Thomas Kinnen

Continuous integration and testing are becoming an integral part of modern software development. Both aid in maintaining as well as improving code and software quality, making them invaluable in every development environment.

This talk will outline the systems used for continuous integration and testing by the Unknown Horizons project. Unknown Horizons has been using Jenkins CI together with a growing set of custom tests extensively in the past year and has been improving the test suite constantly. Different kinds of tests will be demonstrated to show how to test the game on different abstraction levels: Unit Tests, UI Tests and AI Tests.

Game architectures used to be designed in an inheritance-based approach, which has proven to be difficult. The current state-of-the-art is a component-based architecture that allows loading all game entities from a separate data source. This enables easier testing and modularization of the code. It is also beneficial for the game designer as it weakens the game designer's dependency on the programmer. This is important for content creators of open-source games, so they can easily add their new content to the game, without relying on somebody else to help them. This talk will outline the reasons to use a data-driven and component-based architecture, give examples of architectures used in popular open-source games (Wesnoth, MegaGlest, 0AD and Unknown Horizons) and explain how Unknown Horizons moved from an inheritance-based approach to the new component-based architecture.