he'd notice it wasn't working. So provide the exact code that isn't working.

A bad bug report goes like this:

"ADD_FLINGLE doesn't work, it always crashes my TP2."

A better bug report goes like this:

"ADD_FLINGLE was working until version 372. I didn't change any code, but now the install process dies. Here's the portion of the TP2 and the portion of the DEBUG file that shows what's going on"

insert TP2 and DEBUG code here.


Feature Requesting

Much like bug reporting, if a feature doesn't exist in WeiDU, it's probably because nobody, Wes in particular, has thought of needing it or how it would work or what it would do. Try to describe not only what you want it but how it would operate (and some "why you want it" will help as well, since Wes often requires feature requests to be seconded and thirded, and if you explain it to other people they'll find it easier to chime in.)

Be explicit. Be detailed. If you think you're coming off as a bit pedantic, that's probably the right level of detail.

So, a bad feature request goes like

"I want a feature to add a state where we eat toast to the end of any dialogue."

A better feature request goes like

"I am working on a mod where eating toast is very important to the characters, but I don't want to constantly have to keep coming back to the same piece of toast, so at the top of the .d I want to SET_TOAST_ITEMS and provide a list of .itms that represent toast in various states of toastedness and butteredness, then I want a function that does EAT_TOAST_ITEM as a state transition, so will give a random piece of toast to Player1.

It would look something like this:

(example.)"

- Again, be detailed. If something's broken, show what it is.

- If something used to work but stopped working, be explicit about that, including which versions it works with and when it stopped.

- If you report your version of DirectX, we'll giggle.