Support for Gaming Consoles

[highlyunavailable]

It would be great if (if possible!) Sentry could provide additional ISentrySubsystems for consoles (e.g. XBox, Playstation, and Switch). This would be a bit more annoying for you because the developer that uses Sentry would have to have the console manufacturer verify that they were a licensed developer to Sentry (E.g. I wold have to have Sony inform you that I'm a licensed PS developer) before you could allow access to that particular SDK but it would be a huge boon for reporting.

[bruno-garcia]

This is something we want to look into but we don't have a timeline just yet. Our goal was to get the plugin and support Mobile, Desktop, Web before we get into Consoles.

[highlyunavailable]

It's appreciated! I mostly wrote this up as a request so you would know customers are interested in consoles as well.

[Edstub207]

This feature will be super useful when it comes, some alternative solutions on the market don't support Console out of the box, so adding this would sway a few folks I think!

[Edstub207]

@bruno-garcia / @vaind I don't suppose either of you have an updated timeline for this as the issue is approaching a year old?

[highlyunavailable]

@Edstub207 My company is moving off of Sentry (to BugSplat) due to poor Unreal support (bad trace grouping, lack of Linux support for servers) and complete lack of Console support in the foreseeable future, so 🤷‍♀️ . Consider alternatives, IMO.

[Edstub207]

@Edstub207 My company is moving off of Sentry (to BugSplat) due to poor Unreal support (bad trace grouping, lack of Linux support for servers) and complete lack of Console support in the foreseeable future, so 🤷‍♀️ . Consider alternatives, IMO.

Linux crashes seem to be okay for us so far... What do you see?

[Edstub207]

@tustanivsky FYI as well - Just realized I've not seen Bruno or Ivan active on this project for a while :)

[Edstub207]

@bruno-garcia @tustanivsky is there any update on this - Had a few other studios wondering about the status of this in a discussion I just had.

[bitsandfoxes]

Hey, sorry about that - Fell through for a bit.
We're looking into it - but it's complicated. (and not just on a technical level)

[Edstub207]

Hey, sorry about that - Fell through for a bit. We're looking into it - but it's complicated. (and not just on a technical level)

@bitsandfoxes Thanks for confirming. Do you know a rough ETA or is it currently unplanned?

[bitsandfoxes]

Sorry, I don't have an ETA.

[maxha651]

I assume the "no ETA" on official support still applies, but do you have any customers successfully running Sentry on consoles anyway? It seems functional enough, but not sure how much effort there would be to get the various platforms to accept it. So any pointers or previous examples you might have would be valuable in case we'd be looking into going that route.

[bruno-garcia]

There are customers using it already. If you're interested, please reach out to the sales team: https://sentry.io/contact/enterprise/ they can verify the middleware program and share details.

If you work with Game Consoles you know not much on this subject can be discussed in public forums. But Sentry has several game studios as customers. But we're not allowed to talk about anything that's not on public websites (like Riot) :)

[jernejstrasner]

The current status of console support is that we won't be widely supporting it. We will try to help on a best-effort basis but can't guarantee proper support with the console manufacturer's blessings.
I will close this issue now.
We do appreciate the report and might get to this sometime in the future.

[bruno-garcia]

I won't be reopening this just yet but I wanted to share that we're moving ahead with official console support. Might take some time before it's available on all consoles but you'll soon hear about the first platforms.

[bruno-garcia]

So Sentry does support consoles at different levels of maturity. We're working on officializing things.

For Nintendo Switch, support is official now.
For PlayStation, you can find Sentry in the devnet and reach out/do the middleware verification process through it. Support here requires you to run at service at this time. But we plan on improving this in the future.
For Xbox, sentry-native can be compiled with GDK. For those with a middleware agreement, we'll verify that and share some details/code.

Also note that we're hiring a Senior Engineer to help us with our gaming support.

[bruno-garcia]

Folks interested in console support. Note that Sentry is available in the middleware and tools page of all the 3 major platform providers.

That means we have support for all consoles already but outside of any game engine integration. That's our next step basically.
So that if you're using this SDK (Unreal) already on PC or Mobile, and you build for Console, all the context (tags/breadcrumbs) show up on those native crashes we can already capture from consoles.

If you're interested in getting early access to stuff please reach out via the middleware pages in the console provider's internal developer network. You'll find Sentry in there (or reach out to Sentry support for details since we can't publish some links publicly here)

[zsd4yr]

@bruno-garcia do you mind linking to the devnet forum where Playstation support is described?
Same for GDK compilation - are there docs for that anywhere?

[bruno-garcia]

@bruno-garcia do you mind linking to the devnet forum where Playstation support is described? Same for GDK compilation - are there docs for that anywhere?

Let me share a broader update, with as much detail as it's possible considering this is a public forum.
For more details on stuff, please go through the middleware verification process so we can provide you with code, docs, details etc.
Sentry support can also help guide you to the middleware process if the details below are not enough.

PlayStation

I reached out again to Sony asking if we can share the link publicly. I did so because in the past I was told explicitly not to share it. While I wait for an answer, let me at least describe it where it is. Inside DevNet, there's Development and under it, Tools & Middleware. Sentry can be found in that page.

We're working on an API for PlayStation so you can set tags, release, breadcrumbs etc programatically and those end up in the native crashes we can already report. The API is engine agnostic, but we'll be binding them to the Unreal SDK next. Then Unity, Godot.
This happens on a private repository for obvious reasons.

Xbox

Microsoft is OK with sharing their new verification page. Sentry is an option in the drop down: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/games/support/request-gdkx-middleware

For the open source Xbox support, we have details on how to compile it on sentry-native here.
But note that we're adding support built-in to the Unreal SDK (and later will do it on Unity, Godot)
There's a draft PR already for it:
* #775

UPDATE:: Since the changes requires some Unreal-console specific work too, it'll be hard to do this without possibly exposing stuff we shouldn't from the Epic's point of view. So this will also be done in a private repo.

Once this is figured out, we'll add it to Unity too.
_We're doing as much as we can in public, thanks to Microsoft's OSS GDK and samples. But it's likely we'll have some private/closed source components in the future as we add more advanced features. _

Switch

The link to Sentry in middleware page in the Nintendo Developer Portal is: https://developer.nintendo.com/group/development/getting-started/g1kr9vj6/middleware/sentry but with Nintendo, you can configure data forwarding from Nintendo directly to Sentry. Through the CRPORTAL. The documentation for it lives within the CRPORTAL itself, including how to set up symbol server, etc.

We're also working on an API for Switch so you can set tags, release, breadcrumbs etc in the Unreal SDK and those end up in the native crashes we can already report. This happens on a private repository for obvious reasons.