CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#windowsprocesscrash
S.Richmond
S.Richmond

Reputation: 11558

Is it possible to write a watchdog process to catch application crashes?

We're developing a video game that has literally no bugs ever has, like any application, bugs that can on occasion cause hard crashes. Unfortunately a number of the crashes we've cataloged so far are out of our control in terms be being able to solve them or work around them due to the closed source middleware we're using (Unity 3D).

Whilst we can hope and wait for the middleware developer to fix the problem we'd like to see if its possible to at least make the crashes more informative and user friendly. For example - One of the rare crashes our users can have is that certain AV products cause some kind of thread context race condition and cause the game to explode. We'd like to be able to detect the crash and error signature, and provide to the user a link to our wiki or forums on how to resolve it (If possible).

Is it possible to write a lightweight watchdog process or parent process that can respond to crash events on the Windows platforms?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 775

Answers (1)

Thomas Weller
Thomas Weller

Reputation: 59640

Collecting crash dumps outside the crashing process is essential. You never know whether your unhandled exception handler is affected or not. But there are other options:

  • Enable WER LocalDumps and write a watchdog (FileSystemWatcher) for the directory where the dumps are stored.
  • Configure AeDebug and attach your own debugger at the time of the crash.

Upvotes: 2

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