44Con2013Game

The NCC Group Game from 44CON 2013 - a knowledge based multiple choice game for conferences

Released as open source by NCC Group Plc - http://www.nccgroup.com/

Developed by Ollie Whitehouse, ollie dot whitehouse at nccgroup dot com

http://www.github.com/nccgroup/44Con2013Game

Released under AGPL see LICENSE for more information

Documentation

The solution is made up of four components:

WpfQuiz - main game binary
ScoreWebServer - the score webserver which the ANSi scoreboard consumes
QuestionEditor - a GUI tool to write questions for the game
ANSi Scoreboard - the Raspberry Pi powered scoreboard which consumes the output of ScoreWebServer

Question and Result Storage

QuestionEditor will write its questions to C:\NCCQuestions
WpfQuiz will write its results to C:\NCCPlayers
WpfQuiz will read its questions relative to binary from .\NCCQuestions
WpfQuiz will read its sounds relative to the binary from .\NCCSounds

Sounds

If you wish to have sounds play these are the filenames:

.\NCCSounds\Dangerous.wav - when a player requests more time
.\NCCSounds\Secure.wav - when the player requests 50/50
.\NCCSounds\ConfidencePlay.wav - when the player gets to level 8
.\NCCSounds\ExcellentPlay.wav - when the player gets a question right
.\NCCSounds\ShallPlay.wav - when the player that asks for the users name is loaded
.\NCCSounds\Win.wav - when the player completes all the levels
.\NCCSounds\GameOver.wav - when the player gets a question wrong

Deployment Directory Structure

So what you end up with is:

bin\ - where the program binaries are
bin\NCCSounds\ - where the sounds are
bin\NCCQuestions\ - where the questions are
C:\NCCPlayers\ - where the game stores its played games
C:\NCCQuestions\ - where the editor stories its questions

Web Server and the Windows Firewall

For the ScoreWebServer you need to punch a hole in the firewall with a command similar to:

netsh http add urlacl url=http://*:8888/ user=everyone

This will allow connections in to port 8888 for the HTTPListener over the network.

Questions

We haven't released all the questions we wrote. Instead we've left two sample questions in. The application logic looks for questions at the desired level, if it doesn't find any (levels go from 0 to 11) then it uses a question from the previous level.

3rd Party Dependencies

For the on-screen touch screen keyboard we use:

http://wpfkb.codeplex.com/

Putting It All Together

The equipment we used included:

VGA Splitter - http://www.maplin.co.uk/svga-splitter-2-and-4-port-36773
ACER T232HL Touch Screen Monitor - http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/model/UM.VT2AA.001
Raspberry Pi - http://www.raspberrypi.org/

In action

People play on a touchscreen monitor (we used an Acer T232HL)

Crowds watch on a VGA split version of the screen with the scoreboard underneath

The Raspberry Pi ANSi scoreboard