At the recent Paris Game AI Workshop put on by AIGameDev (et al), Phil Carlisle spoke about automated testing in game development. His major point was that, by decoupling the game engine from the display engine, you can actually run the core simulation very rapidly. It also takes far less processing power. You can run hundreds, thousands, or even millions of simulations during overnight hours, for example. By logging the resultant data, it exposes glitches and imbalances that you may have overlooked.

Another important part of this method of development is that it allows the engine developers to work on things long before it is ready to go on-screen. Some types of games can be "viewed" if not actually "played" on a regular DOS window. This is what I did in my initial development of Airline Traffic Manager. I was able to do a lot of work on the core algorithms such as the passenger generation, moving the aircraft across the map (in Great Circle routes!), the basic state machine interactions between things such as the aircraft and the gates, etc. When it came time to hook up the display, the game engine was ready to roll.

This also reflects back to a column I wrote on AIGameDev back at the end of April - Automated AI Testing: Unraveling the Combinatorial Explosion. I recommend checking that out for a bit more insight. (Or just my rambling.)

Labels: automated testing, Phil Carlisle