A friend of mine wants to do a local version of “The Wheel of Fortune” on TV and since they don’t want to spend a fortune to build the set <g>, they decided to do the puzzle squares by having them projected on the wall from a computer screen 🙂 So guess who was asked to come up with the actual program that would display the puzzle squares on the computer screen? Yes, moi :p I’ve been working on a prototype for the past couple of days and had something workable – nothing major, a full-screen app that simply draws a grid on the computer screen. You can customize the background, the fill color for the squares and the font that the letters are displayed in.
I showed it to my friend and he agrees that it’s on the correct track but he wants actual squares instead of a grid, he wants the squares with a correctly identified letter to blink and reveal a letter at a time instead of simply revealing the letters as they are typed and a host of other modifications. Not really sure that it’s an interesting project at this point since there isn’t too much of a challenge to it and I’ve done most of the basic work. I have a feeling that I’ll have to change the way certain things are done, however. Currently, I keep track of each typed letter and if it is in the current word and is not a duplicate, I add it to an array which is used later in displaying the letters. Since I’ll be drawing squares, I feel that it’ll probably be easier to come up with a structure to keep the coordinates of each square rather than to calculate them on the go each time. If I create such a structure, I could also probably keep track of the letters displayed in each square and whether they are visible or not …
Can’t you just download a wheel of fortune game, and project it on the wall? 😛
why not keep the grid but make it as the background colour. then you could colour each cell and it would look like squares. change the colour of the cell to make it appear or disappear if needed. you wouldn’t have to keep track of coordinates then. do the colour switch with the letters to make them appear. its probably obvious that i don’t know what ‘wheel of fortune’ is but hopefully its along the lines of the programme 🙂
hmmm i just re-read it and i thinks thats what you did the first time. sorry.
I guess I could have downloaded a “Wheel of Fortune” program if there’s one which allows you to customize the questions – there probably is actually :p But this way, I get to do it *my* way :p