Lots of things I didn’t know, though I seem to know more than other responders. Then again I only made one small game in TADS 3 before moving on, and that was a poorly received port. Still a good idea to remind people about the options they (still) have in the way of authoring systems.
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Felix Plesoianu ? Welcome, Dacian fellow !
I don’t call “poorly received port” Catch That Cat whose I consider a short but decent IF work, albeit City of Dead Leaves remain my favorite of your work, and comparing both Alan 3 sources, I think that a port of City of Dead Leaves into TADS 3 will be not only feasible, but also a valid showcase, as we debated a pairs of days ago. So I encourage you to do this, and share also the resulting source code.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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Thank you very much for your kind words, but City of Dead Leaves was also poorly received as a parser-based game, and it was sparse in the first place. TADS 3 is best used for the sort of interactive fiction where an extensive simulation of the game world is the main selling point, whereas my interests have shifted towards choice-based interfaces and RPG gameplay in the mean time, and that worked out a lot better. While TADS should be able to handle both, I’ve never seen a single game that makes use of sidebars, clickable icons or anything. As pointed out in earlier posts, there are good reasons for that, too.
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(Prince Quisborne has an inventory sidebar and clickable options in the status bar 
)
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While we’re on the topic of good TADS 3 games and interesting features, Return to Ditch Day was (I think) the original showcase for TADS 3, and is really an amazingly impressive game, based on running around a campus and doing some fancy tech work with cables and such. It does a pretty great job of showing off many of TADS 3’s special features.
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Not just any campus - it’s actually a very accurate representation of Caltech, which I thought was pretty cool! Now that I think of it, if you go east from one of the locations in Sting, you’d wind up at the far western edge of the Return to Ditch Day map… that’d be a fun Easter egg to put in!
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For context, it was written by Michael J. Roberts, the creator of TADS. The source code is available and is surprisingly well-documented. MJR not only explains what the code does, but in some cases why he chose that approach (since, as is often the case in programming, there’s more than one solution).
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Return to Ditch Day got me into hardcore puzzlefests. A-ma-zing game.
(Christminster and Theatre did their part too…)
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hey, I missed whether this was written and submitted or not. what’s the status? 
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