## About The Pull Request A long time ago, it was common for designs to cost reagents in addition to normal materials. Every circuit board used to require sulfuric acid, for example. However, these designs have slowly been whittled away, and only two remain: the death syphon PKA modkit, which costs blood, and paint remover in the service lathe, which costs acetone. Although these two designs still use the old system, it is very outdated, and it shows. TGUI doesn't take reagent costs into account at all. Reagent costs aren't displayed on mouse over like material costs, and the design won't be greyed out if there necessary reagents aren't present. If you try and fail to print one of the two designs, the protolathe will tell you that reagents are missing, but it won't say what reagents. In fact, there is not way to find out what reagents are required without code diving. ## Why It's Good For The Game In light of how outdated and unsupported this system is, I think it makes sense to deprecate it almost entirely.* Now, protolathes, circuit imprinters and techfabs will no longer take reagent costs into account at all, even if a design does define reagent costs. The machines also no longer need beakers to be built, and reagents can't be transferred into them. The two remaining designs that did use reagent costs now don't, and I've updated the designs unit test to fail if any non-limbgrower design does set any reagent costs. *Limb growers are the exception, as they're fully functional and work fine. ## Changelog 🆑 del: Protolathe/circuit imprinter/techfab designs costing reagents is now totally deprecated. /🆑
Unit Tests
What is unit testing?
Unit tests are automated code to verify that parts of the game work exactly as they should. For example, a test to make sure that the amputation surgery actually amputates the limb. These are ran every time a PR is made, and thus are very helpful for preventing bugs from cropping up in your code that would've otherwise gone unnoticed. For example, would you have thought to check that beach boys would still work the same after editing pizza? If you value your time, probably not.
On their most basic level, when UNIT_TESTS is defined, all subtypes of /datum/unit_test will have their Run proc executed. From here, if Fail is called at any point, then the tests will report as failed.
How do I write one?
- Find a relevant file.
All unit test related code is in code/modules/unit_tests. If you are adding a new test for a surgery, for example, then you'd open surgeries.dm. If a relevant file does not exist, simply create one in this folder, then #include it in _unit_tests.dm.
- Create the unit test.
To make a new unit test, you simply need to define a /datum/unit_test.
For example, let's suppose that we are creating a test to make sure a proc square correctly raises inputs to the power of two. We'd start with first:
/datum/unit_test/square/Run()
This defines our new unit test, /datum/unit_test/square. Inside this function, we're then going to run through whatever we want to check. Tests provide a few assertion functions to make this easy. For now, we're going to use TEST_ASSERT_EQUAL.
/datum/unit_test/square/Run()
TEST_ASSERT_EQUAL(square(3), 9, "square(3) did not return 9")
TEST_ASSERT_EQUAL(square(4), 16, "square(4) did not return 16")
As you can hopefully tell, we're simply checking if the output of square matches the output we are expecting. If the test fails, it'll report the error message given as well as whatever the actual output was.
- Run the unit test
Open code/_compile_options.dm and uncomment the following line.
//#define UNIT_TESTS //If this is uncommented, we do a single run though of the game setup and tear down process with unit tests in between
Then, run tgstation.dmb in Dream Daemon. Don't bother trying to connect, you won't need to. You'll be able to see the outputs of all the tests. You'll get to see which tests failed and for what reason. If they all pass, you're set!
How to think about tests
Unit tests exist to prevent bugs that would happen in a real game. Thus, they should attempt to emulate the game world wherever possible. For example, the quick swap sanity test emulates a real scenario of the bug it fixed occurring by creating a character and giving it real items. The unrecommended alternative would be to create special test-only items. This isn't a hard rule, the reagent method exposure tests create a test-only reagent for example, but do keep it in mind.
Unit tests should also be just that--testing units of code. For example, instead of having one massive test for reagents, there are instead several smaller tests for testing exposure, metabolization, etc.
The unit testing API
You can find more information about all of these from their respective doc comments, but for a brief overview:
/datum/unit_test - The base for all tests to be ran. Subtypes must override Run(). New() and Destroy() can be used for setup and teardown. To fail, use TEST_FAIL(reason).
/datum/unit_test/proc/allocate(type, ...) - Allocates an instance of the provided type with the given arguments. Is automatically destroyed when the test is over. Commonly seen in the form of var/mob/living/carbon/human/human = allocate(/mob/living/carbon/human/consistent).
TEST_FAIL(reason) - Marks a failure at this location, but does not stop the test.
TEST_ASSERT(assertion, reason) - Stops the unit test and fails if the assertion is not met. For example: TEST_ASSERT(powered(), "Machine is not powered").
TEST_ASSERT_NOTNULL(a, message) - Same as TEST_ASSERT, but checks if !isnull(a). For example: TEST_ASSERT_NOTNULL(myatom, "My atom was never set!").
TEST_ASSERT_NULL(a, message) - Same as TEST_ASSERT, but checks if isnull(a). If not, gives a helpful message showing what a was. For example: TEST_ASSERT_NULL(delme, "Delme was never cleaned up!").
TEST_ASSERT_EQUAL(a, b, message) - Same as TEST_ASSERT, but checks if a == b. If not, gives a helpful message showing what both a and b were. For example: TEST_ASSERT_EQUAL(2 + 2, 4, "The universe is falling apart before our eyes!").
TEST_ASSERT_NOTEQUAL(a, b, message) - Same as TEST_ASSERT_EQUAL, but reversed.
TEST_FOCUS(test_path) - Only run the test provided within the parameters. Useful for reducing noise. For example, if we only want to run our example square test, we can add TEST_FOCUS(/datum/unit_test/square). Should never be pushed in a pull request--you will be laughed at.
Final Notes
- Writing tests before you attempt to fix the bug can actually speed up development a lot! It means you don't have to go in game and folllow the same exact steps manually every time. This process is known as "TDD" (test driven development). Write the test first, make sure it fails, then start work on the fix/feature, and you'll know you're done when your tests pass. If you do try this, do make sure to confirm in a non-testing environment just to double check.
- Make sure that your tests don't accidentally call RNG functions like
prob. Since RNG is seeded during tests, you may not realize you have until someone else makes a PR and the tests fail! - Do your best not to change the behavior of non-testing code during tests. While it may sometimes be necessary in the case of situations such as the above, it is still a slippery slope that can lead to the code you're testing being too different from the production environment to be useful.