It's up. The Forum link doesn't work right now, but the site is up.

http://www.triviathing.com

Right now, the only category with a reasonable number of trivia questions is the Movie Quotes category, with a little over 200 quotes.

Submitting Trivia and Moderating Trivia both require accounts, though account creation is quick enough (no email verification or whatever).

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Do it for the Lobster

Cool, hopefully check that out tonight!

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no fat chicks

Aside from the need for flash, this is pretty cool. I like that you can type answers close and still get it right. Like "Wizerd of oz", "ghost busters", "american sycho" and "the dark night" all worked for me (and i typed them all wrong on purpose, for the record). Pretty nice touch. My fat typing hands won't stop me from getting points .

The interface could use some work though. It's a lot like a trivia channel on IRC right now...

EDIT: Just got this one...

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Answer(s): Southpark

It's actually South Park (Bigger, Longer and Uncut)

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no fat chicks

Thanks dude!

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Aside from the need for flash, this is pretty cool.

Yeah, I didn't particularly want to use flash, but I DID want to use a TCP connection and an open protocol to make integration with other devices trivial. If you sniff the packets, it's all transmitted in clear-text. You could telnet to triviathing.com:8599 to see how it works, granted you won't be able to do much without knowing the protocol.

In any case, I'll switch it from flash to websockets once they become more widespread. I'm not super concerned with backwards compatibility with older browsers, so it shouldn't be a big deal.

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It's actually South Park (Bigger, Longer and Uncut)

Yes it is. That's one movie who's set of quotes I found from an old database of quotes I was working on years ago and I just haven't corrected them.

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The interface could use some work though. It's a lot like a trivia channel on IRC right now...

That's what it's modeled after, but yeah, the interface could use a little sprucing up. It's pretty dull right now. I just wanted to get it out there and functioning, and I can improve the aesthetics as I progress. I may ask one of my graphic designer friends if they can mock something up for me.


Among the things I'm working on:

-Friends List
-Game invite system
-Leaderboards (done on dev)
-Flagging questions as they're presented (done on dev)
-Not repeating questions in a game (done on dev, but can lead to an infinite loop if there are less questions than the number of rounds in a game).
-Private games (invite only or password protected)


For down the line, some ideas:

-I was thinking custom categories for users on a payed basis. Think something like a school that wants to have an educational trivia game for students to play. This could allow organizations to enter their own trivia for their own private quizzes or whatnot.
-Pictures in questions (think things like "Identify this celebrity from this younger picture of them" or "What Country is this"?)

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Do it for the Lobster

Kinda fun brings me back to the theater years doing quotes over the radios. Only wish my brain could read the whole line in less then 30 seconds.

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STS-128 RTFM!!!

Quote by Chops

Quote The interface could use some work though. It's a lot like a trivia channel on IRC right now... That's what it's modeled after, but yeah, the interface could use a little sprucing up. It's pretty dull right now. I just wanted to get it out there and functioning, and I can improve the aesthetics as I progress. I may ask one of my graphic designer friends if they can mock something up for me.

I didn't really mean that it needs graphics. What I meant was that it needs to be "modernized" a bit. Having a big text screen and "terminal" on the windows doesn't make much sense. Something like you see in the bars would be pretty cool though. Pop up the question all large and have a little timer in the corner, then at the end, fade the question out and the answer in and show the scores at the same time. Even better, include little facts about the questions that you can toss up when you list the scores. Although, copying their format directly probably isn't the best idea, but it's a good example of a more appealing way to do it. It's fun as it is, but the IRC model doesn't make a lot of sense...

EDIT: One of the best things by boss (a graphic designer) ever taught me was that white space is important and makes things look better. This is a principle you could definitely use even in the current iteration. Even adding some whitespace around the questions and making it clear that a new question is out would be nice.

The telnet think is kind of cool though. Why do things with a TCP connection though? I mean, you could easily use web calls to an API to make things happen. Even if you wanted to make hardware down the line, it would be easy enough to make that hardware do the API calls too. Especially if you're just returning formatted data (XML, SOAP, JSON, etc.). I'm pretty sure simple micro controllers (at the very least the Arduino) have libraries for parsing that kind of information.

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no fat chicks

The reason I went with TCP instead of using web services is to avoid doing comet or long-polling, since the server needs to initiate some messages (such as "User 1 got it right" or "Round Ended Early").

And, while not a huge issue, a TCP connection ends up being lower on the bandwidth than using web services, since there're no HTTP headers transmitted with every request/response.

And with websockets becoming a reality soon, I think you'll see more things like this relying on TCP connections. And overall, I just think that the TCP connection is overall simpler to implement both server-side and client-side. The commands are extremely simple:


Client: /start
Server: Q 145 2/20 Game over man! Game over!
Client: This is a guess
Client: This is another guess
Client: Aliens
Server: CORRECT ClientName
Server: ALLCORRECT
Server: ROUNDOVER
Server: A Aliens
Server: Q 723 3/20 Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!
...
Server: A Gone with the Wind


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Do it for the Lobster

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I didn't really mean that it needs graphics. What I meant was that it needs to be "modernized" a bit. Having a big text screen and "terminal" on the windows doesn't make much sense.

This makes sense. I definitely will have to tweak it so that it's not just a chatroom, but I do want to maintain a chatroom, since it is a multiplayer thing.

Do you think that the chatroom shouldn't be there? I think it helps to have the communication so that people can make friends and whatnot. I've considered putting the chat in a different section, but I've played multiplayer games with multiple entry spots, and everyone forgets they're in the non-game part when they're typing answers.

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Do it for the Lobster

Quote by Chops

Do you think that the chatroom shouldn't be there? I think it helps to have the communication so that people can make friends and whatnot. I've considered putting the chat in a different section, but I've played multiplayer games with multiple entry spots, and everyone forgets they're in the non-game part when they're typing answers.

Well, if you're going for chat AND trivia, then the IRC model does make sense. Still though, mixing the two does seem kind of.... something. Cheap is the only word I can think of but that's not quite right.

Maybe doing something as simple as moving the trivia "voice" out of the chat window and in to a dedicated div on the page or element in the flash object or whatever would be easy enough. And it would probably be worthwhile blocking peoples' answers from the chat if the system accepts them as correct, otherwise people will just wait for the first guy to answer and then copy him.

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no fat chicks

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And it would probably be worthwhile blocking peoples' answers from the chat if the system accepts them as correct

It does do this already. Same with "close" answers.

If you type "Gostbstsr", it'll give you a "Close" message and block that answer from relaying to the rest.

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Do it for the Lobster

Quote by Chops

Quote And it would probably be worthwhile blocking peoples' answers from the chat if the system accepts them as correct It does do this already. Same with "close" answers. If you type "Gostbstsr", it'll give you a "Close" message and block that answer from relaying to the rest.

Ah, ok. I didn't play with other people so I didn't get to see that. I did get it to say "Close!" once when I typed "teh dork knight" or something to that effect

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no fat chicks

Another update:

* Aesthetic update in the game (sweet drop-shadows, yo)
* The game will make a concerted effort to not repeat any answers or questions (it will make 5 attempts to find an answer that hasn't been used before it just grabs the first thing it finds).
* Can disable sounds in-game
* Can now report questions (inaccurate, etc) while in-game
* Bugfix: Points will now reset when a game starts
* Bugfix: when the game ends, the "Start Game" button will show again

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Do it for the Lobster

Couple more updates over the past few days:

2/12/10
* Added Search feature
* Added Leaderboards
* When a game is completed, the results are now stored in the database (still not visible in the interface)
* Leaving a game will now store your score (as long as you're logged in), and rejoining the game will restore your score
* The answer-matching is now a bit more lenient
* Bugfix: Rendering bug for the tabs in Internet Explorer (go figure, fucking IE)

2/14/10
* Bugfix: Joining a game that's already in progress should display the question and proper countdown
* Bugfix: Fixed a crash based on blank answer fields
* Bugfix: If the channel owner leaves the game, another user will be auto-promoted to room leader so they can start the next game.


Also, the current breakdown of questions and categories

Lost Trivia: 168
Movie Quotes: 1005
Star Wars: 43
Twilight: 123

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Do it for the Lobster