Good evening.

While I am bereft of an Internet connection at home, I have programmed a little, improved old utilities, wrote some documentation apart from all the "serious work" every day.

And there is a new project born that I ask you to comment... I am also bereft of a QUERTY, let alone a QUERTZ keyboard and uyou woii have to live zisth some odd spelling mistakes, I am afraid...

History Quiz: Line up historic events in the correct order.

The game starts currently with three events in arbitrary order. This number will be configurable. You try to get the numbering in the right order and win immediately 3 or 0 points. The game shows you the correct timeline, the year for each event and your points.

From then on, you can choose to either
- see some background information about one of the listed events
- add a new event, that you have to place after one of the previously listed or at the beginning of the list
- hit "q" to quit the game at any time.

This game more or less exists in a "hardware implementation", where you have to get cards in the right order, then learn the actual year from the back of each card. That is dumb. My game looks much better, even though there is not yet a graphical UI. The interfaces will allow to add one. This is not the hardest part.

The accumulation of historical events and one or two explanatory phrases for each is a real problem... I feel that this should be a "community project", maybe.

But then agan..; I am far away from it all and may be nuts anyway...

Sounds interesting. Have you developed anything so far?

It might be an idea to have subcategories such as European History, Latin American History, Peace Treaties, World Leaders.

Just for pure info (sorry), it's quiz with only one z, and qwerty not querty (I assume you're an azerty guy).

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[static]Sorry for the late response.[/static]
Yes. The game works so far. There are some glitches which mainly concern the presentation on screen and the succession of "screens". Although I currently work exclusively for the terminal window, the décisions taken in this context are of general nature and will probably have to be duplicated for any type of GUI.

Something like that had crossed my mind. You can already store the list of events in a file and thus replace it against a different one. This is not difficult, technically... but the amount of work needed to fill up these files with a "reasonable" (read: considerable) number of events gave me the shivers, before I wrote my initial post, above...

I am many things but especially NOT AN AZERTY GUY. Rather QWERTZ (Kraut). Despite my bouts with this AZERTY keyboard, the faults that you mention are really my own.

THANK YOU for all corrections of my English, in the past and in the future. That is the only true reason, why I am here; the rest is just camouflage... and every 2nd word is underlined in red on this French Internet Exploder under Windows 1\d. So many Englishmen around and no QWERTY.

P.S.: Almost forgot: I want to name the game Quistory. If that is not already taken.

http://www.quistapp.com/quistory-in-your-neighborhood/

Do let me know when you have something I can try out.

I too have to switch between qwerty and azerty keyboards - it always takes me a few days before the muscle memory kicks in.

http://ask.metafilter.com/4346/Quizcreation-programs
https://www.efrontlearning.com/blog/...ols-for-e.html
Tho old, those may suggest some useful search keyword ideas. Enjoy your project!

Moodle has been my dearest enemy, when I was participating in the Rubylearning.org online-courses. I cannot say that the experience made me curious to try out that Platform.., or ...
... or just anything with the expression "web-based" in it.

Thank you. I program exclusively for fun, even if somebody actually uses my software for other purposes. Giving sense to my projects is not my favorite part of it.

Ha! Thanks for that hint (could be worse). I shall think about a different name for the project, Uploading anything on this Library-PC is unfortunately impossible. It may be that once I have a new Internet-access,a dozen programs have to be updated at once and the first edition of the Quiz will be published at the same time...

Read you next week.
Michael.

I trained as an historian (US history, with a focus on US Southern). Given that ignorance of history seems to be a coming thing here in the US, if you think that I can help you with content, feel free to PM me.

Thank you very much, Frank.

By chance, I have a connection today and can publish a preliminary, completely insufficient version of the program, below this post. All code is in the sub-directory /lib. The executable is in /bin.

Call the ruby-interpreter with "bin/timequiz" as only argument.

The events are currently in the file "events.rb", where each event is itself an array of three elements: "name", year, "comment". The year is an integer, the others are strings.

I find the Ruby Array syntax easy enough to understand. Other ways to define events are possible, but should not impose a more complicated, special syntax.

There is code in an intermediate state, which you should probably not look at. This concerns the files "extstring.rb" and "console_output.rb":

1) The wrap-function in extstring or its use in the box() method are flawed, which results in the border lines being broken, sometimes. This is due to a problem with a regular expression and my mis-interpretation of screen dimensions (arithmetics). I understand the problem but it bores me.
2) console_output.rb is a rewrite of the user-interface, which currently only generates the initial "screen" with three events. The remaining code concerned is still found in the main program class but will be moved to console_output, as soon as I find the time.

The file, that I link is merely a tar.xz archive. In its current state the program is not fit to be packed as a ruby-gem. It runs on my machine and despite the glitches in the user-interface I can play with all defined events.

Here it is:
Timequiz.tar.xz

Shoot at own discretion.

I have identified the methods needed to alternate between a graphical and a text-interface, externalized all output to the console class and am writing a Gtk-3 interface. Even if the first edition will only reproduce the output currently visible in text-mode, it will allow for choices being made via check- and radio-buttons. I am not a "GUI-artist" and do not care to develop my own widgets.

The problems mentioned in my previous post are solved, btw.

Bye.

I have an Internet connection!

And here is a screen shot of the current development version. This is not awfully sophisticated yet, as it has been weeks since I have last touched the code. There is still not much that I can do in my free time but the ”project“ is not dead.

Attached Thumbnails

 

Nice one! I hope all the questions aren't so hard. ;-)

ROFL.
No, not at all... For the less historically inclined, I put some "Birth date of Kathrine Mansfield" and "Léon Czolgoscz kills William McKinley" in, too.

And I didn't even know that William McKinley was dead.

Look forward to the finished product, Michael.

HA!

This is my last contribution in this thread, as there will be a new one, announcing a first Gem-release of “TimeQuiz”. Wait a little, though, as I am finalizing a mechanism which allows a user to keep her/his own list of events to pick from.

And...

More important even: [Reverb & Echo & Wawa]THERE WILL NOT BE A GRAPHICAL USER-INTERFACE[/Wawa & Echo & Reverb], for the time.

My bouts with the Gtk3-bindings for Ruby result in a terribly ugly and only rudimentary functional program-window. Having to collect pieces of documentation here and there and advancing mainly by trial and error, I am terribly unproductive. The text-mode version of the game being complete, AFAIS, and in view of the banality of the concept and the question-and-answer character of the game, it is probably best situated on the console, anyway.

The GTK-code will be available to anybody who wants to give it a try, but I will exclude it from the Ruby-Gem.

More in a few days.

Michael.

... and Ω