It's very possible to do what you ask in Quest, In fact I wrote a demo featuring a wandering cat that the player had to feed as a 'how to do' demo for Quest 2.0 (and put it on my 'tricks and tips' website) ages ago. You require only a little bit of variation of that idea for your wandering deer.

However setting this up in QDK is going to be much trickier than writing the code by hand. I'd suggest you do this bit of your game at least with hand coding. My old "Cat" demo could serve as a guide to how to go about this.

Another option would be to make use of Quest's library function by having someone who is up to speed with Quest ASL code write you a 'deer' object that you can just add in from QDK, set a few parameters and use. I would offer to do it (it would not be hard to do) but I really don't have the time at present.

do you want the deer to do things when the player can't see it? if not, there is an easier way than using those libraries.

Simply use a function that randomly adds the deer to the room the player is in. Then call this function every time the player enters a room where the deer might possibly be.

Basically all I need is a deer object that wonders around a set of pre-defined rooms.

Nothing fancy, seeing as you are busy and all.

The player needs to be able to look and examine this deer object.

The "path" the deer will take can be listed as an array (ie "deer path[0]" to "deer path[20]").

There are three ways of dealing with this issue - you can have it so the deer goes in that strict order (0 -> 20) and then re-start at 20 again (like it jumped over a gorge or something...) in a circular path...

You can have the deer wander from 0 -> 20, and then back to 0 again (0 -> 20 -> 0).

Or you can have the deer jump between the various rooms (0 -> 5 -> 2 -> 7 -> 19 -> 20 -> 3 -> ...).

Now this can be done two different ways;
When the player moves around or inputs a command, the script to move the deer can be executed.

Every 10 seconds or so the deer can be moved along or "around" the "path".

If you give me which things you would like to happen I will gladly give you "psedo"-code (spelling?) and then you can just look up the proper ASL code...

A-[You can have the deer wander from 0 -> 20, and then back to 0 again (0 -> 20 -> 0).]

and..

B-[Every 10 seconds or so the deer can be moved along or "around" the "path".]

["psedo"-code (spelling?)] ..I think it's "pseudo", not to sure though.

My original idea was not to have the deer actually moving around at all, but to make it look like it was by bringing it up randomly just after the player enters a room.

like in the 'player enters room' part, put a function (this is pseudocode):

if $rand$(1;5)=3 then
-->Add deer to room
-->print message, 'deer is here'

the random number generator here is set to give a 1 in 5 chance of the deer being in any room.

string <deer1[0]; Yard>
string <deer1[1]; Street>
string <deer1[2]; Main Road>
string <deer1[3]; Round About>
string <deer1[4]; Secret Tunnel>
string <deer1[5]; Secret Nut Store>

Any other variables we may need;
numeric <deer1Alternate; 0>
numeric <deer1Position; 0>

Then a sub routene - where we move the deer around...

I don't know if there are Ubounds or Lbounds in Quest. If there are then you may be able to use one function for ALL your moving animals - but for now we'll just use one sub for one animal.
I'm calling mine "deer1Wander_Sub" (you'll see why later).

if (%deer1Position% = 0) or (%deer1Position% = 5) then <deer1Alternate; 1 - %deer1Alternate%>
^ This line tells us if the deer has reached the limits of the array, if we didn't do this the subroutene would produce an error when it went outside our array - plus it wouldn't go back down the array...

if (%deer1Alternate% = 1) then
<deer1Position; %deer1Position% + 1>
else
<deer1Position; %deer1Position% - 1>

move deer1 to room <#deer1[deer1Position]#>
^ Do you know when you type things too many times it look wrong? Deer looks wrong to me!

Now we add a timer....
Activate it as often as you want.

do <deer1Wander_Sub>

And that's the timer.

Start the deer off in room number 0 and wait for the timer to kick in...

Oh, and if Quest doesn't announce the arrival of the animal (I might be getting confused with QuestNet) then just put the code in in the Subroutine.

Also, if you want it to eat nuts, then you have to check the room that the deer is in, I think you can have Quest do a; for every object in #deer1[deer1Position]# then check for an alias of Nut.

I hope this helps...

If you want a demo (and trust me, my demo's aren't to be trusted : ) ) then I'll have to botch one together tomorrow (If I can). Tonight I have to do some Maths stuff : ( .

There's no lbound function as the lowest element of an array is always 0.