What I'm REALLY Up To (Was: Readable GIF Maps...): The State of the Electronic Diplomacy Hobby According to Chris, the Sad Condition of Postal Diplomacy, the Danger of Commercial Severs, the Inadequacy of the Current Paradigm, the Eerie Sound of Maniacal Laughter and the Poor SOBs who Pay for it All...

On Mon, 4 May 2009 18:26:28 +0000 (UTC)
Jim Burgess <burgess@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Now we see why you don't actually finish these things.... ;-)

I never bother to make anything pretty, I just do stuff. ;-)

That is too mean. I'm going to assume that the winkies are there
because you are really providing me a segue to talk about my
acomplishments, which would admittedly be more impressive if they
did not have my ambitions to live up to. :-P

The reason that I haven't done much of anything before is that I've
been learning how to do it right. I could have had a PHP page up 3
years ago with an order entry form for USAK, but then I would still be
just as far today from a web site integrated with nJudge as I was then.

What usually happens with software development is that people get the
user interface done early then development stalls while they work on
the parts of the project that are less visible. I've been working on
the back end for 3 years. Most of it has been learning rather than
coding, but as a result I have a very sound and flexible design in
place. There aren't any hidden time sinks left. It's just a matter of
choosing which feature to implement next and doing it - one at a time.

If I was really a competent software engineer then I would be out
working instead of home collecting Social Security Disability and
playing with a Diplomacy server.

What I've managed to get done so far is the only email filter in the
hobby that actually uses the HTML part of a mail. This is important
because, although there has been agreement among those providing email
service that all email should contain a plain text part, the plain text
part provided by many clients is damaged. The usual method for
producing the plain text part of an email in web clients is to strip
out the HTML tags. Some clients, like Yahoo Mobile, even do this if the
message is sent as plain text only. The result is that some messages
lose their line spacing or contain character entities like "&#37;" and
may be unusable on a judge. A typical response from a judgekeeper or
server admin on this is that they are not going to support damaged
clients.

The web-based order entry form that I wrote is the only interface that
communicates in real time with an adjudication engine capable of
multiple simultaneous real time games. That's qualified enough to sound
contrived, so let me explain... DPjudge is not a real time engine. It
has a "real time" mode that allows orders to process as soon as all
orders are entered, but it can only enforce deadlines with a
granularity of 20 minutes with the default setup. Decreasing the
polling interval to 5 minutes or less is dangerous as it could rapidly
consume CPU and hard disk resources. Sites based on phpDip have a
polling interval of 5 minutes, but do not adjudicate until polled -
miss the server run and you wait for 5 more minutes. Most real time
games are played on DAIDE servers now with 5 minute deadlines. The
weakness of this system is that someone has to set up a server and
publish an announcement on a mailing list. As a consequence, few real
time games are played (1-2 per week), all are no press and there are
usually bots filling in some positions. With a persistent server
capable of multiple simultaneous games, it will be possible to have
more real time Diplomacy games and to have them more consistently
filled with human players. The web interfaces for USAL and DEUS send
messages to the mail server and do not provide a real time response.
Once I finish the maps, someone proficient in AJAX could turn my web
interface into a real time application with a couple hours worth of
code. I am *not* proficient with AJAX, so I will not be doing that
myself in a couple hours. Instead, I will work on other things and
hoping against hope that someone comes along before I reach the point
where it becomes worthwhile for me to take a couple weeks and do it
myself.

I'm hoping to provide an interface for nJudge that is functionally
complete for email and play by web before the end of the year. By that
I mean that players who are used to using a certain toolset (email
client, Floc tools, the DipPouch) will find that using using the USAK
site for games on USAK improves their games. After that, I'll provide
incremental improvements to the site and to the core functionality of
Diplomacy servers.

I don't expect that my most valuable contribution to the hobby will be
technological, however. I'm even less capable of communicating social
function than I am technological function, but I'm going to try anyway.

Diplomacy has a rich history of servers and 'zines providing venues for
the game that are free to play and distribution of content that is
either free or available for the "cost of media" - actually a net loss
for the publisher. That works well enough as long as there are
committed individuals with the resources to pay the bill for everyone
else.

The problem with this, besides the obvious inequity, is that the
economy no longer supports so readily the combination of resources
necessary for one person to both do the work and pay the bill for a
server or a publication. As servers and expectations become more
sophisticated, it's becoming more difficult to provide a quality
playing experience for multiple players on an individual budget. An
example of this... it took over 12 years after the second MIME
specification was finalized for there to be a compliant server
implementation in the hobby.

That and the fact that the most active server in the hobby has adopted
a subscription model leads me to think that there is a need right now
for a way to pool resources in the hobby for a player experience that
is consistent with both the general culture and the traditions of the
hobby. The network effect, the fact that more people using a service
adds to its value, means that the hobby needs a model for social and
technological growth that can scale upwards over 1000 active games in
order to provide enough value to fund a competitive quality of playing
experience. Just as important (to me) that playing experience should
continue to support the best traditions of the Diplomacy hobby - i.e.
non-profit, no advertisements and complete respect for the free will of
players to support the venue or not according their own assesment of
their resources and priorities.

The long and the short of it is that quality and availability of free
play in the Diplomacy hobby is in jeopardy. I completely respect Jim,
Millis and others who continue to provide for the hobby in their own
way. If we want games and other hobby resources to remain free, freely
available and worth producing for our lifespan, however, then we need
not only technology but also social structures that scale with size and
over time to take advantage of the network effect and create value for
the hobby.

Less than 6 months after I started accepting donations for USAK, it has
become self-supporting. Unless I have specific permission from the
donor, all donations go to operating expenses, which at this time
consists of the cost of the dedicated server, the domain name, and
other network services. Over and above that, there was a sizable
contribution in April that was given with explicit permission to use
for anything - even personal expenses - that I want. What I want to do
is draft a charter and form a non-profit hobby association to run USAK,
DANA and generally serve as an umbrella organization for any group or
association providing services for text-based social games, i.e. any
multiplayer interactive strategy or roleplaying game like Diplomacy or
Legend of the Green Dragon where distance play is realized in a text
protocol and play is enhanced by communication with other players.
(That could be *much* more succinct.)

In essence, I am creating a nonprofit hobby association with many of
the goals that I tried to shoehorn into DANA, but more general, and
donating whatever Intellectual Property I have associated with the
Diplomacy hobby to that organization, making every effort to add value
to that IP in the process. Just like my work on USAK, I'm taking my
time to do this right, because this isn't just about good maps and RFC
compliance, it's about social and legal structures that are even more
opaque than tech specs and legacy code. More importantly, it's about
the hobby owning its own infrastructure. There will always be room for
people to do their own thing. My goal is to create a pooled resource
so that those things are possible without being dependent on commercial
services like FaceBook and YahooGroups or resorting to a subscription
model like PlayDiplomacy.

Chris

PS - Yahoo is killing GeoCities. If you know of any Diplomacy sites on
GeoCities or any other 'free' hosting service, please encourage the
webmaster to contact me about free and ad-free hosting.

.