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Where Am I?

Where Am I? is a simple geography game which can be played solo or with others. It's a lot like GeoGuessr but is designed to be played with a group of people in a conference call.

Playing the Game

  1. One person acts as gamemaster. They visit the homepage and choose a game to play.

  2. The gamemaster presses S. This will:

    • Show the answers.
    • Remove !solo from the location links.
    • Enable Copy buttons on each round of each game.

  3. The gamemaster clicks Copy on the first round of the chosen game and pastes the result in the text chat of the conference call. This requires rich text support in the chat application.

  4. The players simultaneously click the provided link and attempt to guess the city they're shown. Anyone may shout out an answer.

  5. When the gamemaster hears the correct answer, they reveal the location to everyone by running sendRevealMessage() in the JavaScript console of the game page (not the list page).

  6. For each subsequent round, the gamemaster clicks the corresponding Copy button and replaces their previous chat message with the new version. The players click the new link and the process repeats.

Features

Moving and Non-Moving Locations

Locations have a boolean allowMovement property. This controls whether players can move down the road after the Street View panorama loads. If false, this property means the players will be limited to the initial photosphere.

Clues

Particularly useful for non-moving locations, a list of clues may be specified with each location to show players what could have tipped them off and what they should look out for in future rounds.

Bonuses

Particularly useful for the last round of a game, each location may specify a bonus video filename. This video will be shown to the players shortly after the city name is revealed. Videos are not included in the Git repository.

Fairness Countdown

The first player to join the game at a particular city will trigger a synchronised 10-second countdown for all players playing that same city. This gives players a little more time to click the link when it appears in chat and avoids penalising players with slower internet connections. Google Maps still loads immediately but is hidden from view while the countdown runs.

Additionally, after finishing, the countdown has its own 15-second cooldown, preventing late arrivals to the game from triggering a second countdown and being obstructed while others start the game.

Solo and Silent Modes

URLs of game pages may have flags added to them, e.g., https://whereami.blieque.co.uk/7b9453e!silent:

  • !solo – Show the player their own "Reveal" button on the game page. Do not reveal other simultaneous games when a "solo" player presses reveal, only their own game.

  • !silent – Join the game without triggering the fairness countdown.

Adding Content

Locations are stored in src/locations.json and games are stored in src/games.json. These files are pretty intuitive.

Locations

id should be omitted when adding new locations. It will be added by the server at startup and saved back to locations.json.

Some properties are optional:

  • isEnabled, default true
  • latitude and longitude, if panoramaID is provided
  • panoramaID, if both latitude and longitude are provided
  • flag, default undefined
  • allowMovement, default false
  • clues, default undefined
  • bonus, default undefined

It is recommended to:

  • Specify locations by panoramaID rather than latitude and longitude where possible, unless allowMovement is true.

    • Values for panoramaID, latitude, and longitude can be found in the URL of the page when viewing Google Street View. Consider this URL: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.4779302,-0.0014511,3a,63.7y,327.19h,93.1t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sAuEPJltHzwIzwxBBEDekQA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656. latitude and longitude follow "/maps/@" and panoramaID is found between "!1s" and the following "!", not inclusive.

    • Specifying locations by panoramaID ensures the exact photosphere you intended to use is loaded. By contrast, using latitude and longitude can sometimes cause a photosphere from a slightly different location or date to load. Using panoramaID is more brittle as photospheres are sometimes removed when Google adds new imagery. Since locations with allowMovement enabled are less likely to include clues for a specific photosphere, the reliability of latitude and longitude is preferable for those locations.

    • When the panoramaID in the Google Maps URL begins with AF1Qip, the photosphere is user-uploaded. This is common near tourist attractions and in countries without official Street View imagery, e.g., India. Specifying these photospheres by panoramaID does not work due to limitations in the Google Maps SDK. These locations can usually, although not always, be specified by latitude and longitude.

  • Always either set allowMovement to true or provide an array of clues. Note that flag will not be used if clues is not an array of clues.

locations.json is in the form:

[
  {
    "id": "231b158",
    "isEnabled": true,
    "name": "London",
    "panormaID": "AuEPJltHzwIzwxBBEDekQA",
    "latitude": 51.4779302,
    "longitude": -0.0014511,
    "difficulty": 2,
    "flag": "🇬🇧",
    "allowMovement": false,
    "clues": [
      "\"Royal Observatory\" (southeast)",
      "London skyline (north-northwest)"
    ],
    "bonus": "01.mp4"
  },
  // ...
]

Games

Each game consists of an array of rounds. Each round is specified by a location ID or an array of location IDs. In the latter case, all locations should be in the same city and should be of varying difficulty.

games.json is in the form:

[
  {
    "series": 1,
    "date": "2020-10-02",
    "locationIDs": [
      ["d282f31", "45523f4"],
      ["83751fe", "b0a8a17"],
      "cf3ff15"
    ]
  },
  // ...
]

Deployment

The server application is started with npm run start. The application may be deployed behind a webserver to handle TLS termination, serving bonuses, etc. Below is a sample partial nginx server block.

server {
  # ...

  location /bonus {}

  # Forward requests, including WebSockets, to the application server.
  location / {
    # Allow upgrading to WebSockets.
    proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade';

    proxy_http_version 1.1;
    proxy_cache off;
    proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;

    # Prevent 502 error.
    proxy_buffers 8 32k;
    proxy_buffer_size 64k;
    proxy_read_timeout 3600;

    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080/;
  }
}