Marker Missions / Marker Quests - No Interest

General debates and discussion about the Guild of Writers and Age creation

Marker Missions / Marker Quests - No Interest

Postby JahmanMyst » Wed Apr 28, 2021 12:00 am

As a builder of Marker Quests, I have often wondered just how other explorers felt about them. Did most explorers know about Marker Quest making and playing? Did they ever try making any themselves? Did they ever play any of them?
Back in the GameTap era of MOUL when we all got those new ages like the Observation Pods, Minkata, Jalak Dador and those Eder Garden Ages, some explorers were starting to make Marker Quests.

But the Ki Marker Quest making was a privilege explorers earned by upgrading their wrist Ki communication devices.
This was done in 3 stages. It started by finding the book back in those days when they were called Bevin's (Neighborhoods) and a link to the Calibration Chamber (Machine).
This was where explorers got their first series of Green Markers to find in Ae’gura City.
(NOTE: These were not Marker Quest Markers! They were proximity & sound markers you could only find when you got close enough to one to see or hear it.) They were TOTALLY COOL fun!
Once the explorer found all of the Green Markers, they would return them to the Calibration Machine and insert their wrist Ki into machine to upload them. Then the Calibration Machine would download the second stage Red Markers to find.
Once all the Red Markers were found, the explorer would upload them into the Calibration Machine and receive a private link in the Nexus to the Great Zero.

NOW the MARKER MISSION! The missions ranged from 8 to 24 markers in each and were found within the Cavern. Ae’gura City and the Bevin’s (Neighborhoods)
There were 14 Marker Missions in all explorers had to complete in order to Calibrate the Great Zero and receive the ability to make Marker Quests. You got 999 markers in all to make a Marker Quest with.

Marker Quests started off as simple word text puzzles of clues to guess what something was or a riddle.
Others made Marker Quests that showed out of the way places explorers could get to. . .
Those became Marker Quests that guided explorers along exotic routes outside of the normal game play environment. And still others made Marker Quests of poetry, short stories and art. The Art utilized the marker’s white glow light to sculpt shapes and adorn with.

MARKER QUESTS: The down side was in the Ki design in which editing text into a marker in a Marker Quest was labor intensive.
The problem was twofold, the first was the Ki edit mode always started you back at the beginning of your marker list at the first marker you placed after you would add text to any marker.
The second problem was the down arrow in the Ki editor had no ability to scroll through your marker list to edit them with text. This meant you had to click on the down arrow to advance your marker list to the next marker one click at a time!.
Your KI marker edit screen starts with 10 markers showing. After you add text to the first 10 markers you have to click the down arrow to get to the 11th Marker. Then start again and click it twice to get to the 12th marker.
Three clicks to the 13th and so on and so on.
It takes 40 clicks to get to the 50th marker. But you had to click the down arrow
39, 38 ,37,36,35,34,33,32,31,30,20,28,27,26,26,24,23,22,21,20,19,18,17,16,15,14,13,12,11,10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 times each before to add text to all the markers along the way!
So, a Marker Quest of 50 markers would take you 780 clicks on the down arrow in the Ki Marker Editor mode to put text into each marker. This doesn’t count any additional clicks for text mistakes.

Some explorers with programable keyboards could create a scroll key for the Ki down arrow to be scrolled.
While this eliminated all of the clicking of the down arrow to save your poor finger, you still had to click the down arrow to scroll 40 times to edit a 50 Marker Quest game or story.

MARKER EDITOR: An explorer named Lyrositor figured out how to build a Marker Quest Editor that allowed us to Download any MOUL Game Marker Quest into a text file in a Games Folder.
Then you could use the Notepad program to open it with. This meant you could copy/ paste the file text into Excel and create separate columns for editing your markers. I kept the first column for all the original game data.
A second column was a copy of the first column original text to add in the text I wanted to put into the markers.
And a third column was for the text I had for each marker to copy/paste over into it with.
NOTE: I worked out exactly how wide a column text had to be to match the text limit displayed in the game when you found the markers.
This allowed my marker’s text to be read more easily and if you ran a chat log while playing my Marker Quest, it would lose any of the text to the cutoff.
The fourth column was a copy of all the edited in marker text from the second column.
It was the final to copy/ paste back into a notepad file to clean out the Excel file program format.
I kept 2 Game Folders: Games and Games 1. The games folder was for working games that had been edited and finished for sharing.
Games 1 folder was for edited game files for upload back into URU.

If the game failed to upload back into URU for some reason, I would delete it and go back to the Excel file to look for the coding error.
Usually upload failures were due to an extra space or character pasted over from the original script code.
Most often related to changing the markers coordinates or position by editing it, not adding the text.

MY REASON: I made a very extensive Series of Quest Marker Puzzle Games (Using arithmetic, riddles, Questions & Answers using the Books of the Kings, Ki Coordinates and much more) with Quest Stories as rewards for solving the Puzzle Quests.
All 10 to 12 were an epilogue to my Planet Dragonia Fan Age. Starting with the exodus when the cavern closed. But’s that a whole other topic. The story Quest Journals were all made in the Minkata Age because it had a night time sky that made reading the text markers easiest.
Also, it was big enough for straight lines of Markers running between all of the flags and kiva’s (Caves) in a straight line for reading best because you only had to change line direction when you got to a flag or kiva.
I also worked out that marker text would be cutoff after so many words when found, so I built a column for the text of each marker to fit into without being cut off or it would be put into the next text line marker.
I started building my Quests back in 2008 and spent many years designing and making the Series.
Honestly I lost track of how much time, but I would guess over 3000 hours given all the years and years I spent on it.

Then they changed the moula "myst online uru live again" client/ PhysX that changed the Marker Quests coding from yaml to json. That killed my entire Quest Series of Games and Story Journals.
Then I learned many years later in 2020 an online conversion was made available to convert yaml to json.
This allowed me to update my Quest Series of Games and Story Journals to be playable again in moula.
By the time I was able to get my Marker Editor working again and remember how to use the to Download and Upload commands to get Quests back into moula again, they updated (2021) the moula client again.
This changed the moula client from python 2.7 to 3.9 and that stopped the Marker Editor from working.
It was a H’uru based 2.0 python code. Up until then, yes that old H’uru based 2007 Marker Editor worked!
I had only gotten about half my Quest Series of Games and Story Journals uploaded back into moula when it happened.

THE MARKER EDITOR is Crucial Tool to creating Marker Games
and Story Quests because to edit markers to contain TEXT, you have to manually scroll click your ki in Marker Edit one marker at a time by clicking the down arrow on the ki.
It was simply too labor intensive and time consuming to make any remotely interesting Marker Game Quest Puzzles or Stories. The Marker Editor Tool made the building of my Quest Series of Games and Story Journals possible.
Without it, I can’t retore, fix or update any of my original work, nor can I create any new work. Why upgrade the Marker Quests from 999 to 1,200 makers and provide No Editing Tool to explorers to build with?
I am hopeful some will see the importance of this Marker Editor Tool being remade or fixed and want to help. Having such a tool available to explorers would open up a whole new area of game content.
That was how I saw the Marker Quests as, the first means for explorers to build and create something new for every explorers in the cavern to have fun with.
Last edited by JahmanMyst on Fri Apr 30, 2021 10:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.
JahmanMyst
 
Posts: 6
Joined: Sat Sep 19, 2020 12:56 pm

Re: Marker Missions / Marker Quests - No Interest

Postby Korovev » Wed Apr 28, 2021 4:10 am

The ME fork is well known; it may be worth adding an issue in GitHub. The main obstacle is that the H’uru client manages marker games differently, so saved games will need to be modified a bit.

Python 3 comes with a built-in JSON parser, so that would be the format if the ME additions will be merged. Valid JSON is valid YAML, so it would be a good idea to have the games in JSON format regardless. There are online converters (like this one) from CSV to JSON, so that’s an option too.
Deep Island #194197, MOULa #46116, Gehn #137074, Minkata #132812.
Gahreesenomee biv keneet pishoeet b’set!
My macOS wrappers, Fan Age Expeditions, tools and other stuff.
User avatar
Korovev
 
Posts: 317
Joined: Sun Jan 27, 2013 5:18 am
Location: Europe

Re: Marker Missions / Marker Quests - No Interest

Postby Théodore » Wed Apr 28, 2021 5:38 pm

Hi,

I don't know what is the issue at hand because my install of MarkerEditor is working fine!?! I can download or upload any marker quest I make in MOULa. I've just checked few minutes ago and it works smoothly. If your issue is that you cannot load it anymore, the server has gone through several changes over the last year or so, maybe your client files are not up to date. On this forum/wiki, you can find the link to the new files to put in replacement of the old ones. The markerEditor client will work as long as you have the right server update client files.

If on the other hand, your issue is that you got rid of the client in the past, you should have kept a backup copy just in case. If I can be of any help, let me know.

EDIT: When you upload a file, you need to get rid of the GUID and save the file then upload it.
https://mystonline.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=27523&hilit=MarkerEditor You can use this link as a reference, Lyrositor's server isn't working anymore but the functionalities are the same. He specifies not to modify the GUID, he is right, but the games won't upload to the server unless you get rid of them. Upon upload, they will be assigned a new GUID anyway.
Théodore
 
Posts: 112
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2018 9:17 am

Re: Marker Missions / Marker Quests - No Interest

Postby JahmanMyst » Thu Apr 29, 2021 12:40 am

Théodore wrote:
I don't know what is the issue at hand because my install of MarkerEditor is working fine!?! I can download or upload any marker quest I make in MOULa. I've just checked few minutes ago and it works smoothly.

That is great news and good to know!

If your issue is that you cannot load it anymore, the server has gone through several changes over the last year or so, maybe your client files are not up to date.


I used the latest .dat & .sfx files from my MOULa game files after the March moula update. I knew about the updates because when I logged into my MOULa game, the updates ran before the game would load.
After the updates I was thinking that replacing the .dat and .sfx files in the M.E. Client would repair it. But it didn't work and I tried remarking the Marker Editor over several times using the same original steps from before.
Including the Target Launch Script /ServerIni=server_moula.ini /SkipPreload for the plClient.exe file. The interesting bit was when it couldn't see my server_moula.ini file, even though I could see it in the Client file list.

On this forum/wiki, you can find the link to the new files to put in replacement of the old ones. The Marker Editor client will work as long as you have the right server update client files.


The only problem I have now, is that I need to know specifically what server client files and where to get them, along with exactly where to put them.

Marten from DISCORD Technical Support ask me if the client had been over written. Something about checking the date of the Client file? I wasn't sure what he meant. The M.E. Client or the MOULa client.

If on the other hand, your issue is that you got rid of the client in the past, you should have kept a backup copy just in case. If I can be of any help, let me know.


As far as I know, I still have the original client from years ago that had been working because I had already used it to download and upload game files I had at the end of 2020.
And I have made multiple copies of Lyrositor's Client on multiple PC's and drives. I definitely have a copies of the M.E..

Again, the Marker Editor (M.E.) I was using was working fine until the January/ March update of the MOULa game.
I had found the online yaml to json converter and immediately started converting all of my old marker games files to json at the end of 2020.
I had been uploading them back into my MOULa game where they were working fine when my M.E. just stopped working after those MOULa game updates in the Jan.-March period.

Marten from DISCORD Technical Support initially thought that the updates of the MOULa client? that had changed the Python code from 2.7 to 3.9 and that was the problem.
He had suggested I use the online Python 2/3 converter to updated all of the M.E. .py files in my client to 3.0. Then later said it wouldn't fix it.
Others posted that the marker quests storage had been moved onto the server. I took that to mean the change in location of the marker quest game files was the issue.
HOWEVER: If your M.E. is still working fine, than none of the above are the problem with mine.

EDIT: When you upload a file, you need to get rid of the GUID and save the file then upload it.
https://mystonline.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=27523&hilit=MarkerEditor You can use this link as a reference, Lyrositor's server isn't working anymore but the functionalities are the same. He specifies not to modify the GUID, he is right, but the games won't upload to the server unless you get rid of them. Upon upload, they will be assigned a new GUID anyway.


The Forum Link as reference you provided, I'm the author of that Post.
And I recall something in the forum about the "GUID" back when the client was changed and the Marker Quests became json code based. That the GUID had to be deleted. That it was given a new designation when you uploaded it.
I not certain, and I can check to be sure, but because I already was able to successfully upload my games I doubt that is an issue.

The issue now is that the M.E. loads to the avatar logon screen, but then freezes when I try to logon to the game.
So, I'll attempt to follow your posted suggestion about the client not being up to date. Look for an old original Lyrositor, H'uru Client and go over all of the files again.
Thank You! I at least know it can be made to work now.
JahmanMyst
 
Posts: 6
Joined: Sat Sep 19, 2020 12:56 pm

Re: Marker Missions / Marker Quests - No Interest

Postby Maroonroon » Sun May 23, 2021 6:42 am

Théodore wrote:I don't know what is the issue at hand because my install of MarkerEditor is working fine!?! I can download or upload any marker quest I make in MOULa. I've just checked few minutes ago and it works smoothly

JahmanMyst wrote:The issue now is that the M.E. loads to the avatar logon screen, but then freezes when I try to logon to the game.

Hi Théodore;

I have the same problem than JahmanMyst, so, like him (probably), I'm interrested by an functionnal MarkerEditor installation folder, can you please share with us a link to download a copy of yours, please?
(I'll then keep it as a backup.)

Edit: Or if you're agree, I can send you a PM with a temp link to a webpage of my cloud, where you can upload 1,94Go max of data (everything but the "sfx" folder, for example).
If you do it, tel me when it's done, I'll then dowload it on my computer, delete it from the cloud and tell you when I've done it, so you can use the same link to upload again 1,94Go max of data (the "sfx" folder, for example) and tel me when it's done; I'll then dowload it on my computer, delete it from the cloud and disable the temp link.
Are you agree?
:arrow: Forget this, it's really very fastidious to upload something on pCloud using this way (no folders, only files, or need a account creation for folders)... :x
User avatar
Maroonroon
 
Posts: 219
Joined: Sun Jul 06, 2014 5:03 pm
Location: France


Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 14 guests