QTads is a cross-platform, multimedia interpreter for TADS games. It is fully compatible with HTML TADS (aka “Multimedia TADS.”) Both TADS versions in use today (v2 and v3) are supported. It runs on Linux, macOS and Microsoft Windows.
Four years worth of updates in this release. Downloads for Linux (32-bit as well as 64-bit), macOS and Windows:
Game audio is now streamed directly from the game and decoded in real-time
rather than all of it being extracted and decoded in advance. This
eliminates the delay and memory use spike in games with long audio tracks.
Resampling quality is improved and the engine will now correctly apply
resampling (if needed) in all cases. Previously, certain sample rates could
cause resampling to be skipped, resulting in audio that plays at the wrong
speed.
MIDI music is now rendered using an internal synthesizer (FluidSynth) and
thus it no longer matters whether or not the operating system supports
MIDI.
Fixed font rendering issues on Windows, improved font quality of bold and
italics.
Fake bold is now used on macOS when the selected font does not have a bold
variant (like Monaco.)
The maximum text width of the game’s main window is now configurable (set
to 70 characters by default. This only applies to the main window. Banner
windows created by the game are not affected.
Fixed an issue that prevented games from applying custom colors to links.
The interpreter now restores the old window position on startup, not just
the size.
You can now press the END key (or whatever shortcut the system uses for
jumping to the end of a text line or document) during MORE prompts to jump
straight to the bottom of the text, bypassing further prompts.
Fixed an issue where the interpreter sometimes failed to set custom fonts
requested by the game.
Added config dialog button for restoring default settings.
The “Typewriter” font setting now allows selecting proportional fonts. Many
typewriter fonts don’t identify themselves as fixed-width. Lift the
restriction so that they can be selected.
Fixed a possible crash when clicking on an in-game URL and the default
browser on Windows is set to Microsoft Edge.
Improvements for high DPI displays.
Fixed not being able to close some dialog windows on Windows.
HTTPS links in games are now supported.
Improved random number generator.
“OS time” is now properly reported with nanosecond precision instead of
milliseconds.
The choice for which fonts to use by default (if no font settings exist
yet) is now deferred to the OS. Previously, common font names for each OS
were hardcoded for each font type.
TADS VM code fixes and a workaround for dynamic compilation crashes.
Building the interpreter now requires at least C11, C++14 and Qt 5.5 or
newer.
It’s now possible to build the interpreter without audio support:
qmake -config disable-audio
The project has moved from sourceforge to github. New homepage:
With ./QTads.AppImage --appimage-extract you can extract the contents of the appimage (the output directory will be called squashfs-root.) It should then become clear why there is a size increase
noted and browsed prior of the systemwide installation.
Dunno why Nikos decided to trade portability for security, but until there’s a trusted source/binary repo from a very trusted (in the common sense) and known developer, (that is, Nikos’s qtads github pages) this choice remain a non-issue.
Is true that I heavily criticise portability issues (esp. I7’s ni) but in this case the portability is more than guaranteed, at the “Franklin’s Price” (that is, vigilance), so can accept it.
For now indeed works fine, even with a filename change for consistency (qtads --> qtads2, Qtads.AppImage -->qtads3) after placed in its appropriate systemwide place.
to get the raw binary and it will then use your installed system libraries. If it works, then you don’t even need the appimage. However, I doubt it will work. You’d need to download the needed versions of the dependent libraries, build them and install them. At this point, you might as well build qtads from source instead, which is easier since then it should only need whatever versions of the libraries you can find in -dev packages in your Linux distro.
The only sane way to get a binary out there that works reliably across different distros (and their different versions) is something like appimage, flatpak or snap. Yey, three choices. Three times the packaging work.
So I just went with appimage, since out of those three choices, it’s the only one that does not require you to install a package manager first and doesn’t download 2GB of library runtimes. I might look into providing a flatpak as well in the future though, since it has become quite popular lately.
Other than that, I’m not sure what other choice I have.
There was an issue with the Linux downloads in this release. Due to how they were packaged, when running on Fedora 31 it was not possible to open any files because the file dialog was not working.
I repackaged and re-uploaded the Linux versions and they should now work correctly.
