Features

Quest Viva hides most of its options until you ask for them. Rather than showing every author every tab, it puts a set of checkboxes on a Features tab — one on the game object, one on each object — and each ticked box reveals the tab where that feature is actually set up.

This keeps the editor manageable, but it does mean that if you are looking for an option and cannot find the tab it lives on, the Features tab is the first place to check.

Ticking a feature does not change how your game behaves on its own. It only makes a tab appear. The behaviour comes from what you then set on that tab.

Game features

The Features tab of the game object turns on optional systems for the whole game.

Feature	What it enables
Score	A score attribute for the player, shown in the status pane. See Score, health and money.
Health	A health attribute for the player, shown in the status pane, plus a “script to run when health reaches zero” on the game’s Player tab. Also adds the “Change health by” box to the Edible tab.
Money	A money attribute for the player, and a “Price” box on each object’s Inventory tab.
Inventory limits	Limits on how much the player can carry, by number of objects or by volume. See Inventory limits.
Lightness and darkness	Dark rooms and light sources. Adds a Light/Dark tab to every room, and a light/dark feature to each object’s own Features tab. See Handling light and dark.
Ask/Tell	ASK ABOUT and TELL ABOUT topics on characters. Adds an Ask/Tell tab to every object. See Building an Ask/Tell system.
Annotations	A Notes tab on rooms, for your own notes. See Annotations below.
Show advanced options for wearables	Layers and slots for clothing, so one garment can cover another. See Clothing with several states.
Advanced scripts	The game’s Advanced Scripts tab, holding inituserinterface, unresolvedcommandhandler and scopebackdrop. See Advanced game scripts.
In-room descriptions	An “In-room description” box on every object, whose text is appended to the description of whatever room the object is in. See the Setup tab.
Multiple commands	Lets the player put several commands on one line, separated by full stops — GET LAMP. LIGHT LAMP. GO NORTH. Each is run as a separate turn.

Three more features are elsewhere, because they change how the game looks: hyperlinks are on the Display tab, and the map and drawing grid and the picture frame are on the Interface tab. See Look and feel.

Turning a feature off again does not delete anything you set up while it was on; the tab simply disappears, and the attributes stay where they are. That makes it safe to turn a feature on to see what it offers.

Object features

The Features tab of an object decides what kind of thing that object is. As the tab itself says: select an option here to have a new tab display, then go to that tab to set the object up.

Feature	Tab it reveals
Use/Give	Use/Give — what happens when the object is used on its own, used with something else, or given to a character. See More things to do with objects.
Container	Container — whether the object is a container or a surface, and whether it can be opened, closed and locked. See Using containers.
Switchable	Switchable — on and off, with messages and scripts for each. See Items that can be switched on and off.
Edible	Edible — what happens when the object is eaten. See Items that can be eaten.
Wearable	Wearable — putting the object on and taking it off. See Wearable items.
Lightness and darkness	Light/Dark — whether the object is a light source, and how bright. Only offered if the game-level lightness and darkness feature is on. See Handling light and dark.
Player	Player — lets the player become this object, and sets the name and gender used while they are. See Changing the player object.
Initialisation script	Initialisation script — a script that runs once for this object as the game starts. See Object initialisation scripts.

Rooms have no Features tab. The features above are all about things the player can pick up, open or wear, none of which apply to a room.

A feature on its own is still not enough for the first four in that list: the tab it reveals starts with a dropdown (“Can be eaten”, “Object is a container”, and so on) that is set to the inactive option. Tick the feature, go to the tab, and choose the option — otherwise nothing has changed.

Annotations

With the “Annotations” game feature on, every room gains a Notes tab: a free-text box for your own notes about that room. Nothing you write there is ever shown to the player, and it has no effect on the game.

It is a good place for the things that do not fit anywhere else — a puzzle you have half-designed, a reminder that this room’s description needs rewriting, a note of which other rooms depend on the state you set here. In a game large enough that you cannot hold all of it in your head, notes attached to the room they concern are much easier to find again than a document kept separately.

Notes are saved in your game file and are inlined into the published game like any other attribute, so treat them as something a determined player could read.