Testing

Reporting bugs

Please see the bug reporting page. This page is about helping modders and developers testing their changes.

Debugging

To create a debug build, change CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE in CMake from Release to Debug, then compile.

You may find it necessary to set in_nograb to 1 to disable pointer grabbing so that you may use your debugger.

Debugging with gdb

Start gdb as follows:

$ gdb --args ./daemon +devmap chasm

If the program segfaults, a backtrace is very useful to the developers in determining the source of the problem. At the debugger prompt, type bt:

(gdb) bt

Debugging with Xcode

With Xcode 4, even if you did not build the game with Xcode, you may still use its facilities for debugging.

1. Open any project. If necessary, create a new one. It may contain anything.
2. Click "Product" on the menu bar and navigate to "Attach to Process". Look for "daemon" listed under "Applications".

After a moment, the application will be ready for debugging.

See the Xcode 4 User Guide for more information.

Live Testing

Starting a testing session

Start the game, and enter the following command:

/devmap map-name

Adding bots

Like fish in a fish bowl, they can bring some activity in a map.

/bot fill 5   # add 5 bots

You can also have a look at all the g_bot_* cvars, they are quite interesting. There is even a graphical user interface for these!

Moving around with ease and spawning anywhere

You can pass through walls and fly around using /noclip, and you can spawn anywhere you want using /devteam h for humans or /teamteam a for aliens. That's very practical and can allow you to start from an empty map.

To load an empty map without having the game finishing immediately, you can use g_neverEnd. This can help porting maps.

The /give command

The /give will give you an easy way to test situations without being blocked by funds or team advancement.

/team a           # join aliens
/give momentum    # give all the momentum you can to your team
/give bp 100      # get 100 build points free
/give funds       # get rich quick! I swear it's not a pyramid scheme!
/give all         # get all personal things you can get, in addition to money (BP and momentum are independant)

You can also combine several commands into one, for example you can test advanced dragoon really quickly

Some misc useful cvars

• cg_drawSpeed to see how fast you are moving, /set cg_drawSpeed 2 even brings an histogram.
• cg_drawBBOX to see how big or small the bounding box are
• cg_drawDebugDistance to give you an idea of how far away of you a distance of "100 quake units" is
• timescale setting this will make everything faster, or slower. Be careful that if you set it too low (say less than 0.1) the graphical console will take a lot of time to visibly appear, but you can still type in it. For example to do /timescale 1 again.
• g_freeFundPeriod to change how often you and other clients are gifted money. This can be an alternative to making bots ignore limits that can give a bit more diversity in their choices and behaviours (rich bots will always rush, for example)

Debugging Graphics

• cg_draw2D can allow you to disable 2D drawing. It may be useful if you want to ignore 2D performances from your benchmarks.

There probably exist proprietary tools for your platform. For example AMD used to have gDEBugger, and GPU PerfStudio proprietary debuggers.

apitrace

apitrace is an open-source tool that records every graphics API call made by an application. After the application has closed, you can step through individual calls to the graphics API, allowing you to

• see the result exactly as it would appear following each call,
• see graphs of API usage, and
• inspect buffers.

Linux users can install it from their package manager, for example:

sudo apt install apitrace-tracers apitrace-gui

Windows users can download a build.

General Tips

Miscellaneous

• To stress test the engine's ability to display a large number of buildables, you can tweak g_BPInitialBudget and build as much as you wish.
• To determine what file was loaded for a particular asset (e.g., to determine if files are being read from a particular DPK archive) use the /which command with the relative path to the asset as an argument. You can use tab-completion.

For example, this means that you are effectively the new version of an UI file:

/which ui/shared/circlemenu.rcss
File "ui/shared/circlemenu.rcss" found in "/home/me/unv/Unvanquished/pkg/unvanquished_src.dpkdir/" 

Viewing Runtime Information

The engine and game logic provide a number of commands for viewing information about its current state.

Testing materials and textures

See Materials.

Testing maps

See Maps.

Testing models

See Models.