About this software:
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This program is an attempt of an automated adjudicator for
the boardgame Diplomacy™.



What is Diplomacy?
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Diplomacy™ is a boardgame and was created around 1954 from Allan Brian Calhamer.
Diplomacy™ is a trademark of Avalon Hill, a division of Hasbro, Inc.



Isn't there a software for that?
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Yes, Ken Lowe has write a program in the late 1980s.
The software was improved from several different programmers,
but the program has many flaws:
  - can only run one time at same time.
  - can only read emails with ASCII-plaintext.
  - it is slow, because the program must be loaded for every email.
  - a bunch of work was done by scripts (or other software) around the program.
  - can only work with emails, there are no local interfaces.
    (in example: for a webserver)
  - can only read and answer in english (detriment of ASCII-plaintext).

The goal of judged is:
  - can run more than one at same time
  - work with MIME-emails
  - work completely with UTF-8 encoding
  - run as daemon
  - need no other scripts/programs
  - have fifo, unix-socket and inet-socket as interface
  - support for other languages (with conf-files)

The name 'judged' stay for 'judge' (shorthand for Adjudicator)
and the ending 'd' stays for 'daemon' (like many programs on Unix/Linux).
If you study the source code, you will find many comments from my tests.
Many comments are in german, because i life in Austria (sorry for
my horrible english at this point).



How come the idea of a new program?
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I found in spring 2012 a site (http://www.lepanto.de/) where i can play
Diplomacy per email. I'm a fan of this boardgame and this judge (DEUS)
was translated to german. So i'm starting to play Diplomacy per email.
In june 2012, the judge was gone. After a couple of days, i become
the message, that the judgekeeper (Dietmar Kulsch) is died.
But i have contact with the webmaster (Martin Asal) and he has
a shell-login on the server where DEUS and DEAC was hosted.
He give me the account-data (it was a root-account) and i go to
my server and copied all files per ssh (judge, gamedata, website, etc.).
The webmaster an i worked the full july and in august the judges
goes online under http://www.lepanto.at/.
It was a hard work, i have never seen this software before.
At this time, i saw the fragile workchain with many scripts and programs.
Now, where the judges run stable, i work on a better program to
eliminate the flaws from the old software.



Sascha Reißner
Judgekeeper of DEUS and DEAC