Week 8: A Site to See

Hi readers, welcome back to my blog!

This week was quite hectic for me, with this project coupled with my house move. Nevertheless, I’ve continued working on transferring my project onto a quiz platform. However, I immediately ran into a huge issue. Google Forms can’t run PyGame, which has all my code. 

To work around this, I had to use Pygbag, a library that effectively translates the Python logic in my code to HTML and Java web interfaces. I also had to program the buttons and stages needed to recreate a quiz experience. Fortunately, exporting responses to a Google Form is fairly easy, so all I needed to do from there was find somewhere to host it. Using GitHub to publish my final website, I’m glad to show you: https://thunderrhombus.github.io/4DVisualizerQuiz/

But this skips over the development challenge that went into it. 

Here’s how that went down:

Pygbag runs on terminal commands to begin translating, and doesn’t exist as a GitHub extension. This means I have to resend commands and troubleshoot using long terminal and console logs I’m not familiar with. This led me to discover some strange errors in Pygbag itself, where its output file contained a site-crashing typo.

I also accidentally packaged all of Python into Pygbag, causing my file size to explode literally a thousandfold. After experimenting with the .gitignore file and terminal commands, I ultimately moved everything down a folder.

My previous classes and models were not configured to handle new shape inputs and random answer options. I had to create a brand-new interface class for my own testing, in addition to a main class for Pygbag to read over.

In addition to my trouble with Pygbag, I’m still handling a few UI mishaps, especially with the quiz formatting. The link I sent earlier is noticeably missing the option to take the quiz. However, there’s still a free exploration function using the three models and a few shapes. For any of you too eager to wait for the full quiz experience, it’s on there for you to explore.

Continuing to read about GPUs and math has been nice, but this week’s true lifesavers are the Pygbag instructions. Without them, I’d be completely, utterly lost trying to get PyScript to work instead. 

For now, though, I’m just a step away from reaping all the data I’m looking for.

Wish me luck, see you all next week! 

(Early next week, please, I need all the data I can get)