Platform support for debugging on (XBox) user consoles

[SteveP]

I have a question: XBox, how do you get diagnostic information out of this "black box"?

Background: correct me if I'm wrong but as I understand it, you guys can't duplicate the XBox save problem in the lab, correct? How do you gather diagnostic information from the XBox for end-user bug diagnosis? Just ask what the dude was doing? Isn't there some sort of technique for instrumenting the save process and completion? Is there an equivalent to the fflush, fsync and fclose of a file stream? Can the user get at diagnostic files? (please excuse my extremely newbie question)

In a linux or PC type environment, I would use an environment variable that controlled the internal diagnostic logging system to enable diagnostic logging. The environment variable can also specify levels of diagnostic logging or routines or subsystems for logging or specific triggers for turning detail logging on and off. Output can go to stderr or to a specific named file.

Here are three links to examples that may be insightful or analogous:
DEBUG macros for the C Preprocessor
Trace and Logging messages TRACE Macro for visual studio
Lightweight logger for C++

The reason for the flushing and syncing is for processes that crash or that crash the OS too. Obviously flushing has a performance hit but its perfectly fine in synchronous wait conditions like the Save function.

I have another tangential related question: is the delay of first release because of XBox issues like this? I don't have any sense of how many players are successfully playing on XBox but I'm sure you devs do so this gives us some type of indication of the severity and frequency of the save bug. I would have added a poll but we never get a sample size above 25 or so. If you play on Xbox, please add a comment about how well things work for you and what sort of precautions you have to take to safely perform saves.

How well is the Linux version working? Is it even important vis-a-vis market share? What is the market share for XBox of TLD sales? Is it getting lots of play time?

[Nasdaq401]

I play on Xbox, have put in maybe around 100 or more hours.  I had my save wiped 2 times.  One prior to the latest hotfix and once after that.  The 2nd one happened to a save that I had started before the hot fix was patched in.  I haven't had any problems after that. One thing I definitely do now is to make sure I wait a few extra seconds after I sleep/go into a building after the spinning icon dissapears, just to make sure.  Also, I always exit back to the main menu and let that load up before I close it instead of just going to the dashboard and/or force closing