If I had a wish for christmas from GabeN or Valve in general, it would be actually meaningful error messages from steam.
If I had two wishes, I would like a community tool to share configs to make games work that require tweaking.
But I’d be very happy if I got better error messages.
https://xkcd.com/2501/
If it has over two thousand pages of problem reports, users asking for help, it is a legitimate problem and the logs are not a sufficient help to those users.
What you’re not understanding is how hard it is for an operating system to diagnose a problem with a drive.
You’re expecting from Stream they write a full diagnostics tool so the program can figure out what went wrong, which could range from permission issues or formatting, to failing sectors/drives.
In theory you could make something that works, in reality you’ll be getting false positives, for example: a permission error message while it’s actually a physical write error. The ‘wrong’ message is worse than a ‘vague’ message.
If I can look up what the error was with the disk access, in a log, then steam can do that too. It can parse that, and present it to me. That’s what I expect.
And if that fails, it can at least point me to the correct log.
I can not stress enough that the client tells me nothing:
The only approach I have to solve is, is to use a search engine for “steam disk write error”. That’s it.
Disk write error.
Almost like the error has something to do with writing to the disk.
As in the disk may have an error in which Steam cannot write to it.
What else is Steam supposed to say? it’s literally pointing to the error, it can’t do anything else. If you don’t know how to pour through logs or anything that’s okay, that’s what Geek Squad is for
It should provide more information, as to “which file”, “which drive”, and what caused the error like “not enough space” or “no rights to write” or whatever the hell it is. And maybe some other context depending on the circumstances. “Disk write error” is just too generic. It’s better than nothing, but the request and critique in this post is that it could and should be more detailed and helpful.
In theory, I’m inclined to agree with you. But error handling in your code is not at all straightforward. Just successfully catching an error so the program can exit gracefully can be difficult. Classifying different error conditions and displaying an appropriate message is even worse.
Basically, the logs exist for exactly this purpose. Just how it works.
it is wild for someone to say this immediately after saying “actually they can’t display the error because it’s too hard” and somehow not realize in the middle of typing how ridiculous it is trying to square those two claims.
additionally, every logging library worth using lets you log to multiple outputs, e.g. disk and screen.
Yes, and will outputting the log directly to screen help to make the error any less confiding?
And writing code that includes robust error catching and handling is simple, then?
No one asks to output the naked log line. There are a few more information that could be presented in a more readable and useful manner in a message box. Error messages are meant to be helpful, not to annoy without knowing what happened.
Even if you are right and the log contains the answer, why not trying to make more helpful Error messages? Does it hurt you?
I have nothing against helpful error messages, please understand; just pointing out this issue is not a trivial matter. It’s not like somebody is doing this just to intentionally annoy you, after all.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
No one argued it would be a trivial issue. But how do you know its not a trivial issue? To me this does not look like a hard thing to implement, its more a design choice and a design failure. If they have the data to write into log, they could have given SOMETHING more useful (like the filename in question) with the error message.
If they can log it, then they can show it in the message.
How often do you read log files…?
Like, windows specifically stopped including the stack trace in the blue screen of death because of how rarely that proved to be necessary. And most log files are about as easy to parse, so…
Doesn’t matter. There is zero excuse for bad error messages.
it does. in the logs.
The error message should contain all the additions information, so that we don’t even need to parse and look into log files. There is no excuse for bad error messages.