Hello all (especially devs),
Have you ever wondered why freespace froze at a given point in time, but had a hard time tracking down why? This may be the help you need.
I've been working on a trace viewer called Space Compass.
You can get the software here:
https://github.com/TheMatthew/spacecompass/releasesFrom the program just go to file->open and open the trace.json from freespace2. I suggest using a launcher to enable tracing with a checkbox.
If you want to go even deeper, you can have a system trace using LTTng in Linux or the windows performance toolkit in Windows. LTTng generates a CTF trace that can be natively imported by trace compass. Windows did not release the specs to the trace format as far as I know, so an additional step is required. You can get the trace (not sure how) but then convert the ETW to CTF using this project
https://github.com/fwininger/ETW2CTF . Then it can be imported.
So what is so interesting about this? You will correlate a system trace to the Freespace trace. You will know what is pre-empting your program and why.
I sincerely hope this helps,
Please feel free to suggest features/bugs/splash screens/other.
TL;DR: get this
https://github.com/TheMatthew/spacecompass/releases if you need a trace viewer and want to see something other than Google Chrome/Chromium.