5.7 KiB
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.