If I decide to use for this big project I'm working on I don't want to get 3/4 the done and find out Quest can't handle it and get real laggy...
I learned not to use 1 millisecond clocks because they cause the game to get really laggy... so there will be none of those.... I'm not using audio or images since I feel they ruin the impact of a text adventure.
Has anyone had any experiences with making a large text-based project in Quest? Did the game turn out alright!
It'll probably take like 3 months for me to finish this project completely and I don't want to get 2 months in and find out Quest can't handle it.
I'm not too worried about online play because it's designed to be played with the Quest application.

I know from experience that online gameplay can get very laggy, and on a good broadband as I have, that can't be down to internet speeds.

I don't know how the desktop Quest differs from the online player, but if you're not bothered about online play, and your game doesn't exceed the max file size for uploading (whatever that might be), then I would say it's not an issue.

As you get deeper into the designing of the game, your play-tests should tell you how the game will perform for others. Internet connection and speeds for a downloaded game aren't an issue, of course, so just keep an eye on performance during your play tests.

Also remember that while you'd prefer it if people downloaded your game, you've no way of forcing this, so the majority are still going to try and play it online anyway.

I don't think it's a problem of size. There are some problems in the system like timer I found with my game, but I always found a way to solve such problems. There are no performance issue with my game (~10000 lines of code) offline or online. Sometimes the server is laggy or the game freezes, but this happens with small games, too.

My game (A Stranger, Unregarded) has over 300 locations. It uses timers sparingly and only for specific needs. However I've had reports that it soon slows down unacceptably in online play. Even in local play it slows down. However this appears to be largely because of the mapping: it seems that when the map shown is very large and complex things start slowing down a lot (plus some map artefacts appear). But it is still perfectly playable on my machine, though others have had difficulties and had to clear the map.

Not sure if it helps...but my game is all text right now.

Currently, it's about 1,039kb, 130,000+ words, and 600-650 pages long in word with 12 font.

I think Quest can handle up to like 20,000kb (20mb)?

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=5677

^--- as mentioned here.

So .....without pictures or sounds, you could potentially make your game roughly 2,470,000 words. That's a lot of rooms and story! I imagine your game is lagging though because you are using the "map" grid feature. Try turning it off and making the directions in text more clear so that the player knows exactly where they are. Or you could reduce the spaces they travel. Maybe something like Flexible Survival does, "Go to areaname" and so on.

Actually, I don't have the map feature, I'm not a fan of it because it's sort of buggy... but was just wondering how big of a game you can create with Quest without it overloading...
20 MB is not very large but of course when you start a game it's only a few KB and even after I added quit a few objects and object types I haven't even reached 20 KB

Neonayon wrote:Not sure if it helps...but my game is all text right now.

Currently, it's about 1,039kb, 130,000+ words, and 600-650 pages long in word with 12 font. ...

Could you try doing Tools - Publish, and tell us how big the .quest file is? It will include all your library files, but will be compressed, so will be significantly smaller. It is the .quest that is uploaded, so this would be a better guide.

Sure thing....one sec.

475kb

Quick question though. Would have the game over 20mb prevent the game from being played or opened? Or just uploaded to the Quest website? I ask because I didn't realize that the map for my game was 20.4 megabytes, but when I opened Quest, it seemed to open just fine.

The 20mb file size is only relevant to uploading... as far as I'm aware. But if you can't upload it, how are people going to play it?

We could really do with some official word from Alex on this matter, as I'm finding it all very confusing.

OurJud wrote:The 20mb file size is only relevant to uploading... as far as I'm aware. But if you can't upload it, how are people going to play it?

We could really do with some official word from Alex on this matter, as I'm finding it all very confusing.

Maybe if you upload it to your own site or use a site like mediafire or another file share website and Alex could just link it to the downloads.

Thanks neonayon. So you could upload a game 40 times the size of yours (assuming no images and sounds), i.e., 5 million words, or 25 thousand pages. Good luck writing that much!

OurJud, 20 Mb is just the upload limit.

lightwriter, a better option might be to upload the large image/sound files to mediafire, and have your game reference them. That way your game could still be played on-line. Just give the URL as the image source in an HTML img element.

msg("<img src=\"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6a/MystCover.png\">")

In GUI view:

Print [message] <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6a/MystCover.png">