I'm wondering why Quest 4 Pro hasn't been made available for free, or at least cheaper, in light of the very sound logic behind making the upcoming Quest 5 free. I'm not trying to slight anyone - if Quest 4 does what it appears to do from the descriptions and screenshots, I think it's worth $40. I've been a huge adventure game addict since I was a kid, pre-Windows 3.1, from McMurphy's Mansion to Day of the Tentacle. I've played through every Sierra game just for the sake of getting the maximum amount of points and seeing every possible outcome and hilarious death. I'm also an avid fiction writer and would LOVE to turn my stories into games. But I'm much too poor right now in my life to justify spending that much on a game maker. I'm a 26-year old self-employed web and graphic designer from Detroit city proper, and suffice it to say, times are tough. Quest was the first program for this purpose that I looked at, but I moved on to the free ones when I saw it wasn't. I spent several hours with Inform, and while the concept behind the program is extremely clever, I can't get a handle on the logic of the language. It's too vague, I need a more definite and intuitive interface. I could wait for Quest 5, but I've got (I think!) some great ideas and I want to strike while the iron is hot.

Again, I don't want to prevent anyone from getting what they deserve for their hard programming work. I guess what I'm saying is, sort of going along with the reasoning behind making Quest 5 free, I want to contribute to the author by creating some really great, thoughtful games and releasing them for free to the IF community and the world.

To the author: thanks for making such a cool program. If this logic jives with anyone else, chime in here.

I realize this is a brash request, so I'm going to cut my teeth on QDK Lite and start making some games. Because of the evaluation limitations, they will be abbreviated versions of what I have planned in my story notes, but I'm hoping that if you can see what I'm capable of, it might help strengthen my argument for a free QDK 4 pro. Thanks again!

There are a few reasons:

- Quest 4 and Quest 5 are different systems really, and I think the "clean break" of Quest 5 is the best time to make such a radical change to the product's licencing.
- I don't really see much benefit to myself, or the longer-term future of Quest 5, in making Quest Pro 4 free.
- I don't want to annoy people who have recently paid for Quest Pro 4.
- I'd rather encourage new people to use Quest 5 as soon as possible.
- But perhaps the main reason is simply that it would take me a bit of time to "free up" Quest 4 - updating the website, withdrawing it from RegNow and so on - which is time I'd rather be spending on Quest 5.

If you drop me an email you may find me in a generous mood though

Alex wrote:There are a few reasons:

- Quest 4 and Quest 5 are different systems really, and I think the "clean break" of Quest 5 is the best time to make such a radical change to the product's licencing.
- I don't really see much benefit to myself, or the longer-term future of Quest 5, in making Quest Pro 4 free.
- I don't want to annoy people who have recently paid for Quest Pro 4.
- I'd rather encourage new people to use Quest 5 as soon as possible.
- But perhaps the main reason is simply that it would take me a bit of time to "free up" Quest 4 - updating the website, withdrawing it from RegNow and so on - which is time I'd rather be spending on Quest 5.

If you drop me an email you may find me in a generous mood though

Alex has raised some very good points for not making Quest Pro, free. One of the biggest issues that I agree with would be for those that have purchased Quest Pro recently, then seeing it being changed to free. Those as well as others potentially, could be asking for a portion thereof or all of, their payment back.

In brief - a explanation of myself:
- on / off programming in Basic since 1982 (currently learning / relearning Visual Basic 2010 Express)
- text adventure fan since 1982. On/off wanting to make my own since.
- First serious text.adv. programming learning attempt - July to October 2009.

I agree with Inform 7. Initially, I'd loved the programming language idea OF it! It's implementation and lack of clear instruction / assistance, quickly became major hurdles for it and I stopped at the encountered 'roadblocks'.
T.A.D.S. V3 is powerful as heck! Learning curve though, FOR a programmer? Still quite steep. Not enough time available to fully learn.
I paid for Adrift originally - only to find out later just how many things that it IS lacking - including a simple IF ... THEN function. That, was the killer.

For the last 2 weeks I've been looking at all of the previous languages that I had learned last year, in hopes of starting work on learning again, having returned to my 'Basic language' programming hobby in later November - spurring my desire to make my own free text adventure games as well. I've once again ruled out the previous languages I had learned. I loved the idea of Alan V3 except, for having to input through a separate text file. Not crazy about that.

And all of that, has brought me to Quest, whcih I'm VERY happy with my learning so far! Instructions / help in it so far are great and easy to follow. Not having a lot of free time for my (too many) hobbies, Quest fits in VERY well with it's 'point and click' functionality, which saves me a heck of a lot of coding time! WELL done there, Alex.

I'd considered hopping on to the Quest V5 'bandwagon' seeing VB.net listed as well but ... I'm not confident enough in my VB chops yet, as I've only been relearning it for about the past month. (I came to know VB 2002/2003.Net well enough, a couple of years ago to write fully detailed / fully functioning Numerology software but ... I'm still in the area of relearning what I'd learned back then, as well as learning the new functions / versions of things in VB 2010. I've a ways to go yet and don't feel comfortable enough yet, in trying to help.) In the future though - possibly.

Anyhoo ... to close: my past experience of paying for Adrift last year to later find that major IF...THEN function lacking from it, as well as a few other things about it (and currently, it's membership appearing to be as low as it is) has made me a little cautious of paying for another one. Here though - the 15 room / 50 object limitation within Quest Lite, still gives me more than enough room to learn the software with! I'm VERY happy with that.