Flash MX 2004 Games : Art to ActionScript

14 Quizzes
Quizzes are a very popular form of entertainment on TV. In the UK, a quiz show called Who
Wants To Be a Millionaire? rapidly became one of the highest rated programmes on TV. Quizzes
are very simple to create, Flash MX 2004 even includes a template for creating them, but they are
fairly demanding to maintain. In this chapter we will look at creating a database of questions using
an SQL Server database. Because the questions are categorized by difficulty and topic we can use
this database to access questions in a variety of ways. The chapter builds on some of the concepts
presented in Chapter 12.
Multiple choice or free text?
The easiest way to write a quiz program is to use questions that have multiple-choice answers.
The advantage of using multiple choice is that any answer the user gives is either definitely wrong
or definitely right. There is no ambiguity. Computer programs hate ambiguity. The disadvantage
is that the quiz compilers are required to create the alternative ‘wrong’ answers, which adds to
their work. Free-text input is prone to errors. A quiz that allows free-text input for the answers
must have answers that are very easy to input. Numeric answers are the least prone to error, but
even here there are possible problems; if the answer is ‘3’, how do you respond to an answer
of ‘three’? Both answers are correct but if the code is checking for ‘3’ and finds ‘three’ then the
player could easily be marked wrong. Free-text input is very demanding to code; many answers
that are incorrectly spelt must be marked as correct. But how do you allow for that? One way
is to compare the player’s answer with the correct answer using a table of permissible, wrongly
spelt answers. But however you approach it, the problem is complex and can result in ‘obvious’
wrong answers being marked correct and vice versa. In this chapter we are, therefore, only going
to consider the multiple-choice option. In the database of quiz questions we will keep the correct
answer and three incorrect ones for each question.
Creating a database
Databases come in many shapes and forms. In this chapter we will concentrate on using SQL
Server. This is a relational database management system for Windows NT servers. If you intend
to do much work using SQL Server then you will need to get a copy of the developer edition.
Unfortunately this costs about the same as a copy of Flash although a trial evaluation version is
available. A simpler alternative is to use an Access-based database. Access comes with a complete
version of Microsoft Office, and much of the material in this chapter applies to both databases.
The major difference between the two options is in the way the server implements the database
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