Using Battle Test Profiles for Efficient Testing
This article discusses some techniques to speed up your battle testing. Battle testing is used for a variety of purposes, such as checking balance between enemies and actors. It might be used to determine how long a battle lasts, given a number of scenarios such as which actors you’re using, what states they have, which items you carry, what skills you’ve learned, and so on.
If you battle test extensively and find yourself manually setting up the test environment, some techniques described here may be useful.
Background
Battle testing is an option that is available through the troop editor in the database. When you click the battle test button, you are presented with the battle test setup dialog.
In this dialog, you can
- choose up to 4 actors
- choose their levels
- choose their equips
And then proceed to a battle simulation with the selected troop.
Setting up the Test Environment
I have listed the three things that you can do to set up the battle test. But there are obviously other things that you may want to consider
- Actor states (can you apply buffs before entering battle?)
- Actor class (can you change classes in the game?)
- Items in your inventory
And many more. The battle test setup doesn’t support any of these, so you need a different solution.
Battle Test Event Setup
If you can’t set it up through the battle test setup, you can just set it up during battle!
Take one of your event pages, have it run on turn zero (before the battle begins), and then set up the test environment. You can now add states, change classes, change HP/MP, make any necessary script calls, and now you have a battle configuration that you wish to test.
Anything that the editor doesn’t support can be done here. For example, if you’re using custom equip slots, this is probably where you will equipping them.
Some things that you might need to note:
- You do not have any weapons or armors in your inventory. If you want to equip specific weapons or armors, you must add them to your inventory
Managing Multiple Battle Test Profiles
Now that we have one page set up with all of the configurations for one battle, we can just keep it around so we can use it in the future.
You can extend this idea to multiple test profiles. Simply create additional event pages and add your configuration settings. Remember to set the run condition appropriately so they don’t all run at the same time.
Combining Multiple Test Profiles
I mentioned that you should set the run conditions appropriately, because they might all run at the same time. On the other hand, you might want to take advantage of this behaviour to combine different test configurations together.
For example, page one might set up the actors. Page two might set up the states. Page three might set up certain equips. This allows you to reduce redundancy by sharing configuration options between different profiles.
Working with a Test Troop
All of these profiles allow you to save test configurations, but these profiles are all for testing purposes. You don’t want to accidentally leave it in one of your troops.
Consider creating a copy of the troop you want to test and performing all of the testing there.
Closing
Having to set up test configurations manually is a tedious process. If you can make use of event pages for keeping track of all of these tests, you may find it much faster to test your battles.
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