Quest Viva WasmPlayer - host Quest games on any website

Authoring Other Development Systems
1

You can now host Quest games on any website using Quest Viva’s new WasmPlayer, which is now in Beta.

Unlike WebPlayer, with WasmPlayer games run entirely in the browser - there’s no server component to run, just static files. This means you can have a playable Quest game running on any web host.

It’s like Parchment, but for Quest.

Try it out: All Quest games on textadventures.co.uk have a “Try the new player (beta)” button, to launch the game using WasmPlayer. Eventually this will take over from WebPlayer to serve all games on the site.

Open a local file: Go to play.questviva.com/player and load any Quest game locally. Your file is not uploaded anywhere - the app runs entirely on your device.

Point it to a URL: Enter a URL on the start screen, or append a URL to https://play.questviva.com/player/?url= to play any publicly accessible Quest game. For example, https://play.questviva.com/player/?url=https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2014/Jacqueline,%20Jungle%20Queen!/Jacqueline,%20Jungle%20Queen!.quest plays the IFComp 2014 3rd-place entry “Jacqueline, Jungle Queen!” by Steph Cherrywell via the IF Archive (if IF Archive is available in your location).

Host it yourself: Upload WasmPlayer files to any host like Netlify or itch.io. Upload along with your game file, and set the config to point to it. See the documentation for instructions.

2

Sounds interesting. Currently, “A Stranger, Unregarded” did not work with the new player on the Quest site. Also, sometimes saving took very long time with other games.

3

Thanks for the report - that game is fixed now. Saving should also be a little quicker, but let me know if there’s a particular game that is taking an unusually long time and I’ll take a further look into it.

4

Will it be possible to include Quest Viva WasmPlayer as part of a multi-format interpreter? One of those interpreters that includes multiple interpreters to play different IF formats?

5

The multi interpreters are all based on Glk, so unless Viva uses Glk that wouldn’t really be practical.

6

Thanks!

Here’s a minimal IFWiki page for the WasmPlayer. Feel free to edit it (“edit with form”) and add details.

7

I’ve set up a new Substack, and for my first post I’ve gone into a bit more history about playing Quest games online. It’s a journey that starts with a server in my kitchen.

https://textadv.substack.com/p/host-your-quest-games-anywhere

8

Regarding multi-format interpreters, it should be possible to integrate WasmPlayer into Lectrote if somebody was interested in doing that.

9

I’ve just released a new version (6.0.0-beta.50) which gives an easier option for publishing your game to itch.io/Netlify/etc.

You can now export your game from the editor to a single HTML file. This embeds your Quest game data in the player HTML, and that fetches the ~30 MB of Quest Viva WasmPlayer from npm (via jsDelivr).

So it’s a smaller output to upload, and it’s one file, but at the expense of not being quite as self-contained as uploading WasmPlayer yourself (as you’re now relying on a CDN to serve that).

For testing locally it still needs a web server (e.g. npx serve) because of the way the WASM runtime gets loaded, you can’t just double-click your HTML file.