AWTools index

about

The AWTools are a collection of open-source CGIs that you can access in any web-browser. There is also "brownie" - a filtering web-proxy integrated into the AWTools. Both are designed to enhance the user experience of Astrowars players.

Tools Access Policy

Alliances can get AWTools access from me (greenbird). (Guest access is always available and always free)
As you can imagine, coding all these great things took me some months and even after it is written, running and maintaining it costs me some more (both time and money).
So if you want to have access, here is the deal:
In any case I promise to keep confidential and not pass on alliance-internal data (e.g. fleets, relations, intel), even if we were at war.

greenbird's AW Tools manual page

tactical

tactical shows 12x12 pixels per system with each line representing a planet and our status with the owner. See legend for their meanings. A little red bar on the right means, that the planet is sieged.
Find your coordinates by counting the brighter lines (each 10 squares) or by looking at the status bar (works at least with IE and mozilla). By clicking on a position you get to the system-info There is also a larger version (redrawn every 6h) which adds planning status color on the right half. If you want to see a map from current relations data you use tactical-live

system-info

system-info shows all available data about a system. population, starbase, plans and color-coded relationship with it's owner. Red background-color indicates a siege
Click the edit-planet-icon edit planet to get to the planet-info.
Click the relations-icon edit relations + intel to get to the relations of that player.
public profile and private profile will bring you to the public or personal AW profile of that player.
system-info also shows all current fleets which are automatically added by brownie or muffin tools (described below). It can also show 24h of fleet movement history.
There is a BB-export option to post plans in forums and an anonymous-export option which allows you to give access to your view of a single system to someone outside (e.g. for good coordination). Such an access link can be set to expire after a few days at the time of creation.

planet-info

planet-info displays information on one planet - especially about plans about which other alliance members will need to know.
Add your next expansion as "planned by" and change it to "targeted by" with ETA and fleet when you launched. And to "taken by" (or "lost") if you were (not) successful
Nowadays, the transition from planned status to targeted to sieged/taken is done automatically when you feed your fleets with brownie.
Hint: as relative measures of time do not make much sense in plannings, the tools try to automatically convert them to ISO date strings. Following things are converted: "yesterday", "today", "tomorrow", "in 3 days", "in 4 d", "in 27 hours", "in 36 h". Days of week(Tue, Sunday) will also be automatically extended with a date. You are encouraged to use those aforementioned or give an absolute date/time directly.

relations

relations (which should rather be called player-info) displays information on one player (TAG, status, uid and all his planet's locations, maybe intel reports) and allows you to change the relation status with him. Setting a relation for an alliance tag (e.g. TZAR) automatically counts for all official members that have no overriding entry.

alliance

the alliance tool shows most public information about players. The "need" column shows free culture and this is colored in red if some culture is free. The "intel" column will show races and age of intel reports. If available from feeding a player's science page, there will also be an estimated time to culture(ETC, red if ETC<24h).

feedupdate

feedupdate you can input HTML files from the game here. Currently player/profile, map/detail, fleet, news and alliance/detail pages are supported. It will produce more or less informative output, but the real important info is "automagically" added to the plannings or player databases. The modified entries are linked in the output.
in mozilla you can: But the preferred method of feeding the tools is to use brownie or old muffin's AWUpload or AWMangle

muffin

this part is outdated. see brownie below.
My muffin is a filtering HTTP proxy, copylefted under GPL and originating from http://muffin.doit.org.
I added two plugins to it: AWUpload and AWLink.
Notice: this section is obsolete now. See brownie below. As of 2006-01-14 last changes were done for muffin, but as brownie is better in nearly all aspects, brownie is now the recommended proxy to use and future development on muffin code will only include bugfixes. You can find more description in the old AWTools manual.

brownie

brownie usage instructions:
configure your browser to use proxy auto-configuration file https://aw.zq1.de/brownie.pac
as described in the proxy configuration guide
end of instructions ;-)

As hinted by the name, brownie and muffin are alike to each other... result of this being that you only need to use one of them. Some of the features (data feeding, color-coding, ETC display) will not work before your user-name is associated with an alliance - either automatically by official alliance tag or manually by the AWTools admin (i.e. greenbird).
If you can't use the brownie.pac for one reason or another there is one more method of how to use it. Just click here for AW 2.1.

How does it work

For the people interested in technology, here is some background info.
The hyper text transfer protocol (HTTP) allows for browsers to use a proxy server to relay a request for a resource (identified by a Uniform Resource Locator (URL)). The proxy usually forwards the request to the original server (some have caches and can answer right away). This design allows for the proxy to inspect and modify both, the request and the response, which is what brownie code does.
To let proxies work properly with AW it requires another thing: it must not be an anonymous proxy, i.e. it must tell the destination about the original IP. This works by adding the X-Forwarded-For HTTP header to the request with this information.

Sharing AWTools data with another alliance

Often enough you are closely cooperating with a nearby alliance (like AF+IS) or your two alliances are in fact one (like AA+XXX), so you wish to increase the benefits of my AWTools by sharing information directly within it.
This sharing is generally supported. It is possible to share all or only part of information. The parts are:
  1. fleets (including incomings, movements and defending fleets),
  2. incomings (only fleets marked as "incoming" ; ignored when fleet sharing is enabled)
  3. plans (the ones next to planets)
  4. intel reports (race+sciences, logins)
  5. internal data (ETC, production, saved A$/PP)
  6. online status (what you see in allies online display)
  7. and relations
The path to get such sharing is as follows: first, all sharing alliances must qualify for normal AWTools access as detailed in the "Tools Access Policy" section above. Now the founder of the alliance can give the other party read access to your data with the edit-sharing tool giving the tag of the other party, checking a few checkboxes and clicking edit. The other founder needs to do the same for you.
Relations are special, because they are only shared when both sides enabled their relations-checkbox.
If the above fails for you, this is the fallback method: I (that is the AWTools admin = greenbird) need confirmation from all sharing alliances that (and what) they want to share with whom (so one party saying they want to share with XYZ is not enough). This should suffice for me to set up sharing.

Sources

You can download many of my sources from the code dir.
If you are a coder and want your own nifty tools for your alliance, check out the developer-documentation.

More Tools

see ChangeLog

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