New version of Jeopardy Challenger

[clemon79]

I realized I never did get around to announcing this, but I have a new version of the Jeopardy Challenger available on my website.

The Downloads section of the site is at:

http://www.fredsmythe.com/downloads.htm

It's the one that is listed as Version 2.0, beta 2.

I'm not looking for adulation, don't worry about that. What I AM looking for are reports of any bugs I may have missed, or suggestions about what I can do to improve the UI.

I'm interested in hearing feedback. ALL feedback. Okay, well, most feedback. Unlike some, I'm not gonna cry if you think it sucks.

Thanks!

[gwarman2005]

I didn't find any bugs.  Real nice, thanks for making it public.

[NickintheATL]

This is a handy little program to have in case you really play along at home. Nice job, Chris, thanks!

[Steve McClellan]

Hm. When I try to open the .exe, I get the following:

Jeopardy Challenger.exe - Application Error
The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000135). Click on OK to terminate the application.

If others haven't had problems, I'll assume it's me. Any clue what I'm FingUBAR?

(WinXP, SP2)

EDIT: Same thing with v1.0.

[clemon79]

[quote name=\'Steve McClellan\' date=\'Feb 13 2006, 05:07 PM\']If others haven't had problems, I'll assume it's me. Any clue what I'm FingUBAR?

(WinXP, SP2)

EDIT: Same thing with v1.0.

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[/quote]
Ah yes. Go to Windows Update and get the .NET Framework 2.0. (It's listed under Software, Optional, which is why it doesn't get pushed when if you have Automatic Updates turned on.) Initially I thought this was force-fed when you upgraded to SP2, but I have discovered this is not the case. And you're gonna need it to run most anything that people write in Visual Studio these days, anyhow.

[Steve McClellan]

Ooh. Nifty with all the values and the allowing me to bet $2k on a DJ! DD if I sucked in the J! round.

Only thing I'm noticing is that some of the labels don't fit on the buttons.

The "WRONG" button takes up two lines of text (the G wraps to a second line), the last two letters of "Final Jeopardy" are missing, and I can only see three digits of the dollar values on the left, e.g., $400, $800, $120, $160, $200. Everything works as it should, though.

My guess is that I'm missing the appropriate font, though I can't tell what font it's actually using (not Times or Arial). Do I win?

(Note: In v1.0, the WRONG button is okay, but both Daily Double and Final Jeopardy are missing their last two letters, and I'm still missing a digit of the four-digit values.)

[clemon79]

[quote name=\'Steve McClellan\' date=\'Feb 13 2006, 10:46 PM\']Only thing I'm noticing is that some of the labels don't fit on the buttons.
[/quote]
Okay, that's good to know. It uses Arial Narrow (specifically, Arial Narrow Bold), which I thought was part of the standard loadout for Windows XP. (Apparently it isn't. Based on what I'm reading here, it installs with Microsoft Office, which I've had for so long that it never occurred to me.) I'm guessing that since you don't have Arial Narrow it's defaulting to just plain Arial, which is gonna cause the wraparound you are experiencing because everything was designed with Narrow in mind.

So what I should probably do is embed the font directly into the app (something I just learned how to do recently in my current project, I don't see why it couldn't happen here as well) so that the code pulls it from within the executable instead of expecting it to be installed on the system. That way nobody has to worry about the appropriate fonts being installed.

This is _exactly_ the sort of thing I was hoping people would catch! Thank you!

[Dbacksfan12]

Hmm...decent tech support from a fan-made program.....

[clemon79]

Well, this isn't meant to be a support thread; I don't intend to usurp bandwidth from the board that Our Benevolent Moderators thoughtfully provide to support this thing. I'm just asking for help looking the beta over. What Steve getting that error tells me ('cuz he wasn't the first, but apparently there are more systems in that state out there than I thought) is that I prolly need to include a README file in the final distribution or something that explains what's needed to run it, 'cuz I can't assume that everyone is gonna have the .NET Framework installed like I thought I could.

[Steve McClellan]

[quote name=\'clemon79\' date=\'Feb 13 2006, 11:27 PM\']Based on what I'm reading [...], it installs with Microsoft Office, which I've had for so long that it never occurred to me.[/quote]
Oh, sure. Neglect the people who use the free office program!

[clemon79]

[quote name=\'Steve McClellan\' date=\'Feb 14 2006, 12:45 AM\']Oh, sure. Neglect the people who use the free office program!

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No, not in the least! When I realized Arial Narrow was packed with MS Office, the first thing I thought of was "he must use OpenOffice". And I'm as big a proponent of open-source as anyone, so I totally don't wanna leave y'all out in the cold. I'm already trying to figure out the best way to make this happen.

[clemon79]

Okay, I think I've embedded the font now, and everything SHOULD render correctly regardless of whether you have Arial Narrow installed or not. Steve, you wanna grab the new version from my site and see if that's the case?

(We're at 2.1b1, now, by the way, 'cuz I basically ported the whole thing over to Visual Basic 2005...the original was written in 2003 and the Code Porting thingy in VS2005 isn't all that good.