If I had a wish for christmas from GabeN or Valve in general, it would be actually meaningful error messages from steam.
If I had two wishes, I would like a community tool to share configs to make games work that require tweaking.
But I’d be very happy if I got better error messages.
I mean, what more do you want from the error? Time? Location? Directory that failed the write? Sector count? It’s pretty straightforward.
Every error steam has given me was easily figured out in the logs. Just like every program.
Wouldn’t it be better if the error message itself helped you figure it out, so that you don’t have to look into logs? People seriously underestimate useful information in a good error message. Stuff like “Windows encountered an unexpected error” are just not useful.
Yes? The error should at least show basic info. Requiring checking the logs when the error message could just show some info is silly and clearly doesn’t work well given how many people are asking for help with it.
https://xkcd.com/2501/
If it has over two thousand pages of problem reports, users asking for help, it is a legitimate problem and the logs are not a sufficient help to those users.
What you’re not understanding is how hard it is for an operating system to diagnose a problem with a drive.
You’re expecting from Stream they write a full diagnostics tool so the program can figure out what went wrong, which could range from permission issues or formatting, to failing sectors/drives.
In theory you could make something that works, in reality you’ll be getting false positives, for example: a permission error message while it’s actually a physical write error. The ‘wrong’ message is worse than a ‘vague’ message.
If I can look up what the error was with the disk access, in a log, then steam can do that too. It can parse that, and present it to me. That’s what I expect.
And if that fails, it can at least point me to the correct log.
I can not stress enough that the client tells me nothing:
The only approach I have to solve is, is to use a search engine for “steam disk write error”. That’s it.
Disk write error.
Almost like the error has something to do with writing to the disk.
As in the disk may have an error in which Steam cannot write to it.
What else is Steam supposed to say? it’s literally pointing to the error, it can’t do anything else. If you don’t know how to pour through logs or anything that’s okay, that’s what Geek Squad is for
It should provide more information, as to “which file”, “which drive”, and what caused the error like “not enough space” or “no rights to write” or whatever the hell it is. And maybe some other context depending on the circumstances. “Disk write error” is just too generic. It’s better than nothing, but the request and critique in this post is that it could and should be more detailed and helpful.
In theory, I’m inclined to agree with you. But error handling in your code is not at all straightforward. Just successfully catching an error so the program can exit gracefully can be difficult. Classifying different error conditions and displaying an appropriate message is even worse.
Basically, the logs exist for exactly this purpose. Just how it works.
If they can log it, then they can show it in the message.