Hi! I've written a pretty large QuestNet world, and the next step is going to be to make some detailed character creation/combat/etc... to round it out into a fun fantasy MUD. I tested my world out by connecting myself three times to localhost, and was able to play as three characters at once, interacting with each other, etc... However, when I tried to test it with a friend and codeveloper over the net, he could not connect to me. What is the process for this? I gave him my IP adress, started a questnet server and then put myself in the game. That worked fine. But then, when he tried to connect, it said "waiting for host to respond" or something until he got impatient and closed it out. We tried it the other way around and I could not connect to him. What's up there?
Also, how do you do logins? I tried it, but could not figure out how to log a new player and his password into the system.
And finally: I own and operate a website with this friend I've mentioned as the webmaster. How would we go about making the site the host of the game so we wouldn't have to get a dedicated machine? Thanks for any help that might be offered. I think I'm relatively close to releasing aQuestNet game, but although I'm good with computers, networking and the like has always eluded me. I'm one step away. Any help would be most welcome!!!

Are you able to ping each other's machines? Are you using a firewall or router?

I don't know. I'm not using a firewall or a router, and, like I said, I'm a computer guy but networking is all new to me, so I'm not even sure what pinging means (I always thought it was just a measure of how well you were reading each other). I think my problem is a simple operator error

Anyway, I have an idea for your next release. It might be implemented already and I just wasn't looking hard enough, but here it is: You should enable folders for locations and objects in QDK. My world is pretty big. I have made one continent that consists of over forty locations just outside. Now, that's only one continent. Even now, if I want to say "go north to:" I have to scroll through 40+ locations to find where going north would bring you. And that is the smallest continent! Now if I could put all that in a folder with the name of the continent, and then the locations inside a city or a cave or a castle inside another folder inside that one, it would make life a whole lot easier! Just a thought!!! Thanks, btw, for replying. I love Quest. I'm very impressed with it, and am looking forward to becoming a member of your community.

That hirearchial (spelling's probably WAY off) idea sounds sweet!
How to implement it would take a bit of thinking, like how do you link rooms tegether? Why? But it would be quite nice.

Anyway, Pinging is the time, the amount of "hops" and the reliability of a transmission (route) between two computers.
Anyway, are you sure windows firewall is not active? If you have windows XP that is. Turn it off.
Other than that, I can't think of anything off-hand.

Well, I won't be able to try again for a week or so (busy holiday schedule) but I'll try when I can and see if I have the windows firewall up.

As for the idea: There could be two areas... the top would be alive and would be a list of all the other locations in the present folder. The second would be temporarily dead. When you are in the first menu, after all the selections there is a double dotted line like you see in the Quick Jump To: bars on some web sites, after which would come a list of all the other folders. Once you click one, the second window could become enabled with a list of locations from the folder selected. Of course, this would only give you one level in the hierarchy, and if you did it that way you would need to use more than the two windows based on how big the hierarchy was. A better idea might just be to do away with the way it is now (in a popup window) and make a button which, when pressed, opens a "BROWSE" window just like Windows Explorer from which you pick the folder, subfolders, and then finally the particular room to which you would be travelling.

Just a thought!!

if you're using a router, go into your router settings and forward port 10001. Make sure you're using your WAN IP (Which you can find by going to http://www.whatismyip.com )