Once upon a time we brought home an overseas game called Twister. In case you don't know, it's a floor game where players have to put their hands and feet on colored circles as instructed, twisting like snakes, and whoever bends the best wins. The game was immediately tested on guests who had been invited under a made-up pretext (see: booze). The joy was indescribable — the drunk guests (and we along with them) twisted furiously and tumbled into a heap together. The next morning, limbs not yet used to poses from the “Yoga for the extra bendy” series hurt like hell, but that's not the point.
During the game it turned out that one of the people present had to sit out the general Twister and be the referee, that is, spin the plastic arrow on the board and call out the moves (colors and limbs). And this in the 21st century, when it's obvious that the game should come with specially trained robots that spin the arrow themselves while the humans, all of them, roll around on the floor.
At the time I was just finishing Max Schlee's book on Qt, so I decided to fix this technological injustice and at the same time practice some aspects of the framework. That's how the qTwister program was born.
The program can:
- generate Twister moves manually (by pressing the red button);
- generate moves automatically at a given interval;
- display each move graphically (with a picture of the limb and the color, as in the image above);
- announce each move in a male or female voice (we recorded the Russian voice ourselves, the English one was generated with espeak);
- work in Russian and English.
So I'm sharing it with everyone. A short user guide is included in the archive.
- qTwister for Windows (just unpack it): qTwister.win.zip (~8.7 MB).
- Source code with brief instructions for building on Linux: qTwister.src.zip (~3.6 MB).
- eComStation port, made by Salvador Parra Camacho.
- qTwister on Qt-Apps.org.
I'll probably make some deb and rpm packages soon too. And learn how to do it along the way.
If you have any questions, messages, corrections or wishes about it, write in the comments or send me an email.
And if you'd like to have a Twister move generator on your mobile phone, try Twisdial. It runs on Android phones and other phones with J2ME support.