I was just thinking of a project i could do with my team. The goal would be to make a visual IDE like Visual Studio, so you could have your own stand alone client, based off ASL. We would probably have to 'extend' the code base a bit, so you could have text boxes, buttons etc. etc.

I think it's a pretty cool idea, and seeing as ASL can do anything (game-wise), it would be pretty popular. I'm not trying to make it so ASL is as good as VB, it will be purely to make text-based games, but it will have its own visual editor so you can make your own client interface for your game.

I dunno, i'm tired, could be just my fragile mind running wild again. But give your comments and opinons on the idea.

I think it's a great idea. You could do custom handeling for different graphics. In Quest it seems that the only type of graphics you can do is to have them pop up in a windows, in something like this you could place them anywhere, even as background to the text.
Custom buttons and title bars would add a lot to the game interface.
Again, GREAT IDEA!

Well, let me say I think the way you've said things sounds like a bad idea, or atleast bad way of implementing/creating a program like this. Let me also say I think the idea of an IDE were you can design an interface and such for a game is a good idea. But what would be better than something mimicking and adding onto the ASL language would be simply a program that acts as a shell for the Quest Client(Quest.exe). An IDE where you could design an interface using different image files as backgrounds, floating layers, buttons, etc, even down to the minimize/maximize/close buttons would be cool. Perhaps a syntax similar to ASL that would be used to program events/scripts for things like buttons being clicked(sending a hidden message to the quest client with a command and returning the output to the player (and also to the shell, perhaps to tell it to change the appearance of a button or change a status icon).

This would probably be best broken into two projects, the first designing a shell for the quest client. Perhaps something as simple as hides the client and sends messages to the window, retrieves the outputed text, scans the output for some syntax that could be included in descriptions and such to change shell effects.

The second would be more complex and would be making basically a skinning/scripting interface for the client shell. This would be best if it had some sort of scripting options to cause shell effects, ie; change pictures, retrive info from the game, execute a macro command in the game, etc.

I think this would also step on a lot less toes(and copyrights).

good ideas there ITIB. I like games to be different in some way, and if skinning was implemented in Quest, each game would be different, have it's own graphical interface, different to everybody elses, making the game look and feel different.