Dicemania is an Internet facility designed to bring together people from around the world, who enjoy playing dice games. Dicemania's aim is to contribute to the concept of the global village in which people can communicate with each other, exchanging ideas and information, regardless of the physical or cultural distance between them.
To achieve this Dicemania provides a variety of features including: the ability for people to play on-line games against each other, communicate via an interactive talker, share ideas through message boards, and to organize events such as world-wide tourn
aments.
Dicemania was initially developed for a degree project in Computer Science by Gary James. Work began in September 1996, with a single player version available in November. Artificial intelligence was then incorporated into the game, to provide automatic p layers. By January 1997 the game was encapsulated into a client/server system, resulting in the first multi-player version of Dicemania, made available in February 1997.
Since then, various improvements have been made, including the introduction of user accounts in September 1997. User accounts provide more control over the system, and allow game statistics to be stored for each user, introducing the various high score tables.
In January 1998, Dicemania moved from the University of Wales, Cardiff to the American Communications Company in Virginia, USA. The move brought faster access speeds to most users in North America and around the world. Dicemania is now based at the Public
NetXchange in Texas, USA.