Welcome! This site contains all the variant files which I have made
for DipChief.
Diplomatic
Chief of Staff, or DipChief for short, is a Diplomacy mapping program
written by Gary Pennington. It is intended for use with PBEM Judge output
files.Updates will be made periodically, with the addition of new variants
and the correction of old files, if necessary. The zip files contain a
.map and .bmp file, which should be unzipped to DipChief's /maps directory.
All map files support the supply centre function.
The bitmaps can be previewed here in gif form. In all cases I have modified
the maps provided by the variants' authors to some extent, for viewing
purposes.
For more variant files, written by others, refer to the Diplomatic Pouch Map Software
page (under DipChief). Rob Addison has some nice looking maps available at
the Rob
Addison's Diplomacy Maps page, and there is a nice Colonial map at
The Old Moulmein Pagoda (site currently down).
I test my files rigorously, but once in a while I overlook something,
or other problems crop up. Please email me if you encounter a problem with
the map files, or find any discrepencies.
06/25/99 - Unit graphics - Some DipChief users may see units represented as graphics
(cannons and cruisers, I believe). This was added in one of the last revisions
of DipChief, replacing the square-for-army and square-with-triangle-for-fleet
shapes. Unfortunately, the newer graphics never worked on my computer,
so all the coordinates I type in are optimized for the square and square+triangle
shapes (since this is the default display if the program detects a problem).
01/14/00 - RLE-compressed bitmaps - RLE-compressed bitmaps are
about 7 times smaller than regular bitmaps, so they save a lot of hard drive
space. So why haven't I used them until now? When I first tried them, they
didn't work properly with DipChief on my computer. However, since then,
I've changed my OS from Win95 to Win98 and used different graphics programs,
among other things, and for some reason it works now. For those of you
who can't get it to work, I'll still be posting the regular bitmaps along
with the compressed versions. For all but the World2 map, the two different bitmaps look identical. For World2, which has a high colour resolution, the shading looks a little rougher after RLE-compression.
Update note - I haven't made any real updates in years, just fixing the occasional dead link. However, if there are any problems, feel free to email me.
-Samy
