How to run the game on CI

[jaapdeheer]

Great progress is being made on automated testing (see #566, #651 & friends). Ideally we will want to do this automated testing on CI.

That raises the question of how to get the complete game running on CI, for automated testing, without having the entire playable game in git (and thus publicly downloadable), which would of course violate EA's rights.
As far as I know, standard GitHub CI can only access files that are available in the repository (and thus public).

I can think of a couple options:

• use private CI runners that have the game installed (legally clean, but annoying, costs money and maintenance);
• put the whole game in git in an encrypted container (zip or whatever), decrypt it on CI with a GitHub Secret, make sure CI runs don't leave the game behind in any artifacts. GitHub Secrets are not in the repo and not public so that could perhaps kind of work. Secrets aren't trivially available to CI for PRs from forks, so this could be annoying, but it might work well enough. I don't love the idea of having an encrypted version of the whole game in the repo though - if the secret ever gets out, you've effectively publicly distributed the whole game;
• mutilate the game into an unplayable mess that still works, and put that in git (optionally encrypted). Make all the models/textures/etc into black squares or whatever, so that it's completely unusable for actual players, but can still run replays without mismatching etc. Make sure to remove the music since we don't need it and we don't want to be accidentally distributing that. Probably quite some work, but no risk of ever accidentally distributing a playable game.

Thoughts?

[JohnsterID]

As the project unifies the two different games more. Possibility to use Generals Demo data: #679

[xezon]

I believe this is of no use, because we need exact game data (maps, models, ini, scb) to run replays.

[roossienb]

Demo is lacking data for multiplayer. Demo is also not availabke for Zero hour