Quest Viva 6.0

Authoring Other Development Systems
1

Quest Viva 6.0 is the “next version” of Quest 5, and it’s now in beta.

What’s new compared to Quest 5? The main change is a big modernisation of the architecture, to run under the latest .NET version using WASM. This means:

Windows, macOS and Linux apps

Previously Quest 5 was only available to download for Windows. The new app is cross-platform, meaning for the first time there are versions for Mac and Linux.

Fully featured, offline web editor

Previously, the web version of the editor lacked certain features - like walkthroughs, the attributes editor, code view, and overriding built-in library functions. No longer - the editor is now the same in both the web and downloadable versions, with full feature parity.

It runs offline, so you don’t need to log in. Games are saved directly to your device. On Chrome and Edge you can open a local folder directly.

No more servers

I reached a milestone earlier today when I finally shut down two VPSes. One had been powering the old Quest WebEditor (which still needed a Windows server), and another was running the newer Quest Viva WebPlayer on Linux. They’re not needed any more, because now the code for both editing and playing Quest games runs entirely within the browser - no need for a back-end server for these any more, as the web apps are now simply static files.

That saves me quite a lot of money each year, but it’s also less to go wrong. Over the years both of those servers occasionally went down or got overloaded, which meant that sometimes the online Quest editor and player became slow or stopped working. Now that’s much less likely to happen.

Host games on any website

I don’t need to run servers, and neither do you to host a Quest game online. You can simply download Quest Viva’s WasmPlayer and publish your game on itch.io, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, anywhere you like.

What’s not changed

Pretty much everything else - still free, still open source. It’s still fundamentally Quest 5 under the hood, the editor and player UI is largely unchanged, and the core library has had very few changes so far. It’s just about bringing Quest to all platforms, making it more reliable, reducing how much it costs me to run, and making hosting, archiving and preserving Quest games much easier.

Give it a go in your browser: play.questviva.com
Downloads: questviva.com/download/
For more info: questviva.com

2

Quest Viva 6.0 is out of beta - the stable 6.0.0 release is now available!

A few new things since the beta announcement:

  • Gamebook “pages” are now available in parser-based text adventures too - handy for implementing branching conversations
  • The editor is now available in German and Spanish in addition to English
  • A full accessibility pass has taken place across the Player and Editor. Game output is now announced properly to screen readers, the sidebar panels and the object/verb menus can be used from the keyboard, and the editor’s labels have been made accessible too
  • You can now publish your game to a single HTML file, or export it as a ZIP file which you can upload to itch.io or any other web host
  • Published games now include Treaty of Babel metadata
  • The player size has been optimised (compressed bundle size down from 7.9MB to 3.3MB)
  • A bunch of compatibility fixes so existing Quest games should now all play correctly

Try it out in your browser - play or create games with nothing to install: https://play.questviva.com
or download for Windows, Mac or Linux: https://questviva.com/download/

3

I would just like to say here that the Quest web player is now much, much faster and better than it used to be.

On macOS and Linux, it used to be that the Quest web player ran entirely on the server, so every time you typed a command, you had to wait for a network request (to the UK, no less).

In Quest Viva 6.0, the web player now runs in your browser, like Parchment does. It takes a while to load for the first time, but, once it loads, you can navigate to new games very quickly.

The macOS/Linux Electron client is good, too, and this is all brand new in 6.0.

Check out the top-rated Quest games on IFDB. Games by Steph Cherrywell and Bitter Karella were often overlooked because they were nearly unplayable on macOS/Linux and on the web.

It would be awesome to have a little Quest review-a-thon on IFDB (maybe after Ectocomp wraps up).

4

Checking if/how the browser link one-boxes when pasted.

This is a link to Guttersnipe by Bitter Karella. It’d be cool if it showed that based on the URL - https://play.questviva.com/player/?id=_Tz-z3689ku5mhP_6GC7fw

I’m intrigued that you can now switch between parser and gamebook (choice menus) in a game.

5

Oneboxing would be cool but it would require the right headers to be returned so that Discourse can pick up the name, cover art and description. Unfortunately play.questviva.com is a static app - it’s served by Cloudflare Pages so there’s no server component to “know” what the game is. When you load it in your browser, the app loads and then it goes off and fetches the game file. So the HTML and headers returned are the same regardless of the id parameter.

It should work for the textadventures listing though https://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/_tz-z3689ku5mhp_6gc7fw/guttersnipe-carnival-of-regrets:

6

Cloudflare Pages supports running code on the server side, including HTTP fetches. Middleware · Cloudflare Pages docs

I’ve filed Add a onebox on play.questviva.com · Issue #2453 · textadventures/quest · GitHub on this… I might try to get it working myself.

EDIT: I did. feat(Player): add link-preview oneboxes for shared game links by dfabulich · Pull Request #2454 · textadventures/quest · GitHub