Parlance 1.4.1

A framework for playing the Diplomacy board game over a network.

About Parlance

Parlance is a framework for playing the Diplomacy board game over a network, using the protocol and message syntax developed by the Diplomacy AI Development Environment (DAIDE) community.

The Parlance server differs from the official DAIDE server in that it can serve multiple games (consecutively or concurrently), is more configurable, can be managed remotely through admin commands, and accepts a slightly broader message syntax.

Parlance also includes a framework for clients, along with a simple bot to replace an absent player. This framework has also been used by the clients of the Parang package.

Parlance may be used, modified, and/or redistributed under the terms of the Artistic License 2.0, as published by the Perl Foundation.

Commands

Parlance installs the following commands:

parlance-server

Starts a game server

parlance-holdbot

Starts one or more HoldBots

parlance-config

Prints out an example configuration file

parlance-raw-client

Connects to a server, translating network messages to and from DAIDE message syntax on standard input and output.

parlance-raw-server:

Listens for clients, translating network messages to and from DAIDE message syntax on standard input and output.

Installation

Parlance can be installed with Easy Install from a command prompt:

> easy_install parlance

Alternatively, once you have downloaded and unpacked a source distribution, you can install it with:

> python setup.py install

Credits

• Daniel Loeb started the Diplomacy Programming Project in 1990, developing a language for communication between computer players and a GM.

• Andrew Rose developed the network protocol used to connect clients to the server, and wrote a DLL implementation of it.

• David Norman extended the DPP communication language into the DAIDE message syntax, translated several variant maps into it, and wrote the first full-featured server, bot, and graphical player interface to use the DAIDE protocols.

• Eric Wald wrote the first versions of Parlance to extend the DAIDE environment to non-Windows platforms, particularly Linux.