October 30, 2003
Yes, it has been a while since the last update. I have been very busy with
a great many other things, not the least of which being graduating and
finding a job. Now the time has come to revive the DiploVariance project
and reformulate the scope of the project. It's time to get this thing off
the ground!
March 12, 2001
The DiploVariance project has decided to spearhead the Diplomacy DTD
project, which aims to provide a universal XML DTD for representing
Diplomacy data. As such, the recently released MDL documents have been
marked "deprecated". The DiploVariance Judge will support the Diplomacy
DTD in all its aspects, which will tentatively include game state
preservation, ordering, adjudication results, map description, and
session management. The Diplomacy DTD represents the advancement of
Internet Diplomacy into a new age, where clients and adjudicators, both
email- and web-based; real-time servers and clients; and auxiliary
programs, including mapmakers and AI, can freely communicate.
"My God, it'll be beautiful." -- Judge Doom, Who Framed Roger Rabbit
March 2, 2001
Two documents have now been published on SourceForge. The first is an
initial draft of the Map Description Language (MDL) that variant
designers can use to describe the details of their map to the DV Judge.
The second is a sample MDL file, describing the Standard Diplomacy map.
It was generated from the Ken Lowe Judge description file by means of a
hack of a Perl script. Hit the 'Docs' section of the project site and
check them out.
While the DV Judge slowly becomes a reality, check out the Variant Bank, which contains every officially recognized and classified variant. Especially interesting are the articles on variant design and strategy.