Tests that catch art bugs, tall walls and war beasts

I kept catching art bugs myself. Newt legs on the newt’s back, then floating in the air. Rat heads drifting out in front of their bodies. A rider’s leg on the wrong side of the horse. Every unit is built from parts, so there are thousands of combinations, and I can’t look at all of them.

So I asked for a way to guarantee it without anyone having to look, and we stopped all unit work until we had one.

Checking the art without looking

The placement check builds every unit in 3D, in all eight directions it can face, and measures it. Feet on the ground, every part where it should be, nothing cutting through anything else, and the right things drawn in front. Every bug I’d caught became a test that has to fail on the old code. Anything new goes through it before I ever see it now.

Everything got a lot faster along the way too. The full AI test went from 20-40 minutes down to about one, and building two armies in the lobby from 27 seconds to 3.

Walls

Walls are tall now, with proper gatehouses and towers, and your soldiers stand on top of them. Archers up on the walkway, ladders and siege towers to get up there, and defenders pouring things on whoever’s at the gate.

War beasts

Every race got something big. Elephants, war boars, a tarantula, a heron or a mantis depending on who they are, with soldiers riding on top. The frogs’ great sling is a bullfrog that jumps on the arm to throw, rats ride cats, and frogs ride newts.

Races got more of their own character too, with six bonuses each, their own research and a few things they lack.

One last thing. I reported that the enemy was “the same race” as me. It wasn’t. My own poison-red frogs were just the same red as the other team.