The autonavigation feature has issues:
* Autonavigation orders are executed at the update. Crafty players
can use them to get around the update window.
* Usability is poor:
- The order command is overly complex, not least because it can do
five different things: clear, suspend, resume, declare route, set
cargo levels.
- Unlike every other command involving movement, order does not let
you specify routes, only destination sectors.
- Setting cargo levels can silently swap start and end point of a
circular route, because "this keeps the load_it() procedure
happy". Maybe it does, but it surely keeps players confused.
- Setting "start" cargo levels actually sets the "end" levels, and
vice versa. Has always been broken that way.
- Predicting what exactly autonavigation will do at the update isn't
easy.
* The info pages documenting it amount to almost 400 non-blank lines
formatted. They claim only merchant ships can be given orders.
This is wrong. Unlikely to be the only error.
* Few players use it, and its workings at the update a fairly opaque.
Makes it a nice hidey-hole for bugs. Here are two:
- Unlike the scuttle command, autonavigation happily scuttles trade
ships while they're on the trading block.
- Unlike the load command, autonavigation can load in friendly and
allied sectors.
* It's more than 700 lines of rather crufty code nobody wants to
touch. Thanks to a big effort in Empire 2, it shares code with the
navigation command. It still duplicates load code. The sharing
complicates fixing the bugs demonstrated by navi-march-test.
Reviewing, fixing and testing this mess isn't worth the opportunity
cost. Remove it instead. Drop commands order, qorder and sorder.
Drop ship selectors xstart, xend, ystart, yend, cargostart, cargoend,
amtstart, amtend, autonav.
xdump ship sheds almost half its columns. struct shpstr shrinks, on
my system from 200 to 160 bytes.
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.
