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>
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.
