Terminology

Host

A host is the main controller of a room and can issue room and member changes at any time.

Room

A room is an individual game that the host and all members connect to. A room code is a 4-letter code generated by Hackbox.

Member

A member is any individual client that connects to a room. You can think of them as "players", however you can also consider special roles such as "operators", "moderators", etc. as a member of the room as well.

State

A state is an object held by each member that describes their current situation in the game. It can describe various properties about the member, but more importantly, it controls how each member sees and interacts with the room. A state has many parts to it, including theme, presets, and ui.

Theme

A theme describes the basic theming of a member's screen. It can define the default background colors and text colors of the Header and Main sections of the UI.

Preset

A preset is a configuration of a component type with a set of properties or parameters. They are useful for defining common visual setup for components without having to define them over and over again in the components themselves.

UI

UI, or User Interface, is the part of the state that describes how the user interacts with the room. It is split into two parts:

• Header, which describes how the header on the member's screen is rendered, and
• Main, which describes how the main body of the member's screen is rendered

Component

A component is a UI element that the member can interact with. They are commonly defined from a preset first, and then additional specific properties or parameters of each component within the state can then be defined. Components can be any of these component types:

• Text, for simple text display
• TextInput, for text input
• Buzzer, for basic buzzer interaction
• Button, pretty much the same as a Buzzer, but with a different default appearance
• Choices, for a collection of buttons