On Programming

Allow me to gleefully report that I have integrated my unit testing framework into the Doom 3 engine.

I have previously used this framework to run unit tests via a simple text interface. Tests are easily defined using a simple set of macros and automatically enumerated. Now, whenever my modified version of Doom 3 starts up, it will do the same, it will enumerate tests wherever they have been implemented in the code, and I can operate those tests via the in-game console. Have a look:

Now, why did I do this? I will of course also have a seperate program with a lot of unit tests, as I develop my software test by test. However, I will want to write tests that will need the game running in some stage, and part of the beauty of all id Software engines is that they make it extremely easy to hook in any kind of custom code that is readily executable in the game at any time, via custom console commands, thus opening up an extensible command line interface to the running game. And so I not only have the environment in which to run my tests, it also hosts them and provides an interface to them. That, I think, is quite beautiful.

I am not working for Id Software, in case you were wondering. I am using the publicly available tools and source code for modifying the original game.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 3rd, 2006 at 3:38 and is filed under Doom3, Gaming, Programming, TDD, c++, idsoftware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.