note: i did NOT create the ASCII art. I'm not good enough to do that. I found on various ascii art archives as well as those image to ascii art converters for the continents I couldn't find.
countryguess was a project I made recently because I wanted to make a quiz that could be customised as you see fit. Also, I had no clue how to make GUIs with Python and ASCII art is cool so I decided to roll with it. It turned out pretty cool!
I made the maps by printing the ASCII art map, and then all the spaces that make up each country would be an array. These arrays would fill up the spaces like morocco[0], morocco[1], etc.
Then, when the country is guessed, the country (or an alternate name/abbrviation, such as uk for the united kingdom or ivory coast for cote d'ivoire) is matched with its index in the list of countries in that continent.
A second list contains all the countries that show up on the map (excluding citystates, islands, etc. that aren't big enough to be shown on the map) and has all the countries as either 0 (false) or 1 (true). Whenever the country is guessed, its respective list item turns into 1.
The map printing function checks each list item for whether it is true or false. If it is true, then the list of spaces for that country would be replaced with a list of equal length and equal number of characters but with hashes "#" instead of spaces " ". This means that, when the county is printed, hashes are printed instead of spaces and the country fills up
I've got africa, europe, north america, and oceania completed. I haven't yet made the map for asia because it's HUGE, and south america I haven't done yet as well. Also, central/eastern europe is VERY out of proportion and will be fixed...eventually. (i.e. long romanian panhandle)
other fun features I added include the ability to enable/disable disputed territories (Western Sahara, Kosovo, and Somaliland bc why not) and the U.N. observer states (the Vatican and Kosovo) as well as score saving to a "scores.txt" that shows the date, time, and name of quiz that you complete along with your score.
once I finished all the continents, I'll work on making a world quiz with ALL the countries. other things like capital quizzes and flag quizzes could be added on later, but that's likely very far into the future.
here are some more screenshots:
europe
oceania
north america
the github link if you want to look at the code or just have a go at the quiz: https://github.com/swarbler/countryguess
Have you considered adding a license to your repository so that it can be packaged in repositories? And a pyproject.toml or setup.py? That would help us in nixpkgs specifically
what do those do?
Well, adding a code license alllows other people to use your code. Technically now, you reserve all rights to your code and it is illegal for us to look at it or use it.
Those other two make it easier to manage dependencies and setup python virtual environments. Additionally, they allow the package to be more easily to software repositories like Nixpkgs or Debian or Arch. It’s also just an industry standard. Poetry has been used to manage pyprojects for years, but uv is a popular tool too and what I use.
oh okay, what's the best license? what's the difference between CC, MIT, etc.
I'll look at setting up python virtual environments later, they seem pretty important to at least learn how to use
CC, depending on which version you choose, is pretty much open domain. I personally would stay away from it for code, but there isn’t really anything wrong with it. MIT is also pretty permissive, but derivative copies of your work need to acknowledge that you wrote the code. GPL is something called Copyleft. It protects both you, your users, and your code to the highest degree. You retain the copyright but also anyone who takes your work and modifies it must also give their source code with the program. I’m simplifying here some, but I recommend you look up the definition of Copyleft licenses, its history, and why the GPL is so important. I emphatically recommend that you choose the GPLv3. But in all reality, there is no “best”. It depends on what matters to you and how you want the code to be used.
It is definitely an important topic to learn about. To be honest, I’m surprised you programmed as far as you did without knowing about them. Great work.
ok, I see. It seems that MIT let you do whatever with the code, whereas GPL seems like the same thing, but with an * that any derivatives must be open-source as well. I'll put the license on my repos then.