Other Debugging Techniques

Logic errors in the plugin

If your plugin isn't acting the way you expect it to, the best recommendation is log, log, and oh log. Write debugging information to the log when particular functions of interest are called, and log the values of relevant variables. The snprintf function will come in handy when doing this.

General Debugging Techniques

Here are some general tips for debugging:

• Remove all other plugins apart from plugin_base from your plugin.ini while debugging. But remember to put them back for your testing before you release to the big bad world. Also take away any unnecessary metamod plugins.
• Simplify the situation in which the bug is occurring as much as possible. e.g. Try it with only one player connected to the server. Or with no players present by typing admin_command <your command> in the server console.
• Sometimes it helps to comment out bits of your code, intentionally making other bits of the plugin not work in order to debug a particular feature.

Debugging HLDS / Admin Mod / Metamod Crashes

For those who have Microsoft Visual C++ installed and have downloaded a copy of CVS for windows, you can download the Admin Mod sources with CVS, Then adjust the project settings to compile the Admin Mod DLL directly into your addons/adminmod/dlls folder (compile direct to that folder, don't compile somewhere else and copy the file).

Now when HLDS crashes, you can press debug and if the crash was down to Admin Mod, you will be taken to the line in the Admin Mod source code it crashed on. If you look at the call stack you can see the history of other functions called. One of them will normally be an AMX native function that you have called - e.g. messageex(). This can help you narrow down exactly where in your code it is crashing, or to find bugs in Admin Mod itself.

Click here for information on using CVS to get Admin Mod sources.