Rounding work down can lead to a bit of work micromanagement. For
instance, four military on a lonely island accomplish nothing in 60
ETU updates, but five will make one point of work per update. They
can build a 2% harbor in four updates, as long as rollover_avail_max
is at least 3. Six to eight will be no faster.
The people's work used to be rounded randomly until Empire 3's big
effort to make the update code work for budget switched to rounding it
down, perhaps accidentally.
Switch back to rounding randomly, so that players don't have to get it
exactly right. Four military now get to 2% in five updates on
average, five in four, six or seven in three, and so forth.
Signed-off-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@pond.sub.org>
In Empire, even babies work.
neweff and production compute the projected population's work,
discarding fractions.
The update first computes the adults' work (discarding fractions),
then newborns' work (discarding fractions), then adds them together.
Double rounding. Moreover, it uses the old work percentage for the
adults' work, and the new one for the newborns' work. Broken in
Empire 3.
Fix by recomputing work after grow_people(). This is how things
worked before the regression. Also restores a bug: growfood()'s work
use is ignored. Harmless, because fcrate and fgrate are too low for
growfood() to produce anything, and nobody customizes them. Mark
FIXME anyway.
Update test output changes as expected: available work differs in
sectors where double rounding discards work, an in sectors with
changing work percentage.
Signed-off-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@pond.sub.org>
Tests need repeatable pseudo-random numbers to yield repeatable
results. Commit 73f1ac8 (v4.3.33) reseeds the PRNG with the count of
commands right before executing a command when running_test_suite is
on. This doesn't help the update: whenever update code exercised by a
test is changed to consume fewer or more PRNs, all subsequent users
get different numbers regardless. The ensuing test result changes are
extremely tedious to review.
To address this problem, reseed the PRNG in the update's two most
important loops with the iteration count when running_test_suite.
This way, the effect of perturbing the PRN sequence lasts only until
the next iteration.
There are many more loops, but reseeding in all of them seems
impractical.
Perturbs test results across the board. Hopefully, that'll happen
less frequently now.
Signed-off-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@pond.sub.org>
The airfield is a sector taken from player 8. How many updates it
takes to convert is highly variable. If it converts late, the
airfield may not be constructed in time. This is currently the case
for me.
Move the airfield to a more dependable sector.
For me, the smoke test now fails frequently, because of differences in
news. To be fixed next.
Just a smoke test so far, extracted from src/scripts/nightly/. This
makes the existing smoke test more easily accessible. Noteworthy
differences:
* Instead of patching the code to make output more stable, postprocess
the output to normalize it.
* Compare actual results to expected results instead of the previous
test run's results.
* Much faster. The old test harness used sleep liberally to "ensure"
things always happen in the same order.
Known shortcomings:
* The smoke test hangs when the server fails to complete startup, or
fails to terminate.
* Normalization of xdump hardcodes columns instead of getting them
from xdump meta.
* Normalization of time values in xdump is an ugly hack.
* xdump meta column type isn't normalized. Actual values can vary
between systems, because the width of enumeration types is
implementation-defined. The smoke test works only when they're
represented as int, which is the case on common systems.
* Currently expected to work only with thread package LWP and a
random() that behaves exactly like the one on my development system,
because:
- Thread scheduling is reliably deterministic only with LWP
- The PRN sequence produced by random() isn't portable
- Shell builtin kill appears not to do the job in MinGW
- The Windows server tries to run as service when -d isn't
specified
Further work is needed to address these shortcomings.
Getting C programs behave exactly the same on all systems is hard.
We'll likely run into system-dependent differences that upset the
smoke test. Floating-point computation seems particularly vulnerable.
Instead of updating src/scripts/nightly/ to use "make check", retire
it. It hasn't been used in quite a while. Investing more into our
homegrown auto-builder doesn't make sense, as canned auto-builders
such as Travis CI and Jenkins are readily available.
The shell scripts src/scripts/nightly/tests/?? become Empire batch
files tests/smoke/. The shell scripts are actually shell boilerplate
around Empire batch files. To make sure git recognizes the move, this
commit moves them unchanged. tests/smoke-test strips the boilerplate
before it feeds the batch files to the client. The next commit will
get rid fo that.
