Hello game masters,

I only have access to the web version of Quest, I am running an older Chromebook, and as of yet the web version of the text adventure is not working in Chrome on the Chromebook. (Yet it seems to be working on other versions of chrome browser, perhaps in windows or OSX).

I am working on a game project in which the player will carry around a smartphone and use it as their guide during the quest.
The smartphone will have apps installed, a flashlight, video app, sound app, photo viewing, perhaps a messenger, and maybe a map eventually.
Since the apps can be turned on and off, I am creating them as objects that are switchable.

Goals:
When the phone is powered off, do not show the installed apps in the inventory.
When the phone is powered on, display the apps in the inventory.
When an app is not in use, do not display any contents it may have, such as photos contained in the photo app.
Allow the apps to be turned on and off while leaving the phone on.
Battery indicator perhaps shown under health status.

Should I create a function that makes all the apps visible or invisible based on whether the phone is on or off?
Since the videos will all be YouTube links, what is the best way to save them all inside a video player object so the player can find them and review them as they wish?
The same for audio files and images with their respective apps.

Or is this a bit too ambitious for the limitations of quest and I should find another avenue of making this work?

Thanks.
"-" egoproctor

That does sounds ambitious, but certainly should be achievable.

I had a go at creating a smart phone myself, though my goals were a bit different, and it uses a library, so not much help to you here.

If your phone is a container, then closing the container should hide the contents, so you may be able to get the apps to hide just by closing it when the power is off (phone.isopen = false). I guess you could do similar with app if you want the photos displayed in the inventory (though the inventory will potentially get very big).

Apps and the phone would be switchable, and when the phone is off the container is closed, so apps cannot be accessed. Just make sure all apps are turned off (app.switchedon = false) when the phone is turned off.

Make the battery status an attribute of the player, so it can be displayed with health. Use a turn script to decrement it, depending on what apps are running. You might want to have two values, one that keeps the true value, one that calculates that as a percentage and is what is displayed (and could be "--" when the phone is off).

I have no experience of adding videos.

It sounds an interesting project. Good luck!

Putting photos and videos inside an app should be easy enough. Just make it a container, because the words "open" and "close" work perfectly well for applications. Then you'd need to create an object for each picture or video, and move it into the relevant app when the player gains access to it.

The phone itself, you could make switchable. Then, like Pixie says, you could put this.isopen = true in the switched-on script, and this.isopen = false in the switched-off script. An object's contents will be displayed in the inventory if it has a boolean attribute "isopen" set to true, even if it isn't a container. You could also make the apps close when the phone is switched off, which shouldn't need too much scripting.

Thanks for the reply.

The purpose is for it to have limited functionality, like the com unit in Metal Gear Solid.
The videos are all hosted on YouTube, and it is pretty simple to call up a YouTube video.
Think of the smart phone as something similar to the books in the Myst series.

What I would like to know, is how to stop the videos playing after a certain amount of time.
On a YouTube video, we can use this little hack to create custom start and end times,
https://www.youtube.com/embed/SZylUYtldno?start=30&end=35

that is actually a video explaining how to do this.

I want to use the smartphone to be like the books in Myst to grab content off of YouTube, play a few seconds of it, and then continue with the story. I would like the video to disappear when it is finished playing the segment, but keep the link in the video history. As the game progresses, different segments of the video can be unlocked, until the entire video can be seen.

That is something I would like to play with.

What do you think?

ah, you know of two awesome games:

Myst and MGS, hehe :D

and it's known as a 'codec' in MGS :P
(quiz: what are all of the frequencies... especially of meryl... wink)

in Fallout... it's a 'pip boy'...

I don't remember the frequencies for MGS, I played it years ago, and then subjected my brain to living in China for 3 years and several large dosages of magic mushroom and LSD since then. So, my focus and memory has been shifted significantly.

Now, I want to tell a story about the history of our world,
from an ancient cataclysm to today, using perhaps quest as a system to build a prototype, if not the entire adventure.

and in LOTR the similar system, not used often, is a Palantir.

Now thanks to DARPA, ElectRX program and other military initiatives, like RAM and some others, they are able to put biochips inside people's brains and remotely control memory formation and retrieval, spatial reasoning, navigation, and stop traumatic responses in the nervous system related to real time evens and PTSD triggers. Talk about terminator style super soldiers. They can also trigger self healing of the nervous system by sending electromagnetic signals to various neurons. There is also a group in India that has developed an external biochip that electromagnetically stimulates the body to regenerate.

I would rather have an external system and not something inside my head that the government can access and stimulate with questionable motives.

Also seems that Intel's new 8x086 processor series features an embedded RISC processor whose instruction pipeline exists specifically to allow remote hardware level access to any systems running that chip. Like Root level access regardless of what software is installed. That includes video cards, phones, any chip that is installed in anything really. It is going to get interesting really fast.

In fact, look up US Public Law 101-15, US Public Law 102-14 and Presidential Proclamation 5956, become familiar with the fun little book they invoke. The world is about to get kind of hellish, and I want to write the story of why that is happening, from the ancient past through today.

Using a choose your adventure style game with a codec or pip boy and whatever it needs to be called can be fun.

"-" egoproctor

You also got a bit of 'manchurian candidate' in there as well, except their concept was brain-washing/conditioning, vs your use of technology/chips/programming/hacking, hehe

(check out 'Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex' anime/manga for incredible insight into the realistic future of our soon-coming man-machine world, the "cyberized" age)

there's also this movie that came out this year, which I actually really liked, simple, but good, with a nice plot twist that I probably should have seen coming but I didn't, as the movie was made well, keeping you from realizing its plot-twist until it happens. It's a very graphically violent movie though:

the 'Upgrade/Stem' (2018) movie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6499752/

Vexille and Appleseed are good.

Gamer is a bit gratuitous, but it is showing what is possible.

The books, Oryx and Crake and the two that follow, The Year of the Flood and MaddAdam Margret Atwood.

Also, Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash

William Gibson had some good work.

We are looking at a population decrease by at least 90% if they are able to use this tech.

5G alone is going to kill a bunch of people. Installers and researchers are discussing how it is going to effect cancer growth.

With all the aluminium in our bodies, etc. it is just going to get ugly.