Overview

Randomises team and civilization selection for typical RTS computer games, specifically for Age Of Empires 2: The Conquerors Expansion. It is aimed at online play on [You must login to view link] servers and is intended to initially be used for DM games with options for expansion through the Script text files found under the Script folder. The program is designed to produce fairish random team and civilization selection with a variety of options available. The programs' each have there own license applied to them.


How To Use

The operation of the Randomiser program sends text information to the text caret and in effect through the in-game lobby. After installation it is recommended to go into the TCR folder (from the shortcut that was put onto the desktop). Double click the 'atest.txt' file to bring it into a text editor, double click any .bat file to load up the program (which also puts it into a background state after a few seconds), give focus to the text editor and click the top-left point of the text file to set you the text caret actively up there, press Ctrl+1 to print the team and civ table to the active text caret, and afterwards it will exit the program. You can see if the program is active or not by checking the system tray in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen. To Store player information see "How It Operates".

For Actual operation you would enter into the in-game lobby. Startup the Picker program. Assign the user data via the Picker program through the clipboard (Ctrl+C) and selection of the in-game lobby chat text with typing in "!Rating". but if not then you will need to either retrieve the data via the clipboard (Ctrl+C) from the Lobby Room or manually into the program via pressing Ctrl+2.

After gathering that information then whilst in the in-game lobby startup the Randomiser program via a .bat file. Assign the text caret to the input box and press Ctrl+1 to again post the information to the active text caret.


Simple Overview On How It Operates

The Picker program is used to store user data to file to be used later by the Randomiser program. Press Ctrl+7 for the program's tips on how to utilise the tool. User data that you create via the Picker program contains information on the player name / rating / players_together_group, for later use in the Randomiser program.

The Randomiser program is used to randomise team and civilization selection based on a variety of options passed in from text files listed under the Scripts folder and through arguments passed into the program via the command line with the help of execution from .bat files (not the main executable for the Randomiser program).


Additional Functionality Offered By The Program

The Randomiser has additional functionality in terms of randomly selecting a bunch of rules, which map to play on and randomly coining a value (giving you Heads or Tails).


Alteration Of The Program

The operation of the Randomiser can be modified through a series of text files found under the Scripts folder and through right-clicking any .bat file (preferably copying the file and then right-clicking again) and select edit which should bring up the default text editor with data written like..

Fooba_Team_and_Civ_Randomiser.exe argument1 argument2 argument3 .. argument#
exit

Just simply alter/add/remove the arguments. See the Guide.odt file which will tell you all about how to use the program and at the bottom is a list of the possible arguments you can pass in, and what they do (although for obvious reasons not all arguments will work with each other and should overrule the information as opposed to crashing or causing indefinite loops).

Tutorials

Picker Tutorial
Randomiser Tutorial


License Information And Downloads

The programs are copyrighted under Pirateware - [You must login to view link]

The program can be directly downloaded from http://www.voobly.com/files/prompt/22140354

The sourcecode can be directly downloaded from http://www.voobly.com/files/prompt/22139883

The files can also be downloaded from [You must login to view link]


The Future

I want ratings to be an automated process along side Voobly, or the !Rating mod to be extended to assign data to the system clipboard which would allow for extremely easy gathering of user data (which is its biggest thorn since at the moment in order to use it, it will take a lot of energy by the host or the one doing it).