The Unity/VR learning curve hadn’t left me space to tackle unit testing until now. Well, it had, but my initial encounter was so bad that I decided to leave it until I had a little more time to look again.
Well, at the moment I’m building out the basic structures for handling a more fluid and complete user experience, so a reliable structure and repeatable experience is essential – so it’s time for Test Driven Development.
I may extend this post as time goes by with tips and tricks as I encounter them, but first off – the unit testing won’t work unless you explicitly create assemblies for the relevant parts of a project. In this case:
I needed to create an assembly “Hackademy” for the spike (pre-prototype code) I’m developing, which then references the “EyeSkills” assembly (so it was able to find the relevant EyeSkills framework classes), so that the “Tests” Assembly could then reference the “Hackademy” assembly (so that the tests could find my scripts to test). It was also necessary to explicitly reference the “EyeSkills” assembly in the “Tests” assembly so I could create Mocks referencing interfaces within the Framework.
It’s also worth pointing out that, despite running from within the context of a unit test and within the EyeSkills namespace, any classes doing dynamic loading from within the Framework will fail to find classes only in the testing assembly. You need to move them into the same assembly which will be looking for them. A bit weak really.
Annoying. Clunky. Poorly documented.
As usual, Unity’s IDE also failed to keep track of alterations to the assembly files (I needed to delete and recreate the Framework folder) causing a terrible mess which was only fixed after semi-randomly deleting .meta files and several restarts of Unity. The IDE has now reached a level of software quality where it is almost inevitably a buy-out target for Microsoft.
For all my occasionally deep dissatisfaction, however, when Unity works it works well, handles every situation imaginable, and does get the job done. It’s not perfect, but then, perfect is the enemy of the good!
