Information AboutTads |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT TADS | |
| interactive fiction | |
| domain-specific programming languages | |
| freeware | |
| text adventure game engines | |
| game creation software | |
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HISTORY The original TADS 1 was released by High Energy Software as Shareware in the late 1980s , and was followed by TADS 2 not long after. In the early 1990s , TADS established itself as the number one development tool for Interactive Fiction , in place of simpler systems like AGT ( Adventure Game Toolkit ). However, Graham Nelson 's Inform has, since its release in 1993 , slowly gained popularity and superseded TADS in the last half of the 1990s. Nevertheless, TADS 2 has been maintained and updated at regular intervals by its creator, Michael J. Roberts , even after it became freeware in July 1996 . Multimedia TADS, introduced in 1998 , allows games to display graphics, animation and play sounds, if the platform supports it. Recently, TADS received a major overhaul with the release of TADS 3, which is a complete rewrite of the TADS engine, only retaining the platform-dependent code to ease Porting . TADS 3 has many new features, such as efficient dynamic objects (with Automatic Garbage Collection ), structured Exceptions , native UTF-8 strings, and many useful function classes. According to the official TADS website , as of and Interpreter are stable and they have been ported to the Unix , Macintosh and DOS Platforms . Several TADS 3 games have already appeared into the 2002 , 2003 , and 2004 , and 2005 IF Competitions . TADS GAMES Games written in TADS are compiled to a platform-independent format that can be played on any computer for which a suitable Virtual Machine (VM) exists. Such virtual machines exist for most platforms, and in this respect, TADS closely follows the example of the original Infocom Z-machine , as well as modern languages such as Java and C# . Whereas the TADS 1 and 2 VMs had to Parse the commands entered by the player, before sending the results on to the game, TADS 3 employs a more general-purpose virtual machine, where the command-parsing is done by the game code itself, akin to Inform. The rationale for this is that it is easier to customize the parser. THE PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE TADS 2 is based on C , with bits of Pascal . A Hello World Program isn't that simple to write in TADS 2, because TADS 2 requires a working World Model to compile. #include #include replace commonInit: function { "Hello World! "; quit; } startroom: room; // We must define a startroom object. Of course, the goal of TADS 2 is to make Interactive Fiction (and not Hello World programs) simple to implement. Nevertheless, TADS 3 dispenses with the requirement of a working world model, and also abandons the Pascal elements of the language. function main(args) { "Hello World!"; } SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
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