For several years I’ve been looking for a tool that will allow backwards execution or at the least replay of random bugs. My graphics programmer send me a link to Replay Solutions which offers Replay Director which I believe can do this. He told me he contacted them several times asking for a price and never got a response. Regardless, I sent a no-frills email asking about the price as well. If they don’t get back to me I’ll try to do some research and see what I can find out on my own.
*** EDIT ***
They got back to me. It’s $25,000 per seat. It doesn’t do backwards debugging, but it does do recording, so that you can play through the scene again and repro the bug. For that to be useful you’d have to have some kind of global tick counter so you could stop one tick before the crash.
Too expensive for me now but it would come in handy after I ship.
One reply on “Code replay”
And you are certain this system works? Especially with real-time apps like games?
Just add a command/action buffer system then remove all “completely random” (i.e seeding rand by time) and make sure your code is deterministic. Almost all commercial games I’ve worked on implement this system – you could play the game in record mode then replay the game in under a profiler/memory leaker check/debugger overnight. This is how you make a game pass the 72-hour memory leak test required by all console makers.