Design limitations - breaking changes wishlist for future major versions

[alexwarren]

I'm creating this issue to capture fundamental design limitations we may want to consider in the future, if we are thinking about new major versions which could have breaking changes.

• Rooms and Objects are the same thing, which is good in some ways, but inconvenient in others (like if you want to easily get a list of all rooms in a game). This should be mostly addressed by Pertex fixes all rooms #1326, but it's a bit ugly that we now have previously "dummy" editor types that now exist in published games. "Object and/or room" can now be represented as either a lack of either of those types, or with a new editor_room_object type. There should be a better mechanism to handle the use cases of showing relevant editor controls, and allowing rooms to be identifiable at runtime, while still allowing for the (admittedly unusual?) case where an object can be both.
• There are a few interesting notes I captured in a 2012(!) blog post about things I might change in Quest's design
• Related to the above, with the new runtime I'm planning for Quest Viva, we should be able to "un-deprecate" functions and script commands which block waiting for user input (as the script runner can be called asynchronously from the UI)

[KVonGit]

Everything in that blog post sounded good, especially calling 'visitable' objects "locations" rather than "rooms".

[KVonGit]

we should be able to "un-deprecate" functions and script commands which block waiting for user input (as the script runner can be called asynchronously from the UI)

This makes me think the pause script might make a comeback. There were occasional requests for that in the forums.

[KVonGit]

It would be nice to have the ability to override hard-coded functions, if that would be possible.

[KVonGit]

It would be nice if the editor had some library editing/exporting functionality.

I assume adding the ability to open an ASLX library file for editing (sort of like we can JS files now, only with editor controls) wouldn't be very hard? If it wouldn't be easy to pull this off, perhaps the editor could have a "library mode"?

I've also heard a few people ask if there was a way to select objects (etc.) in the tree to be exported to a Quest library, and that sounds like a good idea... although I have no clue if it's possible.