OpenAutomate (OA) is a standard API for simplifying the testing and benchmarking of applications. Applications that provide an OpenAutomate interface, can be controlled by any testing harness that is OpenAutomate compatible, without the harness knowing any specifics about the application a priori.
The application exposes the following functionality via the OpenAutomate interface:
These basic functions provide everything necessary to generically test almost any application.
OpenAutomate can be useful for anybody interested in testing applications in an efficient and automated fashion. These may include but are not limited to:
For application developers/publishers, adding OpenAutomate to your application allows the application to be used with any OpenAutomate compatible tools (e.g. oaMan). It also allows others (e.g. IHVs) to test your applications within their internal testing infrastructure with minimal custom development to integrate your application into their process.
OpenAutomate allows manipulation of application settings, and running benchmarks/tests for all OpenAutomate-enabled applications in a standardized, and centralized way.
For example, a user running oaMan with their OpenAutomate compatible applications can:
The ability to query and manipulate application settings combined with the the ability to run benchmarks/tests allows for a multitude of very interesting tools that can benefit users.
You can find the latest release of the OpenAutomate SDK and related tools at: openautomate.com
Questions related to OpenAutomate should be directed by email to OpenAutomate-Support@nvidia.com.
The OpenAutomate SDK is made freely available for integration into any application. Please refer to the LICENSE file included in the root directory of the SDK for more information.
OpenAutomate is free — both as in speech and as in beer — for anyone to integrate into their applications, tools, and testing infrastructure. The OpenAutomate SDK is provided in source form, and can be inspected and modified by anyone who is interested in doing so.
The only restriction is with the OpenAutomate name. Currently it is trademarked by NVIDIA. Any branches of the OpenAutomate SDK that are made public must either be approved by NVIDIA, or renamed to something other than OpenAutomate.
We've found that almost all developers can integrate OpenAutomate into their applications in less than a day, as long as they know their way around the options and benchmarking/testing functionality in their applications well enough.
The single hardest part of integrating OpenAutomate is not related to the OpenAutomate SDK; it's ensuring there is good benchmark/testing scaffolding as well as good benchmarks/tests within your application.
OpenAutomate is a very thin interface for querying and modify settings, as well as running benchmarks/tests. It can only expose existing benchmarks/tests within your application. It is not some magic way of adding useful tests to an existing application.
The OpenAutomate standard does not require that the entry executable for OpenAutomate to be the same as the main executable for your application. If your application needs to restart the application when settings are changed; it's best to create a porxy executable that exposes the OpenAutomate interface, can manipulate and query applications options, and starts and stops the main application executable when the OA_CMD_RUN_BENCHMARK command is issued.
See the "OpenAutomate Proxy Executables" section of the "OpenAutomate" document for more information.
Although adoption of OpenAutomate has primarily been within the game community, there is nothing specific about OpenAutomate that restricts it to games. OpenAutomate can just as easily be used with any type of application.
The OpenAutomate conformance test suite (oatest) is collection of various tests included with the OpenAutomate SDK, used to ensure that an application has OpenAutomate implemented correctly. Applications must pass oatest without any test failures in order to be "OpenAutomate compatible".
Please see the "oatest" document for more information.
OpenAutomate is currently compatible with any Win32, and Win64 operating systems (e.g. WinXP, Vista, Windows 7, ...) as well as POSIX compliant platforms (e.g. Linux, Cygwin, ...). However, OpenAutomate has currently only been extensively tested and used on Windows platforms.
OpenAutomate can be used with any type of application (see the "Is OpenAutomate only for games?" section within this document), and is not related to graphical applications and hence any graphics APIs.
OpenAutomate is hardware agnostic. As long as a particular hardware can run on one of the supported operating systems (see the "What operating systems does OpenAutomate support?" document), the hardware can support OpenAutomate.
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