Re: [Celestia-developers] More on Automated Testing.

[Pat S. <pa...@su...>]

Selden E Ball Jr wrote:
>>- Self-screenshot-taking: is this currently possible?
> 
> Apparently this can be done only from a CELX (Lua) script.
> Unfortunately, many Mac and Linux systems don't have Lua installed.
> That's one of the reasons that I'm writing .CEL scripts.

I say it's worth it. The way a test suite at something like ATI works, 
they would run Celestia with a script specified at the command-line. 
This script would do very little, show no text or anything, it would 
just take a snapshot and save it to something that looks like the script 
name, then exit. Basically, celestia would be started with test scripts 
sequentially from a shell script. If there are visually differences in 
the images, a person could go in manually and look what's going on.

> Also, there's a bug in the Windows snapshot code which has gotten 
> much worse in v1.4.0. The snspshot often is made before the file 
> selector window (used to specify the image name, type and 
> destination directory) has closed. Too often, but not always, 
> the file selector window is in the snapshot, overlaying part of 
> Celestia's image. 

This is a moot issue if the snapshot is handled from the script. I don't 
think it's a bad requirement to have Lua to run a test suite. 
Alternatively, I could try to extend the regular .cel to take 
screenshots. I wouldn't expect that to be too hard.

>>- Frame-by-frame equal behaviour on every execution. 
> 
> That's one of my goals. I wanted to make something
> available immediately, though, to get some feedback.

What you made is good, but as I mentioned before, it would be beneficial 
if the script did only one little thing in a fairly short timeframe, so 
that a batch test wouldn't take too long.

>>Don't know about
>>this one, but it would probably be good enough to always go to the same
>>spot at the same time, with frozen time.
> 
> Some of the tests depend on motion, though.
> Supposedly there's a bug in some Linux drivers that shows up
> when a cloud texture is in motion.  I think that going
> to the same time, longitude and latitude shold work.
> Initially I just used "goto" instead of "gotolonglat".

The bug would be visible in a single frame, so it shouldn't matter too much.

>>- Ability to autoquit after a script executes. Don't know if the
>>scripting can do this, so I'm writing a patch that takes a command-line
>>argument to exit after script execution.
> 
>>Can this be done?
> 
> Personally, I'd like to see a .CEL (and .CELX) command that does this.
> quitcelestia {} maybe?

I'll look into it while I look into adding a screenshot feature to .cel.

Basically, if the requirements I listed are achieved fairly soon, the 
ATI Linux guys would include Celestia as one of their regression tests 
before they release drivers. I think this would absolutely rock, not 
only as ATI/Linux user, but also as 
yet-another-awesome-thing-Celestia-can-be-used-for-and-the-kitchen-sink-too.

Thanks Selden!

--Pat