AutoPBW Manual

Configuring login information

This is fairly self-explanatory; just enter your PBW username and password on the "Settings" tab and click "Save".

Configuring game engines

AutoPBW comes with preconfigured settings for all game engines supported by PBW, but you will need to set the paths to the game executables. Note that for SE4 and SE5, you will want to use separate instances of the game for playing and hosting, as the games create temporary files which will overwrite each other if you run more than one instance of the game at once. (AutoPBW never attempts to run more than one hosted game at a time for this reason.)

If you do need to customize these settings (e.g. PBW adds support for new game engines, or I made a mistake in the configuration files), be aware that the configuration fields (except the "Code" field) support support a variety of replacement strings:

• {Executable}: The game engine executable, as specified in the Host Executable or Player Executable field as appropriate.
• {EnginePath}: The folder containing the executable.
• {ModPath}: The path to the mod being played (relative to the engine's mods path, see "Configuring Mods" below)
• {SavePath}: The path to the mod's savegame folder (relative to the engine path).
• {Password}: The password used to log in as the host or player, as appropriate.
• {GameCode}: The unique alphanumeric code used to refer to the game being played on PBW.
• {TurnNumber}: The current turn number.

Additionally, the following replacement strings are supported only by the player fields:

• {PlayerNumber}: The player's number in the game, e.g. if he is the first player it will be 1.
• {PlayerNumber2}: The player's number in the game, padded with zeroes to two digits, e.g. if he is the first player it will be 01.
• {PlayerNumber3}: The player's number in the game, padded with zeroes to three digits, e.g. if he is the first player it will be 001.
• {PlayerNumber4}: The player's number in the game, padded with zeroes to four digits, e.g. if he is the first player it will be 0001.

Configuring mods

When AutoPBW encounters a mod being used on PBW for the first time, it automatically creates a blank configuration entry for that mod. You will, however, need to fill in a few fields:

• Path: The path to the mod, relative to the game engine's mods folder. This varies depending on the game engine - for SE5, that is the GameTypes folder, and for FrEee and THANCS, that is the Mods folder, but for SE4 it's the root SE4 folder, and for EH, it's irrelevant as EH doesn't actually have mods.
• Save Path: The path to the mod's savegame folder, relative to the game engine's root folder. For SE4, this is typically set to a Savegame folder under the mod's folder, and for other games it is typically set to a Savegame folder under the engine's root folder (though you can do this for SE4 as well if you like).
• Empire Path: The path to the mod's empire folder, relative to the game engine's root folder. For SE4 and FrEee, this is typically set to an Empires folder under the mod's folder (or just use "Empires" to place it under the engine root), for SE5 it is SavedEmpires, for THANCS you would use a dot (".") since THANCS "empires" (ship designs) are stored in the engine root folder, and for EH this is irrelevant as EH doesn't use empire files.

1.1

• Log tab in GUI
• Tooltips for configuration fields
• HTML documentation
• Preinstalled configuration data for a variety of mods (SE4 mods are flagged as unknown since their installation folders can vary)
• Clicking a balloon tip on the tray icon will now bring you to an appropriate place in the GUI (e.g clicking a "game ready to play" balloon will take you to that game).
• If PBW's SSL certificate is expired, you can now force AutoPBW to log in anyway.
• Logging for turn processing failures.
• Reset button, for when PBW goes down and AutoPBW stalls.
• Games now show what mod they are using in the games lists.
• Tray icon tooltip notifying when PBW is down
• Logging of unhandled exceptions to errorlog.txt for debugging
• Player game list now tells you what your player number is. This should help when you are playing multiple slots in a game.
• You can now enable or disable hosting of games on the settings tab. (Defaults to disabled, so if you were hosting games before, you will need to enable it.)
• "View" button to take you to the PBW webpage for the selected game.
• "Browse" buttons to choose a host and player executable for a game engine.
• Option to hide games where you are player zero (e.g. hosting a THANCS game).
• Replaced some popup dialogs with additional tray icon balloon tips to avoid spamming dialogs.
• Improved highlighting styles of lists and grids to make them clearer and more consistent.
• Increased timeout on file uploads to 10 minutes, to allow for larger files.
• Grid columns will auto expand and contract as the window is resized horizontally.
• Notifications that PBW is down will only appear once.
• If processing fails, AutoPBW should place a hold on a game.
• If a mod's engine gets set to null somehow, AutoPBW should not crash.
• If AutoPBW is minimized to the system tray, and you try to open another instance, the old instance's GUI should appear, instead of nothing happening.
• If AutoPBW is minimized or unfocused, double-clicking the tray icon will now restore or activate it.
• Disabled useless multi-select on various lists/grids.
• Launching of FrEee games (you will need to delete the configuration for the FrEee engine and any of its mods, then let AutoPBW repopulate it from the defaults, if you are running an older version of AutoPBW)
• Launching of THANCS games (you will need to change {TurNumber} to {TurnNumber} in the THANCS engine configuration if you are running an older version).
• "Illegal characters in path" error preventing games from being placed on hold
• Turns were being processed twice if they were taking too long to upload
• Disappearing GUI when resizing window vertically
• AutoPBW should not longer display errors when refreshing the games list if you occupy more than one player slot in a game (e.g. a THANCS game where you are the host).
• Clarified the difference between "waiting for PLR" and "waiting for EMP" in the games list, regarding THANCS "host-players" (player zero).
• Possibly fixed occasional crash when processing turn
• Improved performance of operations which involve retrieving XML data from PBW (geting games list, etc.)
• Names of files downloaded from PBW for game hosting are converted to lower case, since SE4 likes lowercase filenames.

1.0

• Initial release