It’s a really old school edition of The Price is Right from 1961. We’ve discussed this original version before – it’s effectively an auction based format where the nearest without going over wins the prize on offer, some of the prizes and skits being quite unusual.
This video is in two parts.
Here’s what’s going on, in case you couldn’t be bothered to click the link above:
It’s fairly simple. Four contestants bid items shown to them. On their turn they must either increase their bid to be higher than the current leading bid or freeze. Sometimes there are is a minimum increment, and sometimes there are one-bids (like you get now). Whoever is nearest without going over wins the prize and occasionally a bonus prize. Sometimes these are a bit outlandish, sometimes there’s a mini-game attached. But it’s really neatly done with some neat ideas. And it all shifts along under the auspices of Bill Cullen, as someone who mainly knows him for his later work he’s really sharp here.
A contestant call on UKGameShows, looking for families of 4 with 2 of the players under 18, for a BBC show that tests all aspects of intelligence. http://ukgameshows.com/ukgs/Contestant_Calls
I assume it isn’t another Ask The Family revival.
Probably not, as I don’t think that particularly needs logic, communication or strategy.
It does say ‘new’ in the blurb! No, this is an entirely new format. I’m doing the games for it, so it will be Quality.
Unrelatedly, a friend asks:
“Is there an app that allows players to use their phones as game show buzzers? For example, it would indicate the first person to buzz in after a question was read.
Thanks.”
Any leads on this one, gang? If not: do any app developers in these parts consider this a worthy challenge?
Not as far as I know. But that would be really bloody handy wouldn’t it? Would probably have to be done over bluetooth.
Or… Jackbox style, browser-based, with a room code? Bluetooth always ends up as a faff.
There is that. Would there be ping issues?
I’ve used this one in the past. It’s reasonable enough, not sure if it is available on Android though.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/friend-game-buzzer/id1303196209?mt=8
This looks like the absolute bunny. Thank you very much, and also to everyone else who has made suggestions.
Ooh, interesting.
I once used a blank Kahoot where all the answers were counted as correct for this purpose, as your score is lower the longer you take.
I found an app called QBuzzer that seemed like it would do the trick.
Buzzers for people in the same room or for an online/streaming thing? The main issue would be latency and how to guarantee the request is received quickly enough. I might see if I can hack something together to see how feasible it is – but I think I’d prefer hardware buzzers where possible. They needn’t be complex either.
Prototype now ready for testing: https://thomaspreece.net/buzzer/
Well that was quick.
Sir, you’re a star. (Haven’t tried it out myself quite yet, but that doesn’t stop you from being stellar!)
This is amazeballs.
So for feedback: I got this to work on my laptop as a second screen, but when trying this on two different mobile phones (both in their native browser and official Chrome app) I got a ‘Site Unreachable’. I dunno if that was something to do with the requirement to open a particular port?
In terms of the latency question, I think it’s never going to be that much of an issue for casual players. If I understand it correctly, people could always put in fake ‘lag’ if you were to compensate for lag on their connection, so… why bother? If pings are 300ms apart, so be it – it’ll always be a better system than saying ‘buzz’. I suppose you could do some kind of compensation thing that allows ping to be taken into account by up to 200ms or something, where the server-side application polls for ping every ‘so often’ or whenever the QM presses a ‘sync’ button, but I think this kind of thing is lower down the list than more useful features for actually running games.
Do I understand correctly that this URL is connecting to a server that you are personally running? Having a system that requires uptime on a 3rd party would potentially stymie the usefulness of this system, unless the ‘server side’ application was something at we could run ourselves (or is that what buzzer.exe is?)
Moon on a stick wishlists: Up to 8 players (e.g. for UC applications) with scoring; ability to allocate players into a particular team (I guess A or B would do for now?); rules for adding X or subtracting Y (even if 0) when a question is confirmed as correct/wrong by the question master; ability to manually change/override the scores; customisable round timer that locks-out the buzzers when it hits zero.
Thanks so much for this so far, and I’m happy to do whatever’s needed to provide testing and ideas for this.
Having said 8 players, the more I think about it, it would be good if it could cope with whatever number and just readjust the screen as necessary, just like a web page would do with additional content. There are such things as 4-team 4-player academic tournaments, and limiting player numbers would limit their usefulness in things like Discord quizzes with lots of players coming and going. I can even think of a 20-team quiz I do each March where this would be dynamite if done well.
Thanks David – glad to hear you like it.
Yes, buzzer.exe is the server – it runs on your PC and serves all of the web requests through itself. So there is no reliance on a third-party server.
The disadvantage of this is that it does depend somewhat on your network and firewall configuration – part of my reason for asking people to test such an early version is to see how practical it is; if no one can figure out how to connect to it then it’s probably not going to go anywhere!
The address it gives you is the local IP address of your computer – so you can only access it from the same machine or from other devices connected to your home network. However, you do need to allow it through the firewall – Windows should prompt you for this when you first start it.
On your phones, where you’re seeing “site unreachable”, are they connected to the same WiFi as your computer?
To get it working over the Internet, you will need to set up port forwarding on your router to allow access from the outside, and also find out what your external IP address is (https://whatismyip.com will tell you).
If over-the-Internet buzzing is a feature that people really want, I could possibly look into whether it’s possible to add a cloud-based portion to it, where it sends your buzz requests to the cloud server, and that forwards them to wherever the host application is running. That will obviously add cost to it, as I will need to maintain a server, and it will also add an extra bit of delay – although assuming that the server handles the buzz requests and then only passes the correct one to the application, it won’t make it any more unfair.
As you say, if the use case is to replace people shouting “buzz” on a voice call, it doesn’t matter too much if some people’s delays are longer than others, as you already have that problem with the voice call.
For academic quizzes or anything remotely serious, it would be better to use a wired hardware buzzer. I have a design for a cheap DIY wired buzzer, based on replacing the buttons on a cheap USB gamepad, that could control the same software system – it’s a bit hacky and ugly, but I’ve previously used the same design to drive live radio playout and it was reliable enough for that.
Thanks for the feature suggestions – I had only thought of this as just being buzzers, so I might have to rethink the design somewhat to incorporate those, but they are definitely good ideas, thanks!
In terms of player count, there is no particular hard limit. Essentially it keeps a list of the IP addresses that have provided a name on the login screen, and just matches up any requests that come in to the buzz page with the names that have been provided. So in theory there is nothing preventing you connecting as many players as you like. Even if lots of buzzes come in at the same time and there is a bottleneck in processing them, that shouldn’t matter, as if the second or third or 100th buzz is delayed, it doesn’t matter because it’s going to be ignored anyway.
From a product perspective, I imagine that there will be a free version with limited features and a maximum player count, and a premium version that unlocks all of the features and has an unlimited player count – but that’s something to think about later.
Incidentally, I found a few bugs in the first prototype today. I’ve uploaded a new version to the same address.
OK, so here are my experiences with version 1.1. Bear in mind that I’m in a hotel trying to get this to work so it might not be entirely surprising that funky stuff with ports might not work here.
Anyway, I tried gamely via all methods I could. I got it to get the ‘Open browser to…’ message to run. If I try to play in a second browser – which actually worked yesterday – it tries for a few seconds before giving up with an INET_E_RESOURCE_NOT_FOUND message. If I try to play by my phone, either on Wifi or the mobile network, after a few seconds it says ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE. It didn’t pop up with any firewall messages.
As I’m in a hotel, I haven’t got any way of adjusting the router.
As I understand it, things like Spatoon 2 uses one of the Switches as the main ‘judge’ of who is where and it propogates decisions on collision detection from there around the network. So when we’re detail with a relatively simple case of a single button press, I don’t understand why the buzzer.exe can’t be the thing that does the adjudication…? And why is port forwarding needed – how does Jackbox get away without us needing to jiggle with our router?
If I’m to test this further, I’m likely to need idiot-proof instructions, and possibly wait until I’m no longer on a hotel connection…?
As I said originally, there’s already quite a few solutions for people on the same network. It’s an over-the-Internet solution that can be streamed (for example) that’s missing.
I’m personally planning on using software and browsers where possible but hardware buzzer options would be good. I did come across this video once: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTViOoHdg3o
Ah, there’s the problem then: hotel networks are heavily locked down and won’t let you run your own servers (for good reason) – so yes you’ll need to wait til you’re at home and your devices can talk to one another across the network.
The principal difference between this and something like Splatoon 2 or Jackbox is that they have server infrastructure “in the cloud”, run by the company behind them. The main application is just another client application (albeit a specialised one) that talks to their servers in the normal way. Here, buzzer.exe *is* the server, and so it needs to be communicated with in the same way as any other server – which unfortunately means either being on the same network or setting up port forwarding.
I will have a think about the best ways to make it work without requiring any technical knowledge on the setup side – it will probably mean setting up a server to relay the requests, which is certainly possible but will require a bit more thought and time than this simple demo.
Thanks for the feedback though – it’s just as helpful to know what doesn’t work as what does!
I think I may have a possible solution that doesn’t require another server, and also doesn’t require port forwarding. It’ll take a day or two to get it working though – I’ll let you know when it’s ready.
Quite a lot of quiz events get run in hotels so I guess it’s an unusual situation but a fairly real-world example of what a professional version of the software might have to cope with.
As an aside, as I understand it (i.e. I watched a video about it on Arlo’s YouTube channel once), Splatoon doesn’t use dedicated servers to run the actual shooting portion of the games, and that’s proved something of a chagrin to subscribers of Nintendo’s online service. https://youtu.be/K6Tkg524jk4
After much research and trying out various things, I’ve discovered that while it is possible to do peer-to-peer communication without a server for the actual buzzer triggering, you do still need a server to tell the peers (ie, the buzzer host’s application and the contestant’s phone) how to find each other in the first place. Unfortunately this is also a fairly specific kind of server, and I don’t currently have access to the relevant sort of hosting to run it.
So I won’t be implementing that at the moment – but I have written the code in a flexible way that makes it simple enough to add that functionality at a later date, assuming I eventually buy the correct hosting for the server.
I’ve also been able to do some manual testing whereby I manually connect up the buzzer to the host application (done by copying and pasting very long random text from one to the other and back again) and have found that it does work nicely. So I think it is fair to say that a professional version would be able to include that feature, even if the prototype doesn’t.
For the meantime, what I have been able to do is to add code that attempts to automatically configure your router to allow connections from the Internet to the buzzer program. This uses a system called UPnP (universal plug and play), which is usually enabled by default on most home routers, and eliminates the need for manual configuration. If it’s disabled, then there’s a good chance that the reason for this is that someone technically inclined has chosen to disable it, and they will probably know how to set it up themselves.
This still won’t work in hotels etc, but it should get it working on most home networks and should be good enough for a prototype, even if it’s not how it would ideally work in the finished version.
The updated version is in the same place as before.
I offer up the suggestion of taking advantage of the Buzz! buzzers if you can find them. They’re four big red light-up buttons connecting via USB, so they can also be read by a PC treating each set as a 20-button joystick.
Just needs an app on the connected PC to use it. Something like http://www.shelty.ca/buzzbox2.html which can handle up to 12 of them.
Side note: I’m sure I saw one of them being used to drive the three-finalist buzzer section on !mpossible Celebrities one time…
ITV has a new application form for a new gameshow called switch, it’s tagline is win some money if you can survive the switch so I’m guessing it be another gimmicky chase summer replacement but you never know a broken clock is still right twice a day.
Going back on topic, I just love the showiness of Price is Right. They make the prizes look more than they’re worth, and the little touches like the champagne gag are hilarious.
I’d like to live in the world where the sort of prize money that ITV was briefly willing to throw around in WWTBAM? and Red Or Black intersected with an interest in giving away the sorts of outlandish prizes that were given away in 1956 Price, except with modern sensibilities – a bit less formulaic than the prize package patterns on Bruce’s Price is Right (or the Alan Carr one-off). If a modern UK broadcaster were interested in a TPiR relaunch, that would be one way to make it relevant and distinctive.