I'm opening a topic to get some help with a couple of basic questions I've got and maybe follow them up with more as I go along.
For starters, I'd like to know if you can add the hyperlinks to the objects as they appear in the room description, since I'm not a big fan of the objects list prefix. So what I want to do is disable the "You can see [object]" line, but have [object] hyperlinked in the actual description of the room.

I've also run into a bit of trouble with the descriptions. It seems that with longer ones the words sometimes get joined together and I have to proofread and correct a couple of times to make sure they're separate. I think it happens when I edit the text in any way.

That's it for now. Thanks in advance.

First thing to do is copying CoreDescriptions.aslx into your gamedirectory. Then you can edit this file, change the function ShowRoomDescription and remove the code for "You can see".

For using hyperlinks you have to add <object verbs="Take/Open">thing</object> to the objectdescription.
But be careful: you have to do this with an external texteditor. And if you watch such a description within the Q5-Editor, you will see strange symbols and saving the file then will delete the tags!

That seems like more trouble than it's worth for the moment, so I'll try to deal with it as it is.

Another quick question, at some point I want to temporarily change the background color to black, and the text to white, which I worked out - but can I also change the link color temporarily? If not, I think I'll have to find a link color that contrasts well with both white and black and settle with that in the game display options, I guess.

edit: can I also make the object list prefix into a suffix for a single instance? To make it say, for example, "[object1] and [object2] can be seen here".

henrygale wrote:
Another quick question, at some point I want to temporarily change the background color to black, and the text to white, which I worked out - but can I also change the link color temporarily? If not, I think I'll have to find a link color that contrasts well with both white and black and settle with that in the game display options, I guess.

No, I dont think so

henrygale wrote:
edit: can I also make the object list prefix into a suffix for a single instance? To make it say, for example, "[object1] and [object2] can be seen here".

For a single instance? You mean room? I think you could do this by editing CoreDescriptions.aslx

There's no built-in "change link foreground" command, but you can do it using the "Raise a UI request" command and choose LinkForeground from the list. Then you can type in an HTML colour name in quotes for the expression, e.g.

"White"
"#FAFAFA"

Is there any way to open released games in the editor? That would be really useful to check out.

Most of the released games are for Quest 4, which is a different system to Quest 5, so there's no way of opening those.

Also, opening released games for Quest 5 (.quest files) in the editor is disabled. The .quest file also includes all the libraries that a game needs, so it wouldn't look the same as editing the original .aslx file, and also many game authors don't want people poking around in their code.

I think it would be nice to have some .aslx sample files for newbies to poke around - there are a couple in the CodePlex repository but they're not full games.

I can't seem to find them, maybe I'm looking in the wrong place? (http://quest.codeplex.com/)
Like you said, some samples to poke around with would be really useful.

Thanks

You can browse the code at http://quest.codeplex.com/SourceControl/BrowseLatest

There are some examples in:

/WorldModel/WorldModel/Examples-Internal
/WorldModel/WorldModel/Examples-Public
/WebPlayer/Examples