How do you restore a saved game in Quest?

I’m playing my first Quest game: Jacqueline, Jungle Queen on the textadventures.uk website (as far as I can tell, you can only play downloaded Quest games in Windows, and I don’t have Windows). After a while, I got distracted, and I came back to my browser tab to discover that my session had timed out and I had to start over from the beginning! After that, I started saving regularly (after creating an account and logging in). Then, I got a fair amount further into the game, and accidentally hit F5 and refreshed the browser tab. Fortunately, I had saved not that long ago and I expected that the restart would bring me back to the last save position… no such luck: I was back at the beginning of the game. RESTORE and LOAD commands at the prompt don’t seem to work, and nothing is mentioned in the HELP text. Is there some other way to restore my save? Or did it somehow get clobbered and I’ll just have to replay from the start again??

On the wbsite, it says you have to create a login for games to be saved. That might be the issue.

Yep, I created an account before I saved.

That’s correct. I mean the first part. I assume you’re telling the truth about not having Windows : )

First I have to frame my response by saying that the Quest online player is unreliable vs the desktop player. A game may work – or it may use features or combinations of features that will cause it to become unwinnable in the player (eg a flag may not change when supposed to). I’ve rated games in Quest competitions where the authors didn’t discover their game’s problems with the online player until players hit it midcomp. I can also imagine such catches interacting negatively with the save mechanism (eg a game may be clearable in one pass, but not in a reload).

My recollection of the player is that when you restore, it doesn’t pull a memory state. It re-enters all your commands up to the point you saved. This will result in a complete reconstruction of the scrollback, but this can also take time since it’s processing your entire playthrough anew.

So, my only real practical suggestion on top of the logging in and keeping your login fresh is that, when you try reloading – and assuming your game was properly saved – you may have to sit there for awhile before all the stuff appears/happens. My memory is a little unclear on whether you’ll see any signs it making progress (well, probably flashing modem lights).

I’m also on a Mac, and it’s for the above reasons that I stopped trying Quest games of any length online. I make a date with a PC and play offline if I’m going to.

-Wade

Huh. What if there are random elements?

That’s probably why reloading the game doesn’t always work. It re-enters all the commands, some random element occurs which didn’t trigger in the original game and the reload fails.

It might be more advanced than it was when I last tried it, but of course it’s no longer under development.

I just now tried the game ‘First Times’, because I know it has tricky stuff like audio and timed events.

I saved, reloaded the page, restored the game (It says ‘Loading…’ at the top of a blank screen). It took 5-6 seconds to load a game that I was about 5 moves into. The text outputs corresponding to the timed events came out in exactly the same places they did when I first played, so it’s obviously storing more data, and more sophisticated, than I made it sound at first. But I still figure if your game was really long, the initial reload could take a fair while.

-Wade

Ohh, I finally just figured it out. You have to go back to the landing page, and then there is a “Play (Resume)” button. I was just reloading the game page itself and assuming it would automatically restore (because I didn’t see any other controls from the game page). Well, too late, I already started over from the beginning a third time. And then a fourth time so I could see the alternate ending, because you can’t UNDO after the game ends…

Random in computing is usually pseudo-random. You can save the seed and get the same output from the PRNG while reloading.

Real/wall time is more tricky.

You’re certainly being far more patient than I would usually be.

Then again, although I haven’t played that game yet, I know the author’s Inform games and can imagine that the game’s qualities are making up for the online player’s inadequacies.

Me, I’d have quit the first time I realised I had to start from the beginning. Then again, I always play from interpreters (I do realise I am able to do this because I happen to have Windows) and never from the web, unless it’s a web game.

Quest saves the entire game state and output log, it doesn’t replay previous commands.

The web version should work the same as the desktop version. If there are differences, that’s a bug so please log it on Github.

Alex, I appreciate you wrote it, but the load mechanism is quite different online.

To load, you go back to the title page. At the bottom of the game blurb, there is a “Play online” button when you first play the game. If you have a save game, you will instead see a “Play (Resume)” button and a “Restart” button. The former will load your game.