seopardy/Readme.md

Seopardy
========
What this is
------------
Seopardy is an implementation of the game "Jeopardy" and a
reimplementation/clone of the software "beopardy", mostly known for being
used in the Chaos Communication Congress Hacker-Jeopardy.


Installation & Requirements
---------------------------
To run this software you need:

 * python (python2)
 * python-pyside
 * python-pyside.phonon (for music)
 * python-yaml / PyYAML
 * python-serial / pyserial

To play a game I recommend:

 * a question file
 * music!
    * start song (played while naming players)
    * question song (played while question is displayed)
    * end song (played while victory window is shown)
 * a configuration file - just copy seopardy.conf.dist to seopardy.conf
 * buttons for player input


The Question File
-----------------
The game needs questions to run the game. A question file is a yaml-file
containing either all questions or a link to the respective files containing
said questions.

The top-level question file contains two keys:

 - Name (name of the round, displayed on top of the board)
 - Sections (a list of question files with sections to include)

Example:

	Name: Round 2
	Sections:
	    - test.q
		- cpu.q
		- extra/foo.q
		- xkcd.q

A question file containing sections can contain an arbitrary number of sections.
Each section needs to have exactly five questions. A question can have the
following keys:

 - Name (to remind you of the question number)
 - Question (text/image/... displayed on screen)
 - Answer (to remind you of the answer, not used in the program)
 - Type (type of question)
 - Double-Jeopardy (if the question is a Double-Jeopardy, default false)
 - Audio (for videos, if the video should have audio or not, default false)

Five *Types* of question are supported:

 - Text: The text is normally displayed on screen
 - Code: The code is displayed with a monospace font, tabs are replaced with
         four spaces
 - Image: The Question key is a path to an image, which is displayed on screen
 - Music: The Question key is a path to a music file, which is played
 - Video: The Question key is a path to a video file, which is played

Example:

	 - Section: Test
	   Questions:
	     - Name: Question 1
		   Question: This text is displayed
		   Answer: This is never displayed, only for you to remember the answer
		   Type: Text
	
	     - Name: Question 2
		   Question: path/to/test.png
		   Answer: Bar
		   Type: Image
	...

Gamestate
---------
To prevent you from losing the current gamestate in case of a crash,
seopardy saves its interal state as a yaml file after each question.
You can specify a directory where the gamestates are stored in the config
file and load a state with the --gamestate parameter.


Player Input
------------
To get the input from a button (aka "the outside world") into the game,
two classes are available:

*Fifo* creates a fifo in your local filesystem, first argument being the
path to where the fifo should be created. To emit a button press you can
simply write an ASCII-number into the fifo, corresponding to the player
which pressed a button. All other characters are ignored.

*Serial* reads from a serial device using pyserial. Parameters are path to the
device, baudrate (default 9600), parity (default N) and stop-bits (default 1).
As with the fifo, an ASCII-number for the player which pressed a button is
expected. All other characters are ignored.

Writing an own class for player input should be fairly easy. Within its own
thread the class can do whatever it wants (including blocking I/O). When it
wants to signal a button was pressed it just needs to emit a ButtonEvent.
An input class has two functions which are called while a question is on
display:

 - `buzzersOpen(isOpen)` is called, when the question is first displayed,
    when the question is reopened after a false answer, when the question is
	closed after either a correct answer or no answer at all or when a
	button for an unknown player was submitted.

 - `playerGotQuestion(playerNo)` is called, whenever a player pressed
    their button *and* got the turn to answer. Note that no extra
	buzzers-are-closed (`buzzersOpen(False)`) event is sent, when a button
	is pressed.


Known Bugs
----------

 * The focus order and focus setting for the question-answer-editing and the
   double-jeopardy window is somewhat broken.
 * The input threads are currently not shut down correctly, leaving some ugly
   output on the console when exiting the game.
 * Stylesheets for buttons/labels could be more centrally managed and more
   consistent.