re: adding questions

You can definitely add your own questions. The text file layout is like this. The files are named XXX.nnnn.dat where XXX is a three-letter category identifer such as ACE for "Arts: Celebrities" or HWO for "History: World." nnnn is a 4-digit number. Number 0000 is a special file which contains the category's name and a 0 or a 1 to identify whether the category starts up as a selected category or not. Numbers 0001 through "whatever" are the questions for that category. So if you wanted to add questions, you just add more files with the correct filename. So if the Star Wars category has 324 questions in it, you add a file called FSW.0325.dat. The format of each question file is:

Question (String)

Difficulty (integer 1 to 100)

Correct Answer (integer 1 to 5)

Answer A (String)

Answer B (String)

Answer C (String)

Answer D (String)

Answer E (String)

Each question must currently have five multiple-choice answers.

If you do have a bunch of trivia questions you want to put in, by all means do so. If you wanted me to put them into the game I'd be happy to. Even if you just want to put them in a spreadsheet or even a flat text file I can easily turn them into the proper format and include them with EmpTriv.

re: repeated questions

Well with 20,000 questions, repeats should be rare in a single session. The only problem now is that the random number generator is seeded with the process ID of EmpTriv, and since there are very few processes running on the Empeg, the chances of a repeated random number seed (and thus a repeated sequence of the same questions between sessions) is too high. In the next release I will seed it with a combination of the PID and some data from the real-time clock.

I also plan on exploring a mechanism for avoiding repeats by tracking which questions you've been asked, but to make this useful, I need a way of saving state between sessions. That doesn't exist yet. A LOT of the features I want to put into this (high scores, multiple personal profiles for difficulty and category selections, etc.) need the ability to save state to disk, and we don't have an API for that yet.

re: audio questions

Well an audio file per question is interesting. Though I wouldn't want to be the one reading out 20,000 different questions. :) I think an alternate solution would be to get a rudimentary text-to-speech engine to read the question. There are public domain ones out there, I had one which worked on my old 286. The quality of the text-to-speech was passable, though not great. For words it doesn't know, I could always put in the phonetic version of the question.

In any event, I don't yet know how to play a sound while the player is playing. If it's as easy as writing raw PCM sound to /dev/mixer then I should be able to figure it out. Audio questions is something I'll keep in mind. Along the lines of the Name That Tune discussion above, it'd be neat for the music categories to say "This song was the #1 hit from 1962" or something, along the lines of the "Audio Daily Double" in Jeopardy.

Good suggestions, keep 'em comin guys.. Has anyone actually installed and played with this yet? Or does the lack of an easy installer scare everyone off?