[Adonthell-devel] on test scripts

[ksterker]

Yesterday I have started getting the old item test scripts working with the 
v0.4 item code.

Unlike the previous tests, these require a couple of extra scripts (the various 
item templates), so I decided to add a 'data' directory to the test folder. In 
there, we can store the data required by various tests.


That also gave me another idea. At present, all my test scripts generate more 
or less meaningful output on the console. To check whether everything is still 
working after a change to the engine, one has to run all scripts and scan the 
output for errors. That's not very nice at best, and it's easy to miss subtle 
errors . So I'll write a little test script that catches all output and makes a 
diff to a previously stored reference output. That way, we could test the 
engine more systematically, thus finding bugs that might be introduced by 
changes to existing code.


On the matter of bugs; while writing that item test, I found that the engine is 
fairly robust so far. A number of things went wrong at first, but it almost 
never crashed. I've just had to add one or two diagnostic messages here and 
there, to figure out what the problem was. All in all, I was fairly amazed :).


I'm not entirely finished, but I will probably commit stuff on monday. By then 
I might also have done something new ...

Kai