To put it short, despite me hating writing Perl for its syntax I am very quest-oriented. The fact is that the full power of Perl is rarely needed and I wanted to "specify" quests more visually and more concisely, at least for the 90% of the quests that do not really require complex processing (fetch, go talk to a guy, deliver an item, this sort of thing). As you can certainly understand, it is not meant to replace Perl as the "assembly" language of quests, but provide a simpler of writing basic quests.
I settled on the idea of writing quests as Wiki pages, with paragraphs for quest chapters, and visual clues about what you do (hand-in items, receive XP etc). Once the quest is written using pre-defined Macros (Templates) you fire up a parser that reads all that (Mediawiki export) and generates the Perl code. You are limited to the primitives provided but it is enough to write quite a few things.
I have completed the first draft of the parser and I will start a new thread about it soon. I just need to complete re-installing the EQEmu servers on my Linux box (sorting my mess if you prefer) and test it on a proper environment. The parser is written in Java for perfo^H^H^H^H^H ease of writing/debugging/prototyping
