Marker Missions / Marker Quests - No Interest
Posted: 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.
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.