tl;dr: Be as simple and descriptive as possible. Provide pictures, videos or scenes.Hi everyone!
For people not used to the way software development works (but even for the experienced ones), it can be difficult to write a good bug report. So if you want your report to be understood well and processed in the quickest time possible, make sure to read and follow these simple rules:
- Choose a descriptive topic title
When going through the forms, it helps us if we can identify the individual bugs by their description, so always write the titles so that it's obvious what the problem is from the title. As an example, "Crash when using normal shader inside layer shader" is great, whereas "HELP, please! I found a bug :-(" could actually mean that the bug will be processed later. - Ensure reproducibility
For a bug to be fixable, we need to be able to reliably reproduce it and later verify the solution when fixed. So if you report something like "in 5% of the cases if I do XY, the WZ will not work correctly", it is not really useful, whereas "if I do XY, then WZ always crashes" is much better. Of course, if you cannot reproduce it 100%, it's still better to write a bad bug report than nothing... - Simplify the circumstances
This cannot be stressed enough and people often tend to report with huge scenes or long set of steps to reproduce the bug. But it helps us immensely, if you take the time and find the simplest scenario where the bug happens. - Provide good "Steps To Reproduce"
"Steps To Reproduce", or STR in short, is simply a set of instructions to reliably reproduce the bug. It can be as simple as "1.) Create new scene; 2.) Create new material; 3.) Corona crashes!". We are also just people, so the shorter and easier to understand the STR is, the better! Also, it's great to try out your whole STR yourself to make sure it really causes the bug to appear. - Pictures or videos are great!
As CG programmers, we are very visual people, so one picture or a simple video is often worth a hundred words! It doesn't have to be anything fancy, as long as it shows what the problem is. But please bear in mind that often, we don't know the requirements that you have on your scene, so simply posting a picture and saying that "it is wrong!" is not very helpful. It is better to explain why the picture is wrong and what exactly it would look like if it was correct. - Uploading scenes is great!
Giving reliable STR is good, giving a scene where we can click and immediately see the problem is even better. Saving our time means we can fix more bugs in the same amount of time! Moreover, we can use the scene in our internal testing tools to ensure the bug never appears again. Note that we treat every scene that you send to us as confidential and if you request it, we can even delete the scene from our harddrives once we find the bug.
You can use the private uploader for the scenes, where noone will be able to see the scenes except for the Corona developers. - Describe your platform
Often a bug is specific to one Corona version, one OS, etc... So it always helps if you describe you platform in a very simple way. At least, say what OS you're using, what version of Cinema you have and what version of the Corona plugin (can be found in the about dialog) causes the bug.
Thanks for reading this far and for being such an enthusiastic community!
