How to debug flash player crashes?

[EvilDog2000]

Hello there
I'm building this game with flash...when I test and debug my project from flash it works fine but when playing the game in a browser, it crashes very often...after a couple seconds/minutes of play. I installed the latest flash player and tried on a couple computers with no luck...so how can I know what's crashing? or how can I have more info on why it crashes? what kind of debug tool can I use when flash player crashes within the browser. it's really hard to know what the problem is.

Thanks for the answers if any :)

Marco

[kglad]

you can use flashtracer with firefox to display trace() messages from your swf.

[EvilDog2000]

Cool man thanks for the info, I'll start with that.
isn't there something less tedious like....I don't know....a way to get a callstack or something haha 🙂

[kglad]

you can use the flash debugger to view the call stack.

[Guest]

What exactly do you mean when you say it crashes?

Track the memory usage and see if you have a memory leak.

Are you using ExternalInterface?

[EvilDog2000]

When I say it crashes, I'm talking about internet explorer crashing altogether...the memory usage seemed stable, going up slowly as I advance in the game and new objects are created...as expected.

I'm not sure what you mean about ExternalInterfaces but I'm not using anything special.

Also when I tried to use the as3 debugger I couldn't seem to be able to break in my as3 code in my external AS files. each class is in its own AS file but when I test my project I can never hit breakpoints placed in them.

[Guest]

Browser crashes caused by the Flash Player is the stuff of nightmares, it's nearly impossible to debug. In fact, I think kglads advice about flashtracer is the best news I've seen on the subject (I didn't know about flashtracer -- thanks kglad).

What player build do you have in IE? What is it in FireFox? You can check the exact build here:
http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/about/

Can you provide a link to the crashing SWF? Does it crash both IE and FF?

[EvilDog2000]

Yeah....kglad's trick is pretty sweet

I have version 9,0,115,0 for IE....my friend got the crashes on firefox but I'm not sure about his version, I made sure he updated to the latest and he still had the crash.

oddly enough I can't seem to reproduce the crash since the small changes I made to the game

the "game" is there.
http://www.evil-dog.com/BB/BusterBoy.html

[kglad]

flashtracer is a great tool. but credit goes entirely to sephiroth. that's his creation.

[adobe_as3_pro]

See this cool mp3 xml player with visualization, playlist and skins. Fully customisable. Vector. http://flashden.net/item/mp3-xml-strongplayerstrong-with-visualization-and-skins-vectorised/11851