Community Awareness Survey of TADS 3

[rpatten (Robert Patten)]

@inventor200

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.

I agree with this. As someone who’s only investigated TADS, I find it confusing to get up to speed, and I’m not talking about learning the code.

For instance, if you go to the tads.org site, you’ll see the last entry on the changelog is 2013, so it’s easy to assume TADS is dead. But in this thread, people are saying TADS is indeed being updated, the source code is available, etc.

And what features don’t work in Parchment, exactly? Where is that documented?

Oh, and I recently saw a recent post that said a TADS game could be bundled into a single file. I think that means you can upload a TADS game to be playable on itch.io (with the limited Parchment functionality). But if I hadn’t stumbled on that post, how would I have known?

And how would I know to look for the VS Code extension? (I liked the code completion feature on it, but I couldn’t get it to work on Windows, so I guess I’m stuck with Workbench, which isn’t actually being updated, right?)

What I’m saying is that you’re right – the information needs to be accessible.

From my beginner’s perspective, a lot of information on TADS is scattered, and many wrong impressions and missed opportunities result.

This forum is great, and I’ve found the TADS community to be friendly and supportive, but I would love to have a central place where I can easily access updated documentation, news on latest developments, etc. Maybe I’m missing something?