How should I report segmentation faults?

I’m working on a BGE game which has just begun to cause segfaults in Blender at unpredictable intervals. Needless to say, this is concerning, especially if I want other people to be able to play this game.

From the perspective of a novice coder, my guess is that segfaults can be tedious to solve, since it involves some pretty low-level debugging. It’s also really hard to reproduce this issue, since the game will run perfectly for a few minutes and then crash for what seems like no reason whatsoever.

Developers, how can I help you figure this out so my shit doesn’t crash? I’d like to know what to include in my report. Is the backtrace from the “crash.txt” file more useful than the .blend file itself, or do you need both? Do you need to play the whole damn game? How important is my specific hardware and OS environment? Are there any specific devs that I can/should throw money at?

I’m beginning to have night terrors about these segfaults; any input would be greatly appreciated!

@Rocketman - at the risk of over-generalizing, I would say to the contrary that Segfaults are often easier to debug… since the crash often points directly to the error.
Sometimes its obvious what the bug is without even knowing the code.

Compared with strange behavior which can mean hours of tracking down interactions between software components…

Suggest…

  • Simplify the problem down so you can make it into bug report.
  • Learn to use a debugger and run the game in a debug build, then you can include a stack trace (assuming you cant submit the entire game as a bug report)
    … note that you don’t need to be some expert developer to do basic debugging, you can see a crash message, a line of code, a list of variables and their values… sometiems its obviously a divide by zero… or trying to use a NULL pointer… such terms you can investigate if you need.