I've been looking for the old versions of quest but all i keep finding is Quest 3.x.Does anyone know where i could find 1 or all of them.
Alex (wisely) doesn't host old versions of Quest on his server because it would be a potential source of confusion. People would download old interpreters, then try and run new games on them = YUKKK, loads of trouble!
I've (probably) still got all the versions of Quest from the version 1 beta to the latest burned onto CD's somewhere. However, I'd certainly not waste your time going back before version 2.15 (I think that was the last of the Q2 versions), because pre version 2.1 Quest was more 'a promising for the future' system than a 'genuinely useable' one (in my opinion).
By V2.15, Quest was a pretty decent, useful system, but you'd find that version curiously hard to use compared to Q3.x - which really was a
massive improvement and disposed of a lot of inbuilt awkwardness that had been carried forward from V1.x and required ugly workarounds to get things done. The lack of inheritance and peculiar distinctions between things we now call just 'objects' in 3.x were a real p.i.t.a. - with the benefit of hindsight!
An aside;
I'm not 'knocking' Quest (or Alex) here, Q2.1x was good in its day, but things have moved on, developed if you like, as they always seem to do.
When Quest 2.1x was current the well known (and also excellent) ALAN system was in its version 2.7/2.8 guise and didn't have proper object oriented niceties like inheritance etc either. Quest & Alan were the two tools I compared and found to be roughly equal in what I could do with them.
I looked at TADS and INFORM too, but as my target audience (quite young children) at that time would be looking for a game with a very strongly 'Windows GUI' feel, the choice was pretty easy. TADS with its HTML interface was a strong contender from a programmers point of view (it really is VERY powerful, there's almost nothing you cannot do in TADS) but against that the interface still wasn't as 'GUI' as I wanted and Quest was 'more than powerful enough' for the job in hand.
While Quest has now been in V3 form for a while, ALAN V3 (which has also undergone a radical re-write to get decent object oriented features) is still not yet in 'beta' form, though the development versions are very promising..Actually, I would not recommend you go back and mess about with Quest 1 or Quest 2 at all, the different 'model' will feel very strange and you might even find it confusing.
Al (MaDbRiT)
