I have a unique question, wasn’t quite sure where to put it so I put it here.
As it stands whenever a developer has an editor crash, it can be very difficult to figure out what the cause is without all of the PDB files from each editor release. We do not distribute a custom built editor to our developers, but instead have them use the Epic released editor. This means that if the editor crashes, in the dump file I can only see the stack of our game code, or that code which is in UE4Editor.pdb (not much).
Here is an example of what I can see using only my game’s PDB along with the primary editor PDB, and where having the other PDB’s (such as UE4Editor-Core.pdb, UE4Editor-OnlineSubsystemUtils.pdb, UE4Editor-Engine.pdb, …) could help me precisely figure out the issue:
From what I can tell from how your “SymbolDebugger” tool works, epic stores their PDB files in version control to allow for analyzing crash dump’s from any of their builds. Basically what I am asking is if it were possible with each release for Epic to host their PDB files for that build, in the same way they host the source build dependencies.
Epic don’t store PDBs in github, there are generated when you build engine (or any other code in VS). It’s good idea, as lack of PDB force me to build engine from source.
We’ve talked many times about how to
make these available, but haven’t
really figured out a good way to do it
yet. We’ve talked about running our
own symbol server, hosting them on an
FTP, and even including the source
with the launcher’s version of the
engine so that you can generate the
PDBs, as long as you have a compiler
installed.
I’m actually leaning toward including
them in the binary-only distribution.
They do compress well, but only to
about 25% with the zlib or Windows
implementation. The 7z results look
great but I don’t know if we can use
that yet. I’ll revive the discussion
about it here and we’ll see where it
takes us. Thanks for the feedback –
it is good to know that this is
important to you guys!
I just found the PDB’s. Go to the launcher and find the panel for your editor. Select the down arrow and then options. In the dialog that appears, check the “Editor symbols for debugging” checkbox. Hit Apply!
