ëšho'hlorẓûţc hwomùaržrıtéu-erţtenļıls

NOTICE: See the known issues below before using this software.

This repository hosts a piece of software intended as a memorization aid for the various parts of the constructed language Ithkuil. It is intended to be used not on its own, but as a supplementary tool within your broader learning of the language.

The software works by having you select a category of the language which you wish to learn, after which it will present you with an endless series of multiple-choice questions regarding the category you selected. You can switch to a different category at any time.

The software is intended to be simple. This means that there are no points systems, no online leaderboards, no formal "lessons". This gives you, the user, the freedom to use this software in whatever way best suits your method of learning.

The questions are not taken randomly from a massive list; instead, they are procedurally constructed based on information and templates supplied with the program and provided to it at runtime. This seeks to avoid the issue of questions becoming repetitive.

This is not a big, fancy, professional project. This is just something I'm doing in my spare time, and I probably won't have much of it to spare on this. If there's sufficient demand for it, i may choose to professionalize it (and frankly, in the unlikely event that it reaches a certain point, i'll realistically be morally obligated to).

Building

To build, you will need a Linux-based operating system that complies with the latest version of POSIX. You will also need a copy of Clang 15, and you need to have the latest versions of SDL2 and SDL_ttf installed—since you're building from scratch, you'll also need the development files. Installing these is rather system-specific, so if you can't figure it out, please ask in the appropriate place for your system, not here. Finally, be warned that this was developed with glibc, and may not work with musl or other libcs.

If you cannot build for your system, please file an issue. I will be happy to work on porting the software to any open and actively maintained systems out there.

Download a copy of the latest release from the releases page, decompress and untar it, then go into the directory in a terminal and type make release. This will create a file called ëšho'hlorẓûţc hwomùaržrıtéu-erţtenļıls.elf, which you can execute to launch the program. Do not move this file or any of the files within the software directory—doing so will make the program fail to launch.

There isn't any way to install the program yet—but then again, this isn't a professional project.

Known Issues

• When the window is scaled, the position of the cursor is slightly wrong. This is poorly concealed by sometimes hiding the real cursor and showing a fake one where the software thinks it is, but the problem is still definitely there and can still lead to confusion. (It should be noted that the 480p@4:3 resolution of the window regardless of scaling is not an issue, and completely intentional.)
• The timer doesn't show how much time remains, only the total amount of time.
• The glyph ẓ doesn't exist in the font we're using, so we use ż instead.
• The current color scheme is Gruvbox, which 0. is uncertaintly defined, Ⓑ doesn't map perfectly to sixteen colors (a fact used by this very software), and IV.) is warm. All of these problems need to be fixed.
• The JSON library we're using doesn't parse \uXXXX escape sequences in strings correctly, but the only place that this matters can be worked around by the fact that it doesn't reject strings with control characters in them either.
• The asset format (see below) works okay for now, but it will almost certainly need to change in the future to adapt to whatever requirements we end up stumbling across.
• This isn't strictly an issue, but it may be funny to sometimes have wrong answers be selected from categories other than the current one.
• SDL may not have been the best choice.
• The executable produced is considered to be a shared library instead of…well, the executable that it is; this requires a redundant shell script.
• There's a piece of code that's copied in both the menu code and the questions code that should be in its own bit.
• Probably some bits could do with a little optimization.
• Quite frankly, the code is just an absolute disaster in some places, even for what is not a professional project. Certain places could definitely do with some cleanup.
• Perhaps most obviously, the software currently only has files for the aspects and the cases. Digitizing the entire language will take a long time (though admittedly most of that will be from the lexicon and the VxCs affixes), and more importantly, figuring out what the best way to organize everything is will be its own ball of fish. Eventually, this might even evolve into a completely separate project.

Asset Format

This section is mostly aimed at developers, and is not required to use the program.

The questions are obtained from a collection of .json files in the Assets directory of this repository. Each JSON file coresponds to one set of questions in one button on the main menu. The are a structure containing two entries, each of which is in array.

The second array in each JSON file is an array of structures, each of which contains a digitization of all of the data for a particular option for a particular category; for example, in Assets/Case.json, each structure contains the name, TLA, Vc, description, etc. for a particular case, such as Orientitative.

The first array in each JSON file is an array of pairs (also arrays) of strings. The first string is the format of a certain category of questions, and the second string is the format of the corresponding answers. Each one is formatted by having the name of a key in the file's second array's structures begun with U+0098 and terminated with U+009C (the control characters for "start of string" and "string terminator", respectively).

When a question needs to be contructed, the program retrieves an entry from the first array of the file. The program constructs four answers based on the second member of the entry from random entries in the second array in the file. It then selects a random entry from the second array in the file and constructs the question base on the data there, and also overwrites a random one of the answers, which it keeps track of as the correct answer. Finally, it checks all the answers to make sure there are no duplicates, and replaces any that exist, making sure not to overwrite the correct answer. Then, it pushes the finished product out to the rest of the program.

This is not a perfect format (and it certainly doesn't help that i'm not great at explaining it), and in the future it will probably need to be expanded to accomodate other types of questions, or fixed to be more efficient. But it works for now.