Another feature which I think we can get rid of is "look only" directions.

I'm not sure if anybody really uses these in Quest. They were one of the early pull requests I received, so not my idea, but it sounded reasonable enough. The idea is that you could "look north", "look south" etc.

But surely you can do that by just adding those as commands - "look north" and "look n" would cover it, I think. You could define these globally as a fallback so you could have some default "There's nothing interesting in that direction" text or whatever.

So I don't think this is a feature that is needed by the core library - it complicates and overloads what an exit "is", which seems too big a cost for the value this feature adds.

Any objections if this feature doesn't make it into QuestKit? Have I missed something useful about how this currently works in Quest?

I agree. They can be added as commands or included in well written descriptions anyway ("to the north you see a...") - I haven't considered implementing it anyway.

Yeah, this one's easy enough to add in yourself if anyone wants it, but it's rarely used.

A bit off topic: is there going to be a thread for making suggestions on things to possibly ADD to QuestKit? I can't be the only one who's thought about it...

Look North was one of the regional news programmes back in the day. Perhaps still is. If someone typed it in my game I'd be tempted to make a niche and irrelevant reference to 80s news readers Mike Neville.

Edit: I thought Angela Ripon was too but wiki doesn't confirm it.

jdpjdpjdp wrote:
A bit off topic: is there going to be a thread for making suggestions on things to possibly ADD to QuestKit? I can't be the only one who's thought about it...

Sure, I'll be adding posts as I come up with ideas, and feel free to add your own. One thread per idea would be good, so we can properly keep track of things.

Also, don't expect a *huge* amount of new stuff in QuestKit 6 (which will be the first version) - but ideas are always good, even if they may have to wait a while.

I can't think of anything apart from problems with Quest that are presumably being ironed out with the Quest6/QuestKit release. Clearscreen clearing all CSS data adds work to a project as does a save game state not remembering audio or CSS states but again these can be scripted around presently.

The text processor has to stay. It's ingenious.

I've been working on a game in Quest 5 (Windows client) and I wanted to have a window that players can look out of. Having a "look only" exit seemed to be the solution. I created a look only exit, with name "window". Confusingly the destination of the exit disappears when you assign the "look only" attribute. In fact it turned out to be a real pain. As soon as an exit is "look only" it disappears from all listings, and the only way to interact with it is to manage to type the correct command "look south" or whatever. You can't "look window" or "look at|through|in window".

I have been using the text processor extensively in my game (yay text processor!) and plan to eschew the GUI compass completely relying on hyperlinks. So to deal with the obscure "look south" command issue I did: "In the south wall is a {command:look south:window} facing the farm". But the pain does not stop there: you'd be forgiven for thinking that you'd get a description of the room for free when you look south. Instead you have to write a script or text - and the script has to do something like iterate over ScopeVisibleNotHeldForRoom. I got all that working in the end, but it took quite a bit of code.

So in short, "look only" exits as they are now are so painful I can't imagine anyone wanting to use them. Its probably a good idea to get rid of them and create a help page that describes how to implement that with a script.

I use the "look" directions pretty frequently, in just about all my rooms. The idea is the player see's the basic room description which I account for as a glance over, and then when they look: north, south, east, west, up and down directions they are more specifically studying that particular area. I would say what isn't needed is northwest and northeast, southwest and southeast. Those are a little excessive imo, but the others serve a good function.

Definately shouldn't be in the core game, unless you want to make it toggle'able (like many of the other features) and it doesn't cause the hassle that it was with the Exit usage

though if it's not put into the core game, for the non-code people, we may need a 'look' library for them to use, as they'll not be able to create their own 'look' scripting. As 'look' can have some uses, depending on the person's game ~ game design. (or, you could script~code in a 'wizard eye: might and magic games' or a 'superman's x-ray vision' like spell, to let you see X rooms in whatever direction, lol)

I don't know how you programmed 'look' into quest, and I'm certainly not a programmer, so obviously this is not as good as what you guys~girls can do, but for my own brief attempt~thinking at a possible way to do its scripting: set it up as a command, and have if conditions for the 8 adjacent room directions (N,S,E,W,NW,NE,SW,SE), and maybe 'in~out' and 'up~down' directions too, for a library for non-coding people if they want it:

pseudocode:

get adjacent~etc rooms
// conditions need to be checked for if you can look at each of the adjacent~etc rooms, obviously
if (every~all directions)
-> iterate through list of adjacent~etc rooms
->-> print room.description
else if (north)
-> north room description
else if (south)
else if (ne)
else if (N+NW+NE)
else if (S+SW+SE)
else if (E+NE+SE)
else if (W+NW+SW)
else if ... etc etc etc etc