Should exitOnError be true by default?

[nightm4re94]

^{This post has been migrated automatically from the old LITIENGINE forum (2018 - 2022).
Posted: 2019-05-04 19:08:04
User: TheRamenChef [] (age: 1441 days 🔥; posts: 5)}
A while ago, I added a mechanism to the game that would cause it to crash if an uncaught exception was thrown. Later, another contributor made it configurable, and off by default.
While I can understand making it configurable, I don't think it should be configurable by the end-user; only by the application, and it should also be on by default. If an error isn't caught, it means that some problem has occurred that the application is unprepared to deal with, and with many applications, crashing is the only useful way of communicating that to the end-user. We could also have a crash ~~*~~screen*, that would basically show the crash report and allow it to be copied to the clipboard.
Another thing, should crashing skip the normal shutdown sequence? I've found a number of cases where the game would freeze because it tried to crash while shutting down.
Similar arguments can be made for catching exceptions in the update loop and gamepad support.
Thoughts on any of these ideas?

[nightm4re94]

^{This post has been migrated automatically from the old LITIENGINE forum (2018 - 2022).
Posted: 2019-05-08 19:15:51
User: steffen [Admin 👑, Mod 🔧] (age: 1568 days 🔥; posts: 100)}
> TheRamenChef crashing is the only useful way of communicating that to the end-user.
I think this is true for development and maybe for some test period of the software. But from a gamer perspective, I think there is nothing more frustrating than dropping out of a game due to an issue that maybe wouldn't even cause a crash or undefined behavior in the first place.
In my opinion, the philosophy for the engine should be: if we can keep the game running without running into undefined behavior, we should do so. At least in a release version. Of course, it's hard to tell how severe an unhandled exception is. Also, we should still track the issue for sure and maybe provide an improved way to report on problems.
I generally agree that the error setting maybe shouldn't be configurable by the player, at least not via the default configuration file (maybe via startup argument). I think it might be best to let the developer decide how he wants to handle this.