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

A question file is a yaml-file defining all sections and questions used in the game. For an example look into questions/template.q. It can contain an arbitrary number of sections, though five are generally recommended. Each section has 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)

Four 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

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.