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Comment by Filligree | Hacker News Reader

My go-to exception for this has always been Factorio. They have not only unit tests, but integration tests, regression tests, fuzzers, performance regression tests, ....

Their blog regularly goes into details about how it all works. It's very much worth reading.

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Sure, but you have to acknowledge that factorio is incredibly amenable to those types of tests -- in a way that most games aren't.

True, but that's not really an excuse for having none at all.

It seems to me if the physics engine and whatnot is deterministic I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to record input sequences and keep those and their effects as regression tests.

Those tests can be written, but if you do it naively coverage is measurable and very small. And the physics engine is not necessarily deterministic (or if it is, you can't always control all it's parameters)

Hah, that truly is the exception.

It's been a few years but if I recall correctly we did have a "smoke test" running on a jenkins box under someone's desk that booted a few levels with most of the game entities(they were called danger_room_1/2/3/etc) and verified that the game didn't crash. Aside from that though there wasn't much else which lead to some spectacular build breaks.

Ah the joys of "AAA" development.

So Factorio is well-factored? Nice.

The factoring expands to meet the needs of the ever-expanding factoring.

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