Community Awareness Survey of TADS 3

Authoring Story Research and Design
1

I’m curious to see what the community’s awareness of TADS is.

Science!!! :smile: :tada:

Length: 28 questions

General

These three starter questions are for everyone.

For reference: TADS 3 games are typically parser games, and their game files end in a *.t3 extension. For this survey, “TADS” refers to TADS 3.

(For any TADS authors out there: This survey is also assuming full HTML TADS functionality being available to a hypothetical game.)

Do you know that TADS games exist? (Before seeing this survey)

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Have you played a TADS game before?

  • Yes
  • No
  • I have not played any parser games
0 voters

Have you authored a TADS game before? (Including unfinished games)

  • Yes
  • No
  • I have not authored any parser games
  • I have not authored any IF
0 voters

Players

These questions are for anyone who has played a TADS game before.

You do not need to be an IF author for this part of the survey. If you have not played a TADS game before, but have authored a parser IF game (or have worked on an unfinished one), then please skip to the survey questions for authors.

Did you know that TADS games can have images?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Did you know that TADS games can have multiple, fully-customized UI panes?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Did you know that TADS games can have basic animation within a UI pane?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Did you know that TADS games can have colorful text?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Did you know that TADS games can have centered text?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Did you know that TADS games can have monospaced text?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Did you know that TADS games can have simultaneous music and sound effects (with simultaneous channels for foreground, looping background, and sporadic background sounds)?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Did you know that TADS games can have clickable hyperlinks?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Did you know that TADS games can have clickable text that functions as buttons for in-game actions?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Did you know that autocorrect is not a part the TADS interpreter, but is actually a part of the game?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Did you know that the UNDO command reporting the name of action that was undone is not a part of the TADS interpreter, but is actually a part of the game?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Did you know that TADS games can have stylized borders?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Which interpreters do you usually tend to play TADS games in? (Select any that apply)

  • Parchment (web browser)
  • QTADS
  • Lectrote
  • Gargoyle
  • HTML TADS for Windows
  • Fabularium
  • Other
0 voters

Authors

The following questions are for people who author IF (using any system, and not just TADS).

Did you know that TADS games can create clones of objects before and during play?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Did you know that TADS games can perform full procedural generation?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Did you know that TADS games can be “baked”, allowing you to run instructions in your game before the final game file is created?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Did you know that TADS games can contain embedded multimedia files, without the need to ship the files alongside the game?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Did you know that TADS games can read and write files within the game file’s directory, for a wide array of file types, including custom binary formats?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Did you know that even the main execution loop of a TADS game can be completely modified?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Did you know that TADS games can use a parser algorithm designed by the author?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Did you know that the save, restore, undo, and other core interpreter functions can be completely customized in TADS?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Did you know that TADS games typically use the traditional world model of objects, rooms, and directional connections because it comes standard in its default libraries, and that TADS games could also have literally anything for a world model instead?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Did you know that TADS games can procedurally generate and run code during play, including code supplied by the player (if the player is allowed the opportunity)?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Did you know that variables in TADS can be made exempt from undo, save, and restore, allowing them to remain unchanged despite these commands?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Did you know that TADS games can support patch files, allowing for game updates without invalidating save files between versions?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Thank you for your time! :grin:

17 Likes
2

Does “I have just begun to make a TADS game” count in the “unfinished” part of creating a game?

3 Likes
3

Yes it does! Any amount of dev experience and experimentation counts! :grin:

4 Likes
4

Thanks Joey! Yay for TADS!

5 Likes
5

Is this survey a thinly veiled pitch for TADS? If so, it works. :grinning:

I have been aware that TADS allows an insane amount of things I could never dream of as an Inform 7 author (though I wasn’t familiar with all the features here).

One thing that has made me hesitant to jump in with both feet is that the developer seems not to be updating it anymore, and it’s closed-source, I think? I guess it’s mature enough at this point, but it makes me (maybe unreasonably) nervous to commit a lot of time to something that may not work on my computer down the line.

Still, it’s so cool …

12 Likes
6

I’ve only ever written two games with TADS and both were written in TADS 2. I found it very intuitive. My main issue with TADS 3 is that it’s no longer in development, and as a developer I’d be worried about maintenance of interpreters etc going forward.

7 Likes
7

short, factual answer:

http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/programming/tads3/source/

long, historical, story:

TADS 2 and 3 was originally closed-source shareware, but in the end M. Roberts folded the shareware business, released the source code under a relatively free license, whose allow keeping the code compilable, but don’t allows forking (and improvements) but is a very mature codebase, with few, if any, bugs and/or issues.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

9 Likes
8

@RealNC is still releasing updates to QTads…

7 Likes
9

I didn’t know several features (both multimedia and coding) of TADS. So, yes, this is quite an ad for TADS, and a successful one! :slight_smile:

I’m in the middle of writing an IF piece, and I’m not yet sure if it will be TADS3 or a custom one. I like TADS3!

5 Likes
10

If I’m not mistaken, a lot of the features mentioned in this survey don’t work properly in Parchment.

9 Likes
11

Yes, true… which is why I asked the comp mods to remove the Play Online button from my entry…

6 Likes
12

I’m feeling a sudden urge to make a TADS game :star_struck: these are very intriguing and exciting features!

Thanks @dfabulich for the tip about Parchment, that’s unfortunate but really good to know!

I admit I’ve been getting lazy and mostly playing parser games in the browser; knowing that it might not always give me the full experience makes me a bit more motivated to re-download an interpreter (I typically used Gargoyle but a quick search tells me it’s not compatible with everything either?)

5 Likes
13

This thread is a great advertisement for all the awesome stuff TADS can do, and I’ve been excited to see some recent games come out and leverage some of these capabilities. I’d definitely agree that the lack of a browser-integrated interpreter that fully supports all the bells and whistles is the biggest gap in the ecosystem right now – I’ve had the experience of being shocked by how different what you see via the IF Comp and IFDB online play functions is from what QTADS offers.

(Ironically, I have the reverse issue sometimes with Inform games, since my default is to play things in Gargoyle, and occasionally I’ve been surprised to notice that they leverage Vorple or something in a way that the offline interpreters miss).

12 Likes
14

As others have mentioned, the QTADS interpreter is still being maintained. Also, the Adv3Lite library is also still being maintained. TADS 3 is very much alive.

10 Likes
15

TADS sounds great, but I don’t want to learn another thing especially for parser. Part of this also is I run Mac and it seems like the fancy “dev tools” were Windows only. I’m so easily swayed by a good IDE.

The major things that I didn’t quite know that would interest me (other than multimedia) is clickable links as commands (you could technically make a parser-based choice narrative I assume?) and persistent variables over play sessions. You can replicate these in Inform with extensions.

My main experience is that once I get a TADS game open in the interpreter…it kind of behaves like a parser game you’d expect (which is good) and I’ve never seen one do all those tricks you mention…since there’s such a high barrier to entry (potential lack of support, code learning, no consistent IDE.) I can write a new parser game that does that right now in I7 or I can sit and learn how to use TADS…

5 Likes
16

Mac has a very decent IDE through VSCode… (Quisborne was made on Mac)

5 Likes
17

When was this news released? If it was, it was way after I stopped being interested in learning new parser engines, personally.

4 Likes
18

@HanonO I think you as an author using Inform7 would have a hard time changing from the natural language of I7 to the programmer’s style of TADS. Off course I can be wrong, but the way to think/write is a completely different one.

5 Likes
19

I was honestly just trying to gather an outline of the community’s awareness of TADS to settle an argument. :sweat_smile: If this doubles as an advertisement for TADS, then that’s an amazing and accidental bonus because I’m usually bad at advertising. :partying_face:

So I was actually going to post a second survey about this, but it seems y’all already mentioned it, and many more people have been made aware of this from Ziegler’s Prince Quisbourne game.

This is also difficult for new TADS authors in particular, because these features are just part of TADS and are considered “standard”, so you actually need to dig quite deep to figure out how to conditionally change your game’s content during play to address what the interpreter can’t do.

There is an absolutely amazing TADS extension for Visual Studio Code, and I frankly prefer it over the original IDE! :grin:

You could actually just disable the parser entirely and make an actual choice-based game in TADS. :wink: I might be exploring this idea in a current project…!

As long as the project does not involve true procedural generation and object cloning, then probably yeah. I’m not sure what the upper limit of I7 is for multimedia stuff without Vorple. :woman_shrugging: The cloning/instantiation thing is what made me switch from I7 years ago.

Interpreter support is community-driven. Part of the argument I’m having that resulted in this survey was the assumption that TADS was “dead” and that the features allowed in Parchment was simply all there was to the language. If it turns out that a lot of this knowledge is super niche and found only in the TADS community, then that might explain why some people think it’s dead. Maybe getting the information out there will promote more support. :grin:

The barrier to entry for multimedia and advanced features—once you have made a basic TADS parser game—is actually pretty low. The reason you don’t see this fancy stuff happen more often is probably because people usually don’t have that in their project outline or they’re afraid of core game features being gutted outside of QTADS. Could be another survey! :grin:

9 Likes
20

That’s why I haven’t personally bothered. In the event I want to write parser in the future, I’d just use Inform. I’m already restructuring most of my existing plots into choice narratives anyway.

Nothing against TADS. I’m just incurious and set in my ways! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

5 Likes