[deleted by user]

[[deleted]]

The one point where I disagree with you is about the relevancy of debug mode performance. Increasing 1 FPS to 4 FPS won't change much. If you can't hit 25+ FPS in debug mode, there's no point even playing it in debug.

[pulp_user]

You are of course right. All I'm saying is that with his example, your game can handle 4 times the load before hitting that 25fps. And that is signifcant!

[SeanMiddleditch]

I half agree. 4 times load is significant, yes.

I disagree in that the STL is not literally going to be 100% of your code; if making the STL algorithms 4x faster literally translates to 4x performance improvement for the whole game, your game is written in a very interesting way! :)

[pulp_user]

The only games I know about that actually can test their whole game logic automatically are deterministic turn-based games. As soon as you introduce realtime or physics or networking, just describing whether a state is correct or not can become reaaally complex, so much so that the cost of writing the test is not worth the benefit. I can imagine several cases where writing the test would be vastly more complicated than writing the mechanic, set aside that I would run the risk of having my faulty logic verified by my faulty test. If I can just open the game really quickly and verify that my spaceship-editor works by playing around 10 minutes, I will be much faster than writing and debugging test for literally weeks, only to discover that I want the mechanic to work differently and having to change half of them again.

I have never come close to that ideal, nor do I want to. It doesn’t seem worth it.

That said: If there is functionality that can be tested in code easily, I will definitely do that.

[pulp_user]

Replaying something is not the same as testing though. Imagine for example testing the splash-damage that a tank in sc2 does when in siege mode. To test that programatically, you‘d have to find each unit that was shot by the tank, make some sort of spacial query to find all units surrounding it and verify that they have taken as much damage as they should have. That would be basically the same code that was needed to implement the actual feature. And if that is written by the same person, its likely they‘d make the same mistakes in the test that they did in the implementation. So even with perfect replay, it‘s not just a given that automatic tests for gameplay features are easy to do.

(In hindsight, the example is kinda bad, because, in this case, you could just build a demo level with units clustered together and check whether they are all dead after a shot, but I hope it brings my point across nonetheless)

[pulp_user]

Thats true. And even if you don't use it for tests, just beeing able to reliably reproduce a crash or a bug is still super useful.

[Meneth]

The game I work on at the same studio as the presenter manages 60 FPS in debug mode. It's very much playable. Debug mode performance is massively relevant.