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0 pointsteamonkey5y ago0 comments

It's not exactly what you mean, but automated gameplay testing is fairly common in the AAA space, although maybe not taken seriously enough.

A simple example might be simply starting and closing the engine after the automated build & package process to make sure the game actually runs, but I've seen things like using bots to emulate player behaviour to smoke test gameplay functionality. No Man's Sky used automated tools to evaluate the procedural-generation algorithms[1]. Here's a more comprehensive example of automated gameplay testing[2].

[1] https://youtu.be/sCRzxEEcO2Y?t=3100 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVq_hgaX8MQ

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mewse5y ago

I’ve definitely seen some automated “pretend to be a player” systems which either spammed controller inputs at random or was able to take some very constrained actions within some portion of a game (undirected driving of a car, for example). Those are neat and helpful, but don’t really have the rigor of proper testing where you know that the same thing is being tested every time.

One of my stumbling blocks at the moment is that the machines in my CI setup don’t have graphics cards in them (or monitors attached or etc); they actually can’t run the game, and I’d have trouble detecting the difference between “runs successfully” and “runs, but only displays a black screen” or other critical graphical issues.

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