Online game testing using scenario-based control of massive virtual users

The stability and performance of game servers are major issues in online games because the online game servers must be able to handle and verify a large number of connections. Test automation has been used in order to reduce testing time of online game servers. In this paper, we propose the VENUS II system, which supports blackbox testing and scenario-based testing as well as simple load testing. The massive virtual clients automatically generate packet loads to test the stability of game servers like the existing approaches. The main difference, however, is that we used the game grammar and game map to describe the game logics instead of using dummy game client code. So the test client code doesn't need to be re-written when a new game is to be tested. And the complex scenarios such as attack, party play and waypoint movement can be tested and moreover effectively because the scenarios can be flexibly constructed by combining protocols and actions already defined in game grammar. We have applied our tools on the ELMA online game application to verify the effectiveness of our method.