Conversation bug in Q-TADS?

Authoring TADS
1

In 1893; A World’s Fair Mystery, I noticed a persistent bug in conversations where an NPC’s dismissive default reply is printed after every conversation command, even if it’s preceded by an author-intended helpful reply. Like this:

>ASK FREDDY ABOUT FLYING SAUCERS
“Yeah, those aliens are zipping about my fields every night. I suspect they’ve got something to do with those weird circles in my corn too…”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
(Note: I made this up. Up to this point, I have not found evidence of
extra-terrestrial activity on the Fairgrounds.)

Now, normally I would chalk this up to an unfortunate oversight and complain about it in my review. But I encountered (and complained in my review about) the exact same bug in Once & Future.

These are two of the most ambitious TADS-projects in IF-history. I find it hard to believe that the same conversation-bug was not spotted by the authors ànd slipped through the mazes of the nets of both games’ teams of playtesters.

Could this be a Q-TADS interpreter fault?

5 Likes
2

I’d be tempted to say it can’t be the interpreter, although I’m not 100% on that. It seems more likely that there’s a coding gotcha that’s easy to forget or to fall into…

3

I wonder if those games were recompiled under a later version of the library, and a regression slipped in.

2 Likes
4

I’ve just done a bit more focused experimenting, and it doesn’t happen with every conversation command. I have no clue if there is a pattern to which commands and/or NPCs produce the error.

1 Like
5

Both have in common being TADS 2 games, and after a quick look I tend to think is a QTADS issue; tried testing with frob or gargoyle ?

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

1 Like