Hello everyone

I'm new to this game, just completed the very nice tutorial yesterday. I absolutely love this program, it is very logical and easy to use.

I have a dream, I am looking to make an educational game, something like a MUD for language learning. I've been looking through the forums for the last few days, trying to find my answers, but since I couldn't, I decided to make a new post with my questions.

1. My dream was a MUD, because I want to interact with the users like a "game master", but it seems it is somewhere between impossible and very difficult, is that true?
2. Since this will be an "endless" game, I need a log in system, information stored database. Can or should that be made in Quest, html or something else?
3. I want to track user progress, so I want to store their save game, and their "score"/achievements on my database. How would I go about doing something like that?
4. Is it possible to make a chat to connects users even though they play in different games?
5. If everything else is possible, is it possible to also make this game into an app for android and iPhone? Or is it better to just think html based?

My coding experience is pretty limited, made a few simple games in Action-script, basic html, and that's about it.

Hopefully my questions make sense to you guys, otherwise please ask me for more details.
Thank you for your time, I look very much forward to hearing your answers.

Fury

Generally, Quest isn't set up for multi-player interactions. There was an effort made once to hook node.js up to Quest (as Quest internally is HTML/JS based), and there was some proof-of-concept that it was possible, but nothing was done from there. So you'd have to roll your own, if you wished to use Quest. (And you have said you're not an experienced coder.)

I can't help but think there must be MUD kits out there somewhere that are already built to do what you want out of the box.

Thank you very much for your reply. It seem likes in my morning haze I didnt make myself clear.
I have given up making a MUD, I realize its way beyond my skill set.

I probably have to listen to my wife and only ask one question at the time ( )

Im thinking about making a site with something like Joomla, where the users login and then get their saved game ready to continue from last time. Is that possible to do?

Thank you

Oh, ok. I thought the gist of this all was that you were trying or wanting to duplicate MUD-like capabilities in Quest. If not, then I'll leave it to you to decide what you're actually trying to do.

As far as your questions go:

1) (See my previous answer)
2) The Quest website already has a login system, so there is some integration with Quest into a website already. The Quest code is all open-source, so it's able to be looked at to see how it works. You might be able to replicate on your website what the Quest website is doing (e.g set the right cookies or whatever that the web player looks for) and then have your own login system. You would need your webserver and database back end and then code how you want it all to work. I have not looked at what is open-sourced in the Quest code to know if it exposes the actual website code. I doubt it.
3) This gets, again, into trying to change the existing website integration that Quest has. Quest already supports saving games. You would either have to see how the Quest code is interfacing with the website and try to replicate that so it just "plugs in" or you would have to customise the code to have it plug into whatever architecture you wish to use.
4) That can be implemented entirely outside Quest as some sort of webpage control that lives on the same page as the Quest webplayer instance.
5) Quest games can be converted to run on mobile platforms, but I don't know what's involved. There is a way to convert a Quest game to Javascript code using an experimental tool, but that hasn't been terribly successful either (based on what I've caught through the forum grapevine).

Alex is the creator of Quest. I don't know to what extent he would want to or be able to help create a customized version of the Quest website (with extras like chat being for you to implement), but I imagine he might if the price was right!

Hi, thanks again for your quick reply!

To quote Dumb and Dumber, "so you're telling me there is a chance!", and that is basically what I was hoping to hear. How to go about all those things, I'll push into the future and start concentrating on actually making the game.

I have another question, about timers in Quest. I did the tutorial, and the counter counts down.
I want to time how much time a player uses on a particular set of problems, and award a score depending on how fast it is solved. Can the timer be used like that?

Thank you

The only problem is that timers are very unreliable (read: "broken") in the web player, which is what it sounds like you'd be using. It may be possible to leverage Javascript somehow to query the actual clock/time. The only trick with JS is that you have to go through some hoops to get values *out* and back to scripts.

I see, thanks for answering all my questions. I really appreciate it!