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just for fun
Are you curious about how the "test your knowledge" game was put together? If so, read along.
We wanted to make something fun for those of you who wanted to test your knowledge. We started off by creating the questions and answers, allowing for 2 answers (for true and false or yes and no) up to 9 different answers. To make it more quiz-show game-like, we added CSS to slowly reveal the questions and possible answers.
We added game-show music where we could. Unfortunately Apple does not allow music to be played automatically so the option has been removed from some browsers.
For the game-show music we performed and recorded "tracks" recorded at 120 beats per minute (BPM) all for the same length, fading in and fading out. We recorded a drum solo. Then another drum solo. Then another. Then we did the same for many different instruments. The unique thing is that use PHP and HTML to somewhat randomly put different parts together to create a unique song. So every time you get a correct answer, your "happy" song gets pieced together with a drum fill, keyboard, a basic drum beat, just the hi hat, and bass guitar, all in random combinations.
Each track was published at 64kbps (Kilobits Per Second) which is a pretty low quality. This setting was used to keep the file sizes small for fast page downloads. Some of the hi hat and cymbal crashes are slightly distorted at that quality but we actually liked it because it sounds a little techno. Each track is 165KB (KiloBytes) so even putting 4 different parts together only requires downloading 660KB (4*165) which is just over a half of a MB (MegaByte) which is pretty small by today's web page size standards.
We did the same thing for sound effects for getting the answer right or wrong. We recorded one person cheering many times and pieced those together with music editing software to create one crowd cheer. Multiple crowd cheers were created. Then we randomly select and play one of the cheers. We also randomly layer whistles and other things to make it more authentic.
While we were at it, we set the program to somewhat randomly adjust the volume level of each track just to keep things more interesting. So was it worth it to spend time on this? We think so. Your experience with UNI is very important to us. We want you to have the best experience possible.
So now you how the fun was created. Enjoy.