seopardy

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.

BeopardySerial mimics the protocol used by the Beopary software. It reads from a serial device and takes the same arguments as Serial, but in addition to taking button presses from the serial it also gives feedback about the current gamestate.

Unix opens up a unix domain socket on your local filesystem, first argument being the path to where it should be created. To send a player button press, send its ASCII number (‘1’-‘9’ is supported). The board will send a ‘O’ if the buzzers (buttons) are open and a ‘C’ when they are closed. To indicate that it is a player’s turn the board will send a “TX”, where X is the current player’s number (e.g. “T3” for player 3).

Examples:

# use BeopardySerial
playerInput:
 - Type: BeopardySerial
   Args:
    - /dev/ttyUSB0
    - 19200

# use a unix domain socket
playerInput:
 - Type: Unix
   Args:
    - /tmp/seopardy.sock

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.
• The audio sounds a bit glitchy on some pulseaudio systems. Setting flat-volume = no in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf fixes this for some users.
• The volume for the first played song is at 100%, no matter what. This is currently circumvented by playing a media song and immediately stopping it at the beginning of the game.