A-Frame Machinima Testing

Machinima testing is the process of playing back motion-captured user interactions in an automated testing enviroment. This repo includes all of the configuration required to add machinima testing to your A-Frame WebVR development workflow using the aframe-motion-capture-components in a Karma/Mocha testing framework.

News

• Changed specification of the recording file to be at the test level, so a suite can run tests against multiple recording files for a scene

Workflow

1. Create an HTML A-Frame scene for testing in machinima_testing/scenes/
2. npm run record to serve the scene
3. Press spacebar to start recording
4. Perform user actions with your HMD and tracked controllers
5. Press spacebar to end the recording
6. Save the json recording file to machinima_testing/recordings/
7. Write a test suite that points to the scene and recording files
8. npm run test:machinima to replay the recording and run tests on the results

Injecting the scene into the test environment

The setup function in the example test file in this repo will read the a-scene from your test scene file, modify it to play back your recording, and inject it into the Karma test environment. All you need to do is specify scene file in the global variables at the top of the file and the recording files for each test where the src attribute of avatar-recorder is set on the scene.

Including components and Dependencies: As the script only injects the a-scene element and its contents, script tags in the head or body will not be avialable in the testing environment. Rather than linking to scripts, require the components and depenencies you need in tests/main.js, and they will be available both when recording and when testing.

Important settings

Here are the key configuration options that make this work:

karma.conf.js

• browserNoActivityTimeout: set longer than your longest recording to prevent Karma from abandoning the browser
• files: inlcude the scenes and serve the recordings
• preprocessors: use html2js to make the scene files available as a string in test setup

*.test.js

• this.timeout(0): set longer than your longest recording to prevent Mocha from abandoning the test (or 0 for no timeout)
• this.scene.addEventListener: listen for the 'replayingstopped' event to run assertions on the state at the end of the recording. Make sure to set once: true because this event is emitted multiple times and will break your cleanup otherwise.

__init.test.js

• setup: Leave the A-Frame render loop intact
• teardown: set scene-replayer.isReplaying = false to help with cleanup

package.json

• scipts: record and test:machina

Notes and Issues

• Firefox Nightly compatibility issue: this setup works with release versions of Chrome and Firefox as well Chromium WebVR, and they can all be run concurently without issues. Firefox Nightly will run the machinima tests correctly at first, but fails when re-running is triggered by Karma due to updated files
• A separate workflow for recording: initially, I had planned to the recording step to be completed from within a Karma debug window. This would help ensure the recording and testing environments were identical. Unfortunately, I could not get the tracked controllers to register under these conditions.