ADRIFT (4, 5, whatever...)

[Dannii]

Too late, we who use Gargoyle (etc) are already using unofficial clones which jeopardise Adrift’s reputation!

I understand you want everyone to shift to Adrift 5, but that doesn’t help the hundreds of Adrift 4 games that have already been written. Even if no one writes another Adrift 4 game, don’t you want the existing ones to be played? If you want to fix Adrift’s reputation, help Gargoyle get a fully compatible implementation. The best way to do that would be to simply share the source code.

[maga (Sam Kabo Ashwell)]

Well, ADRIFT 5 is still (I think) undergoing fairly active development, so a third-party build would probably not be stable right now anyway. Here’s my typical experience of loading an ADRIFT 5 game at the moment:

1. Open it with Gargoyle (.taf files are associated with Gargoyle on my computer, because Gargoyle has nicer fonts and it squashes the horrible text-colouring effects that ADRIFT authors love so well; running ADRIFT games in Gargoyle makes it easier for me to take them seriously). This fails.
2. Open it in one of the three different ADRIFT Runners I have installed (for ADRIFTs 3.9, 4, and 5, none of which will speak to each other.) All of these install with the same name, and all three kinds of incompatible file have the same extension, so this tends to be guesswork. (I could try renaming all the interpreters, of course, but I’ve never got around to it.) Generally I’ll end up picking the wrong interpreter and fail a couple more times.
3. Open it with the 5.0 interpreter. It loads, but warns me that my interpreter is outdated and that if I don’t update it I may run into bugs.
4. Take my chances and play for a bit anyway. Run into bugs after about ten minutes.
5. (optional, if I am feeling particularly dedicated.) Go and update the interpreter. Finally play the damn game.

I acknowledge that periods of instability are sometimes unavoidable when a platform is undergoing rapid development; playing .t3 games was almost as irritating for a while back when TADS 3 was a new and shiny thing. But at least there was a nice clear distinction between .t3 and .gam files.

[ralphmerridew]

@Dannii

Too late, we who use Gargoyle (etc) are already using unofficial clones which jeopardise Adrift’s reputation!

I understand you want everyone to shift to Adrift 5, but that doesn’t help the hundreds of Adrift 4 games that have already been written. Even if no one writes another Adrift 4 game, don’t you want the existing ones to be played? If you want to fix Adrift’s reputation, help Gargoyle get a fully compatible implementation. The best way to do that would be to simply share the source code.

tASEA (ADRIFT .taf → TADS .t) was written from the Runner Source. One could feed that into the TADS compiler and run that. (The only big problem is that I didn’t understand TADS undo mechanism when I was writing it, so my method really eats undo space quickly.)

ADRIFT uses a single file for both development and distribution. This means that any change to Developer requires a corresponding change to Runner. This is extremely hostile to backwards compatibility and multiple implementations.

(OTOH, now that ADRIFT uses Blorb, he could add a resource that contains a bytecode version of the game to the blorb, and have newer versions of Runner just run the bytecode.)

[Hannes]

@ralphmerridew

ADRIFT uses a single file for both development and distribution. This means that any change to Developer requires a corresponding change to Runner. This is extremely hostile to backwards compatibility and multiple implementations.

Hehe, I like that! So every game produced with ADRIFT is basically distributed in “source” format, but the software to use and run it isn’t. Ironic [emote];)[/emote]