Hello all and thankyou in advance for any information you can supply

I have long been a player of text based adventure games and go way back to games like pirates cove and the count by scott adams , 2 games that also stick in my memory are lancelot by level9 and Fish! by Magnetic Scrolls..

i re-played fish the other day and thought i would look to see how the software had advanced with the flow of time so i did a search and really only found Quest - which does sound good

i contacted Scott Adams himself asking about software and what he uses - he replied saying he uses his own system which i assume is what he uses on his newest game release - he does not sell the software ..

I am sure people here at this forum would want me to buy this software but would someone also supply any links to software thats similar ?
really so i can assess the differences ?

I also played games by Infocom and still have a few of these which i took a look at recently..

So if i had a desire to create my own textual adventure games like those i loved to play and wanted to have all the same features and power , would quest do everything that these old adventure game designers inserted into their games ?

Thankyou

Just a few thoughts and questions here it seems in no particular order
Any replies welcome..

Kind Regards
Carl

Some other IF systems are:
Inform (http://www.inform-fiction.org)
TADS (http://www.TADS.org)
AGT
-(http://mirror.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXprogrammingXagt.html)
HUGO (http://www.generalcoffee.com/hugo.html)


A much more complete list is at this address:
http://mirror.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXprogramming.html

http://ifarchive.org is a huge archive of all interactive fiction topics.

Great cheers for that.

I have just purchased the new game from scott adams and to be honest i am not to impressed with the format layout , saying that i havnt played it for long but the layout to me seems very annoying...

Anyway

It looks like i need to do some reading on how best i should persue the creation of adventure games - maybe quest is going to be the best option for me - but i will look around to see what these others can do also

QUESTION:

1 : What sort of advancements go on with the development of quest? are there many during the year ?

2 : whats the quality of the parser like ?

3 : how do i get on and help out in development of quest ?

Kind Regards
Carl

And not forgetting Adrift http://www.adrift.org.uk/.

A good place to check out is Cloak of Darkness http://www.firthworks.com/roger/cloak/ which lists quite a few different systems.

The main thing you'll probably find with systems like TADS, Hugo, Inform et al is that not many games are written for them but the majority of them are of a fairly high standard. Quest games tend to come out a lot more regularly but are seldom any good. (Take a quick look at the main Quest games page if you want proof.) Adrift tends to fall into the middle ground. Some good games, some bad games, although less of either than there were this time last year.

While Quest certainly has potential to be a great system, none of the games written with it so far are anything to write home about. Quest writers seem to have a liking for miniscule games that are riddled with bugs and probably take all of five minutes to write. If someone actually made an effort, I'm sure they could write something pretty remarkable with it.

Thanks

hey i went to your website - it looks like you have been busy ..

i see some of your adventures have over 200 rooms have you done anything like this with quest ??

if you use both systems which one do you prefer and why

Kind Regards
Carl

I've written quite a few big games with Adrift but none have hit the 200 room mark yet - although maybe one day... Do you mean the KB count instead?

Personally I prefer Adrift as I find it quite a bit easier to use than Quest, although both have their good and bad points. I tend to be able to write more quickly with Adrift than with Quest but whether this is because Adrift is naturally easier to use or because I've been using it longer than Quest (2+ years for Adrift, about 4-5 months for Quest) I couldn't say. Also Adrift seems, on the whole, to be more stable. I've only ever ran into a couple of big problems with Adrift in over 2 years but several times during writing my only Quest game to date, I ran into bugs that almost made me give up.

I'm going to stick with Quest though. I like the GUI and think it's a pity more systems like Tads or Inform or Hugo don't have this as an option.

I've got a Quest game planned for the IFComp 2004 although as to whether I actually get it finished or not remains to be seen.