madart954

New Member
Game Developer
Nov 12, 2022
10
26
To be fair, that's mostly on the game developers, and because most of the QSP games released are by Russian developers who have an obsession with stat grinding that is truly remarkable (or just makes the game longer). I did play around with the engine a bit and you can do quite a lot with it. The syntax documentation is a bit murky though so I ended up having to prototype everything. There's also some limitations around the max size of numbers (makes date calculations a pain)

Oh, the UIs are uniformly terrible because it mixes sidebars that and HTML and the developers all hate user experience.

I'm learning units and game design, sorry for now. I want to develop games, but knowledge is not enough.
 

madart954

New Member
Game Developer
Nov 12, 2022
10
26
Yeah, in general QSP games are Russian MTLed into English. Like was said, it stands for Quest Soft Player (or at least that's what I've read elsewhere). But it's generally a fairly ok game development engine, like rpgmaker and renpy are also game engines. QSP is generally better for adventure game style, but works fine for non-map based RPGs and visual novels as well.

I suggest looking at the preview pictures to see how MTL word-salad the game will be (in this case I'd say VERY).

madart954 please update the language section to something like "English MTL" possibly including that it's MTL from Russian (or whatever the original language is, I can't tell the difference between the Cyrillic alphabet languages), since that's more accurate based on the screenshots you've shown.
Okay, sorry)
 

Laxard

Member
Sep 5, 2018
413
296
Oh, the UIs are uniformly terrible because it mixes sidebars that and HTML and the developers all hate user experience.
You can get rid of sidebars and do it like awerage "HTML" game.
There is just little point in this, because sidebars (and lower box) are here to make particular kinds of games, text adventures, easier, something that is annoying to do in other engines as well as going around some of specific issues of "interactive fiction" games.

Also, don't forget that QSP is like 8 years older than first version of Twine. So there was no "just use Twine" option back then.
QSP also surprisingly still holds good, the only issue being if you put way too much images inside the game (*cough* Jack-of-Nine-Tails *cough*).
 

max_002

Active Member
Mar 30, 2019
770
224
fix the animation paths for the female character in the dungeon.
add an emergency gang to return to the tavern at 1 xp
 

ParadigmShift

Member
Mar 4, 2019
112
145
As a suggestion, while there are a number of bugs, and the English needs work, my biggest issue is the file size.
The 45 gif files account for 800mb of the game, which only totals roughly 829mb.
Explore converting those gif files into a more efficiently compressed format, such as mp4 or webm, both of which are significantly better with regards to file size. You should be able to decrease the total file size significantly, and it'll be easier to decide on a format now, at the early stage of development, rather than later, after the game has ballooned up to many GBs in size.
A quick test compression of "makina_suck.gif" to webm decreased the file size from 20.5mb down to 2mb, with a small amount of quality loss. How much quality is lost is your choice and can be controlled but losing a small amount of video quality for a significant decrease in file size will benefit you later down the road.
There are other more complex tools with more features that you can use to convert videos, but HandBrake is always a solid choice for converting video formats and is what used for my test.
I would guess, based on the test, you should be able to get the file size down from 800mb for the media down to the 100-150mb range with a minimal loss of video quality, maybe even less.

Edit: I converted the entire 'nun' folder (38 files) from 666mb down to 74.2mb. So yes, getting the entire game down to the 100-150mb range, with its current content, is easily doable.

So go get HandBrake, or another video converter of your choice, and play around with file formats and encoder/compression settings until you find a quality and file size you like and use that going forward. Gif is the worst for file size.
 
Last edited:

ParadigmShift

Member
Mar 4, 2019
112
145
An addendum to my previous post (posted separately for visibility):
QSP I can guarantee supports mp4 file format. I cannot guarantee it supports webm. Might be something to test and/or look into.
MP4 will still give similar relative decreases in file size as webm.
 

RMo

Newbie
Sep 3, 2017
38
35
I'm learning units and game design, sorry for now. I want to develop games, but knowledge is not enough.
No worries, I haven't actually played this yet - but as I said I did test the engine a bit. So maybe the only thing to keep in mind is that you should mindful of user experience - when you have sidebar buttons, when to use clickable links.
 

RMo

Newbie
Sep 3, 2017
38
35
You can get rid of sidebars and do it like awerage "HTML" game.
There is just little point in this, because sidebars (and lower box) are here to make particular kinds of games, text adventures, easier, something that is annoying to do in other engines as well as going around some of specific issues of "interactive fiction" games.

Also, don't forget that QSP is like 8 years older than first version of Twine. So there was no "just use Twine" option back then.
QSP also surprisingly still holds good, the only issue being if you put way too much images inside the game (*cough* Jack-of-Nine-Tails *cough*).
Yeah, that was my point. The engine is actually surprisingly performant and has a lot of good features. It's fascinating to work with. But the documentation for the script is lacking and the error reporting is fairly bad.

I like the sidebars myself, although I think that many game developers get sucked into this halfway house where they aren't consistent so the games don't flow quite right. But then, I haven't released any games so I can't be particularly critical. And I enjoy most of the QSP games too.
 

Kevin Smarts

Well-Known Member
Respected User
Game Developer
Jul 21, 2017
1,807
2,334
An addendum to my previous post (posted separately for visibility):
QSP I can guarantee supports mp4 file format. I cannot guarantee it supports webm. Might be something to test and/or look into.
MP4 will still give similar relative decreases in file size as webm.
Regular QSP does not support video, but there are versions that do. Awesomium, sonnix's QQSP and Infinate's QSP all do and there are a couple of others I can't recall off the top of my head right now. The first of those also has some extra UI tweaks and changes and is what Jack o' Nine uses.
It will save a lot of space when compared to gifs
 

Kevin Smarts

Well-Known Member
Respected User
Game Developer
Jul 21, 2017
1,807
2,334
Yeah, that was my point. The engine is actually surprisingly performant and has a lot of good features. It's fascinating to work with. But the documentation for the script is lacking and the error reporting is fairly bad.

I like the sidebars myself, although I think that many game developers get sucked into this halfway house where they aren't consistent so the games don't flow quite right. But then, I haven't released any games so I can't be particularly critical. And I enjoy most of the QSP games too.
There's some more info on the GL repo:

and

(Some is GL specific but most is general)
Also on our repo is the QSP analyser in teh tools folder, that needs to run on .txt exports (you can do them with QGen) and will find a number of bugs and even dead variables (if you learn how to use the more advanced functions).
 

SCANTU

Forum Fanatic
Apr 18, 2020
5,435
42,077
Help!
The qsp file is password protected.
I don't know English and I wanted to translate it into Italian.
Who knows the password?
Thank you!
 
1.00 star(s) 1 Vote