What is Rob the database?

WoA is quite a complex game, imagine if you had to work out the orders of every team each week? I know that I used to and it took a long time. That's why I made Rob the database.

The name Rob was chosen in memory of a player that has passed away. Rob Baxendale will always be remembered by the World of Arl.

Rob the Database is simply a tool to help run the game, it handles the creation of the map each turn, the downloading of orders, the storing of information and automatic update of the Team Information topics. It's quite a big program.

For those that enjoy programming, the first version of Rob was written in PHP and weighed in at 20,000 lines of code or 1.6MB of text. Rob2 is still being written and is a complete rewrite of the system in Python.

What can Rob not do?

Rob cannot do everything (though I'm working hard to fix that) and as such there are some things that he cannot do. For example, if you have a crazy and wacky idea of a way to do something I may not be able to add it in right away, if you tell me your idea before you want to use it then I can probably get everything sorted in Rob in time for your idea.

Rob has two main functions: management and orders/results.

Management

Rob stores information on nearly everything in the game. Your team resources, military units, research, cities and more. This means that if there's a mistake that it can be corrected quickly and then all places that the information is kept can be updated very fast. A good example of this would be a city being placed in the wrong location, it is very easy to move the city and update the map.

Orders/Results

The main purpose of Rob is to assist in the reading of orders and creation of the results for those orders. Rob makes the boring and monotonous task of working out if a city can build a given building easy. Rob reads English orders and at all stages the system will cater to you the player before it caters to Rob the Database. The only thing to keep in mind is that spelling mistakes can be quite a problem, Rob tries to work around them but sometimes there's simply no way to guess what the word actually is.

As a solution to most spelling mistakes is to use an orders helper form linked to from the team information topic. It is much like Rob and does all the hard work for you.

Rob requests

The coolest thing about Rob however not that he automatically makes the map and TO for me or that he automatically collect orders. The coolest part is that despite being stored on my computer, you can access him too. Each team forum has a topic called "Rob requests", if you post orders to that then message Rob on MSN you can get him to test-run the orders for you. The test run can't take into account the orders of other nations but for 99% of things will give an identical result to normal.

Rob's MSN address is rob@woarl.com and he's running most hours of the day. I am still working on making Rob use the PM system of the forum.