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There has been a Real Time Diplomacy Hobby for many years. The idea is simple. Games are played over the internet, with short deadlines (e.g. 6 minutes per turn) and no press, so that a whole game can be played in one session. For a long time, Real Time games have been played by e-mail, using the standard Diplomacy Judges. This sometimes worked, but more often than not, someone would not receive their e-mail from the judge fast enough to be able to keep up with the deadlines, or the judge would crash just as the game was getting into full swing, or after 5 hours someone would have to leave with the game up to 1908 or 1910, and a replacement could not be found. Occasionally a game completed, but more often than not, they were either abandoned, or were converted to 24 hour deadline games so that they could be completed. But then at the start of this year, things changed. The Diplomacy AI Development Environment (DAIDE) Project is developing a whole new system for playing Diplomacy, specifically aimed at allowing AIs to play against each other. However, as part of this project, the DAIDE Server and DAIDE Mapper have been developed. The DAIDE Server runs a game of Diplomacy, allowing Clients to directly connect to it using TCP/IP, either locally or over the Internet. The DAIDE Mapper is one such Client, which allows a human to play a power in the game. This has caused a huge improvement to Real Time games. Everything works better. Because a direct connection is made between the client and the server, there are no longer problems with e-mail delays. Confirmation of orders entered are received instantly from the server, and when the turn processes, the client is immediately updated. And because the orders are entered using a dedicated program rather than an e-mail client, orders can be entered using point-and-click on the map, rather than having to type them out. All this means that the games now progress about 5 times faster. A typical DAIDE Real Time game will progress at about 8 game-years per hour. A full game lasts 2 or 3 hours, and usually ends in a solo or an agreed draw, rather than in people having to leave the game to sleep or eat. Of course, it doesn't always work perfectly. This is the Internet after all! Sometimes someone will lose connectivity - in the same way that sometimes a webpage that usually works fine, becomes very slow, or completely inaccessible for a while. But the success rate is hugely better than it was using the Judges. The most common reason for not getting a game played to completion is now lack of players to form a game, where as before it was lack of time or technical failure. So who's for a game? If you are, then there are two places to go:
Hopefully we'll see you in a game soon.
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David Norman (david@ellought.demon.co.uk)
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