I’ve been learning TADS 3 for the past two weeks and I love it. I found it surprisingly easy to get the basics down using the tutorials and since my only program experience is VBA in excel, I felt comfortable with the syntax.
I chose TADS because i felt it was really either that or Inform and the inform programing style i keep reading about seems odd to me. Either way i wanted a tool that gives me little to no dead ends. I don’t want to learn something just to find its not able to do everything i want it to do.
Here is my thoughts now… It seems Inform is by far the more popular of the two. People post on this forum about it all the time and the TADS section is really dead in comparison. Apps seem to all support Inform but only one android app supports TADS.
My questions… Is TADS fading away? Should I bite the bullet and switch to Inform? I’m sure i can figure out the Inform language even if its seems odd to me at first. I’m the type thats going to learn all there is to know about the language so it’s important that as an advanced user they are comparable. I’ve only been able to find comparisons at a novice or intermediate level. Are they truly both equally capable at the advanced level?
Portability? I’d say that right now, apart from the popularity that ensures problems are quickly solved, the greatest feature of the ZMachine is the same as it was when it was conceived years and years ago: it’s amazingly portable, and can be played on almost any system.
Really in the end it depends on interpreter choices. When I initially started with TADS I was under the impression it had a full web interpreter. By this i mean it was fully javascript/html5 and i could customize it as a website. So i could in essence make my own interpreter ui using a webpage editor. Something similar to how quest does it.
I also want my wife to be able to play my game on her phone. I want my father to play it on his kindle.
This was one of the main reasons i chose TADS. I thought It gave control over the interpreter. Though the more i learn the more i realise interpreters are entirely different entities.
So to answering your followup question. I’m thinking of switching because the options for playing TADS games on a mobile device are lacking compared to the ones that can plan Inform.
Quest plays by far the best on a phone(even though you need to load the website). How comparable are the features of quest to TADS?
It depends on what you want to do. I don’t think it’s productive to compare features in the absence of a game’s requirements. Is a feature important if you never use it? In general, TADS and Quest have the same features.
For interpreters, TADS right now has Son of Hunky Punk for Android. For anything else mobile you’ll need a web browser and an internet connection. You can customize the web UI for TADS like you do with Quest.
You can create Quest games as apps for iOS, Android, and Windows, or like TADS use a web browser.
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