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Visualizing Unit Testing

In general, unit testing consists of writing code to make sure other code runs correctly. From wikipedia:

unit testing is a method by which individual units of source code, sets of one or more computer program modules together with associated control data, usage procedures, and operating procedures, are tested to determine if they are fit for use.

I'm working on a Runner-type game and one of the main features of the game is randomly generated geometry. Platforms are randomly generated as you play so no two games will ever play out the same way. One of the scary things about procedurally-generated gameplay is that unexpected things can happen which may completely break the game. In my case, platforms could be generated on top of each other or could even cross paths, potentially blocking the player from continuing to play. There's a lot of code in place to help prevent this but the only way to know for sure is to test it in a live scenario. I could sit there and play the game over and over to make sure nothing bad happens but that's a colossal waste of time when there's much better ways to go about it (in my case at least). That's where unit testing comes into place. I can speed up the platform generation much faster than I could ever play through it myself and if something happens that shouldn't, I can throw an error with all kinds of information to help figure out why it happened and fix it.

Usually, unit testing goes on solely in code and if everything works as intended, nothing will happen (or the unit test will relay that it had no problems). The thing about unit testing is that it will only check what you tell it to check. This is great for testing to make sure a number stays between 1-100, for example, but I don't have the time to code/think out every single scenario of platforms that could be spawned one after another. This is where the whole "visual unit testing" idea comes into place.  Watching the platform generation happen has the added benefit of being able to catch anything that shouldn't happen but wasn't accounted for. If I catch something happen I can always include it in the unit test for future tests to make sure the fix actually works.

In this specific test, I simply spawn a random platform and delete the oldest platform every 0.1 seconds. The result? It looks a lot like snake...

Rolling your own server-based leaderboards, part 4

Part 4. We've setup a database to store all of our data and we've created 3 tables to store our Leaderboard score and our Usernames. Now we'll learn some of the basics of SQL which allows us to add data to our tables (INSERT) and how to read data from them (SELECT). For this part we'll focus solely on the basics of SQL and go through a handful of different queries that let's us read/write data to our database. In the next part we'll deal with HOW to communicate with our database from the outside and we'll use PHP to do so. Our PHP code will contain SQL queries so I wanted to split the SQL/PHP parts up instead of just throwing everything out at once and hoping it sticks in your brains.

INSERT

Lets open up phpMyAdmin again and click on our Usernames table on the left-hand side and then navigate into the SQL tab at the top of the screen. Once again, we're presented with a blank box that let's us run SQL queries inside of it. We did this in part 3 when we created our Challenge table using SQL code instead of using the interface. If you look underneath the input box you'll notice a bunch of buttons; SELECT *, SELECT, INSERT, etc. These are different statements that we can run on our SQL tables. SELECT * means "select all", INSERT means "add" and UPDATE lets us change existing data in our tables. If you click on INSERT a default example will appear in the input box that looks like the following:

Click for larger image.

Let's pick this example apart before we modify it ourselves just to keep everyone on the same page.

• You'll notice INSERT INTO is the first thing we see followed by 'Usernames' in backticks. This is pretty self explanatory, "insert this data into our Usernames table."
• Next, we have 'username' and 'uniqueid' inside the first set of parenthesis. These are the names of the columns where we're going to insert the data. If you remember when we created our Usernames table we have 1 column named username and another named uniqueid. These names MUST match the exact name of the column. If we put username1 instead of username we would get a "Unknown column 'username1'..." error.
• Finally, we have the VALUES statement. The number of arguments in the parenthesis must match the number of arguments in our INSERT INTO statement parenthesis. Since we want to add a username and uniqueid into Usernames, we need to supply 2 values that correspond to those arguments.

Let's fill out the full query and run it to see what happens. Replace the [value-1] and [value-2] values with data of your liking. The first argument, [value-1], corresponds to our username argument so let's change [value-1] to 'jeff' (make sure to add the single quotes around it). Our second argument relates to uniqueid so let's add a random unique id just for the purpose of this article: 'abc123'. The final query ends up looking like this:

Press Go in the bottom-right corner and the result of the query will be posted above the input box. If it succeeds it should say something similar to "1 row inserted." Let's navigate to the Browse tab at the top so we can look at our newly created data in the Usernames table. NOTE: notice that 'Usernames' and the INSERT INTO variables (username and uniqueid) in the example code that is generated have backticks around them, while our VALUES (jeff and abc123) have single quotes around them. Backticks are used in table names and column identifiers and that is to avoid issues with reserved keywords (like if you wanted to name your table 'null' for some reason). I don't use backticks so they won't be included past this point, they're just included so you know to look out for them in the future. Single quotes are used around string variables and those will be used anytime we're entering values.  You should see the new entry near the middle of the screen:

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You'll also that notice near the top of the screen it shows the current SQL query that was run to display the current results:

It's selecting all the data from the Usernames table and returning results 0-30.

Now that we've added a user to our Usernames table we can add data to either of our leaderboard tables; Arcade and Challenge. Remember when we setup the Foreign Keys to attach the username column in our leaderboard tables to the username column in our Usernames table? We had to insert a user into our Usernames table before we could add data to our leaderboard tables. If we tried to add data to our leaderboard table and we specified a username that doesn't exist in our Usernames table we would get an error similar to "Cannot add or update a child row: a foreign key constraint fails" and this is because we must reference an existing username in our Usernames table. This might seem like added complexity (if you didn't want to support Users changing their names then it would be) but for our needs it's necessary.

Let's open up our Arcade table and insert some scores into it. Navigate to the SQL tab like before and click on INSERT underneath the input box. We'll get a familiar looking INSERT INTO statement but this one has 4 arguments instead of 2; id, username, score and timestamp. Lets fill in the values with some actual data:

For the id argument we pass in null. This is because it's setup to auto-increment automatically without us expressing a unique index ourselves. For the username argument we must pass in an existing username (from the Usernames table) so I'll pass in 'jeff' since that's what I used beforehand. The score argument can be any integer value that has a length of 10 or less so I just used '465'. Finally, the timestamp argument is setup to use the CURRENT_TIMESTAMP as the default and we'll use that which is signified by writing DEFAULT. In the future we won't specify the id and timestamp arguments since they will default to acceptable values, so let's add another score to our Arcade leaderboard without using those arguments:

Add 3 more random scores into our Arcade table so we have a total of 5. After you add those scores click on the Browse tab to verify that we have 5 scores saved in our table.

Click for larger image.

SELECT

Now that we've learned how to insert some data into our tables, how can we read the data? We can use the SELECT statement to choose which data we want returned in our query. Let's go back into the SQL tab for our Arcade table. If we want to view all of the data in the table we can use the following query:

Which reads as "SELECT everything FROM our Arcade table". If you haven't caught on yet, after the FROM statement we always specify the name of a table in our database. In our case we'll always have either Arcade, Challenge or Usernames after any FROM statement. What if we just want to see how many rows (i.e. scores) are in our Arcade table? We could use the following query:

This returns an integer with the number of entries we have, so in our case it should return 5. What if we wanted to return scores that are greater than a certain value?

This will return all scores that are greater than 300. The WHERE statement is an extra condition that must be met to the returned data. We'll use this one in almost all of our queries so we can get only the data we want. There's no reason to return all the data in our table then sort through it later using PHP (or whatever language you're using) because that's just a waste of resources and bandwidth. What if we want to order our scores from lowest to highest?

This will order scores ASCENDING in value, so from the lowest values to the highest. Finally, how do we return a certain number of scores or return a certain page of scores? Pagination is something we'll do when we want to display our score because we don't want to display all the scores at once, we just want to show scores 10 at a time, for example, like 1-10, 11-20, etc.

This will start at row 0 and display 3 scores. If we wanted to show our bottom 2 scores we could use LIMIT 3, 2 (start at row 3 and display 2 scores).

That's it for our quick SQL lesson! There's quite a bit more complicated SQL queries that we can run and we'll tackle those as we come across them in the next part where we'll start using PHP so we can communicate with our database from the outside.