intfiction.org

This is not actually true; while you need a browser for Undum, you can download games and play them locally and offline. (Indeed, if you're submitting a game to a comp it's much more polite to allow for this. Everybody is not online 24/7.)

I'd be surprised if Alex were to suggest that people should stop use Quest. He's the creator of Quest.

(You should put that information in your sig or something, Alex. It's useful for people to know.)

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"The thing I like about deadlines is the wonderful whooshing noise they make as they go past."
- Douglas Adams

This strengthens the feeling I must have misunderstood his post completely.

Ok I have updated my profile a bit, now with signature. (I'll try not to attach it all the time as I do find signatures on forums to be a bit annoying, to be honest)

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Quest - create and play text adventure games in your browser

The Spring Thing rules don't allow me to discuss the games during the competition, but I don't think I'm forbidden to weigh in on this topic. Greg consulted with all of the game authors before making a decision. I supported allowing online play, because I can see that in the future we may well be seeing online-only games. Nonetheless, the requirement that games not be updated during the competition is very sensible, and Greg has the responsibility for making the final determination as to how best to do that.

In light of this controversy, perhaps for next year's ST (or even for the IFComp this year) a dedicated server could be provided for online-only games, with no upload access to the author(s) during the comp. I wouldn't be surprised if Mike Roberts were able to help with this.

What I don't know, not being a Quest developer, is whether online Quest games can be hosted on other servers, or whether the textadventures.uk server is required. If the latter is the case, perhaps this would be a good time to look at updating that system as well.

Well, that won't be necessary if the IFComp allows updates again.

Hmm...I get a "VM Error: error reading file" error trying to open "The White Bull" with Zoom, Spatterlight, and Gargoyle...

As is mentioned in the README_FIRST.txt, you'll need QTads.

Ah, so one is actually supposed to read first a README_FIRST? What a novel concept!

Jim Aikin> The Quest web player can be hosted on other servers. According to the textadventures.co.uk website:



And also, I concur with Jim about the reason for online play not being allowed as things stand. Relying on an honor system for people not to invisibly update their game behind the scenes is definitely not the best idea, even though I'm sure the majority of us are honest people.

That being said, as I mentioned in a previous post, a workaround exists for Quest games, as Alex has written a Quest-to-JavaScript converter. It would likely be a fairly simple process to take the resulting JS code and wrap it as an Adobe AIR application, making it downloadable and cross-platform. Although, you'd lose the UI present in the web player, I think. I imagine something similar could be done with z-code games and parchment, although my brief experiments with turning the parchment source into an AIR app were less than successful. I'm definitely not sure about other systems. HTMLTads sounds like something along these lines could be used for it as well, but a stand-alone server would probably be the best solution overall.