Issue running TADS on my PC

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So, just to make this clear for third parties who might be reading along or stumbling upon the thread later.

From a player’s perspective, there are three sorts of TADS games around:

  1. Pure text-based games without any special formatting (or only using old-school TADS formatting sequences), without multimedia adornment, and playable locally offline in a pure text interpreter without multimedia capabilities (in a console, for example).

  2. HTML/Multimedia TADS games: they can be purely textual, but they might also use a subset of HTML markup elements for formatting, and can contain hyperlinks (for example, the direction commands might be clickable links), and can also use images and sound. Arrival and 1893 are in this category.
    Importantly, despite the name, this has nothing to do with the “Web UI”. The HTML here just refers to the fact that Mike Roberts allowed authors to use some HTML markup to customize formatting. HTML/Multimedia TADS games are playable locally offline, and (AFAIK) they work fine in the official Windows HTML TADS interpreter and in QTads.

  3. Web UI games: are intended for online play in a web browser using a client-server model (although, as RealNC notes, there are other possibilities).

TADS 2 can output games in categories 1 and 2, TADS 3 can output games in all categories. (Well, regarding category 1, one has to say that TADS 3 is always in “HTML Mode” – but if an author doesn’t use any of the special HTML/multimedia features, then the game will play without a problem on console interpreters or Gargoyle etc. and will be functionally identical to category 1; otherwise, if multimedia features are used, those interpreters will try to degrade gracefully).

See also: HTML TADS vs. Plain TADS

Dan, thank you for the very insightful post about the state of things regarding the Web UI format. But I think this line is not exactly accurate, because HTML TADS is different, as noted above. (Well, there is overlap in the sense that they’re using TADS under the hood, but not in the sense relevant to this thread, I’d say.)

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