brightsparks... advanced features
Brightsparks has a number of features that are not apparent in normal usage. These are revealed by clicking on the Control Panel button in the End Window. It is also possible to customise (where should this go?) certain features.
Refresh Quiz
If you click on this button, all the questions from the quiz you've just played will be deleted from your computer, and the next time that set of questions is selected, they'll be fetched from the internet (so you'll need to be online of course).
The message in the information field next to the button lets you know when the operation is complete.
Clear Questions
Click on Clear Questions to delete ALL the questions from your computer. Next time you play, the selected question set will be fetched from the web server - that is, just like playing for the first time. Again, you'll need to be online in order to do this.
The Brightsparks program searches for its questions in three possible locations.
First, it looks for them in the questions folder that's in the Brightsparks Data folder within the Brightsparks folder:
Brightsparks\Brightsparks Data\questions\
If it can't find them there, it looks in the Brightsparks Data folder itself
Brightsparks\Brightsparks Data\
If it can't find them in either of those locations, it expects to find them on the Brightsparks web site.
It's possible to download the question sets and install them into the Brightsparks folder itself. This is convenient for system administrators who want to copy the system onto a CD for installation on a number of machines in a lab, say, or to run on machines that don't have an internet connection.
Install Questions
Click on the Install Questions button to start the question installer. You can then use the Selector window to choose sets of questions to install. The selected question set will be downloaded from the internet. This could take up to 8 minutes if your Internet connection is slow. Each question from the selected set is installed into the questions folder in the Brightsparks Data folder. The loader shows you the progress of the download. When the download completes successfully, you return to the Selector Window and you can select another set of questions to download.
If the download doesn't complete successfully, try again! Don't leave a partially-installed set of questions in the questions folder.