I was reading up a little bit on unit tests, and I was thinking, that it might be an interesting idea to integrate some unit testing into the server. The difficulty is, it would be difficult to create tests that could work in a useful way with something as complex as the crossfire server, however I feel that it might be possibly to be able to create some sort of unit testing that may be of worth. To test something like the crossfire server, an awful lot of tests would need to be implemented and it would take alot of planning. Some possible unit tests could be: -'Boulder' mechanics test: Have a basic map with some of the 'boulder mechanics', as a test of various classic map elements like teleporters, buttons, check invs, gates, pits, and such things. Perhaps also have the testing 'script' test magic mouths and ears. This test may not the most useful for finding bugs, but some things like some edge-of-map scenarios could be included. It would also not involve much effort other than creating the map, and having the script test for certain end conditions.
-Spellcasting test: This is in my opinion a more useful test for discovering crashes. The test would have a test map that would have a variety of conditions, including some monsters, edge-of-map situations, and teleporters. The test could teleport a fake player between almost every map square, and casts every spell on each square. This could if designed properly test many different conditions. -Weather/Map loading test: This test would rapidly load several bigworld maps into memory, and process the weather on them a few times each, swapping out from time to time, and verifying that no original map squares have been lost in memory. (This test may currently fail in some cases) -Random map generator test: This test would quickly generate and load many random maps with a mix of parameters, using ever combination of styles in the maps and varying other parameters like size and style. And other tests could be done too of course, mostly limited by what one could think of. The big question is, is this worth it? Well, in my opinion, it would take a significant amount of effort to make, and useful results might not be seen very often with it, however I feel that it might be good to have some sort of 'stress test' like this, pushing game conditions to their limits, and use that as yet another way to find some of the more subtle bugs as them occur. I think that if this is implemented as a plugin of some sort that can be optionally built, it wouldn't cutter the server code too much either. This said, I'm not sure its the greatest idea, but right now I'm brainstorming a bit and it does seem plausible anyways and might have some benefits. Alex Schultz _______________________________________________ crossfire mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.metalforge.org/mailman/listinfo/crossfire
