There was a new player ("Sparta") yesterday whose US-english Windows XP Professional SP3 system had all the latest updates and whose hardware should have been sufficient to run MG. But when ever he tried to start the game it would just crash (even if he just ran megaglest.exe --version) and not provide any game-generated error message, just useless Windows error messages. I did not try to get any debug logs since the game crashed so early that I assume it would not have logged anything at this point.
Hardware:
* Athlon XP 3200+ (single core/processor at 2200 MHz),
* 2.0 GB physical RAM of which 1.27 GB were unused
* GeForce 6200 with 256MB RAM
Software:
* AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 2011 - temporarily disabled
* Windows Defender
For the average Windows user it is currently quite difficult to just collect any useful information when MG does not start or crashes early. It might be worth discussing strategies of improving this. I'm thinking of PDB files, GAE's backtraces / crash logs, a separate application for crash reporting (like Ubuntu's apport or Mozilla's crash reporting utility) or just a small set of scripts which users can easily download and run in case of such an issue.
