I somehow completely messed up the link to the new thread about dynamic parsers. Here’s the thread.
I couldn’t help but throw in two cents for next release. I’m not sure if this is possible or not, but customization of the exe game window would be really cool. It wouldn’t have to be super big until later if desired to go bigger with customization.
- Allow us to remove menu or sub menu items: Remove add/delete themes, remove themes, remove edit themes.
- Allow us to force start in a theme.
- Allow us to change the color and screen color of console theme programmatically
- Override save system and call it with a function.
If these are already features please let me know. But the idea is if we can release Tads 3 games professionally maybe a bit more professional customization would be suitable for a pristine system. I think if we could personalize the console feel Tads 3 would literally be the best.
One annoying thing. There are like 5 parser commands that return information but none of them return the full command that was last typed by the player. This is extremely obvious as to why it would be useful, and extremely not-understandable why it’s not right there.
Did you consider making webui version of the game? I know it is not the same as a standalone exe file, but when it comes to customization, you have almost unlimited possibilities.
No, just windows for now. Although I can see how it would be good for styling. I just found blasphemy in the documentation:
“In the traditional UI, the user installs a TADS interpreter on her machine,”
Now we’re all ‘hers’ lol.
Putting on my mod hat, if it’s not “blasphemy” when someone chooses to use “him” to refer to a person of unknown gender (since it makes us all into “hims”), then it isn’t blasphemy when someone chooses to use “her” to refer to a person of unknown gender.
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When I write documenation, I prefer to use epicene pronouns throughout: they/them/their/theirs/themselves. Check out this handy chart to avoid “pronoun trouble”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_personal_pronouns#Basic
For more information on pronoun trouble see the Looney Tunes cartoon, Rabbit_Seasoning.
And, yes, gender neutral pronouns are important. If you are male, you may not realize what a drag it is to read a comp sci or math textbook (or other books on stereotypically male interests.) where all the examples are “he.” It just makes half the population feel excluded, which is not enjoyable. I don’t see that “she” is a much better option, but I do at least appreciate that the author is trying to level the playing field a bit.
I think most the world is used to seeing ‘he’ including woman. I have nothing against woman, but I’m used to reading bible. It would never use ‘she’ for ‘he’ on purpose. For thousand and thousands of years it’s been mankind. That’s a lot of conditioning to compete with. I know that’s getting opinionated but bare with me on the general consensus thing, which in the end effects popularity. Documentation is not scripture and we don’t all believe, that’s fine. But I would say like the last poster said gender neutral is the norm for documentation. I would say 90% of men do not want to see ‘her’ in place of the user so therefore don’t do it. You can, it might not be a mistake, but prepare to get groans from 90% of your male readers. If you don’t want to put them off, or the woman, use gender neutral for smooth sailing.
If you’re going to make etymological arguments based on the Bible, please cite the Aramaic. 
EDIT-ADD: Also, move to off-topic.
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Doubtful, as “mankind” is an English word, and English hasn’t been around for 1000’s of years. Don’t know what the orginal Hebrew or Greek would have been or if those languages have the equivalent of a singular they.
Actually, the history of the singular they form is quite old and using he for singular they, is comparatively more recent. I found this article on the topic fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Usage
They (not he 
) even give some examples as early as the 1300’s.
So, good news, we only have to overcome our grade school education and perhaps a few centuries. We can do it. Every generation recreates the world anew. I, too, was taught that a sentence like, “A good person does not eat his dessert before his vegetables,” was more correct than, “A good person does not eat their dessert before their vegetables.”* I used to think that people who used “they” and “their” in the singular sounded ignorant because I had been taught better. I don’t believe that anymore. In the 90’s I used to write out “he/she” and “his/her,” which was always awkward. I was so happy to discover the acceptability of singular they.
Lest anyone think this veering too far off topic, every good piece of IF needs good writing and the more inclusive your writing style is the larger your audience will be.
I will get off the soapbox now. Thanks for listening.
*I eat dessert whenever I feel like it. Try not to judge.
The terminology for mankind was men or man in Greek scriptures.
anthrōpos: manfaced, that is, a human being: - certain, man.
It’s just like saying mankind, because it roots from ándras which is man. Men is ándres. The word ‘mankind’ may be under 1,000 years old but the terminology of mankind is not limited to English. Like I said, the issue stems from 1000’s of years of conditioning where the world was referred to as mankind. Woman were only mentioned in text when they were being talking about specifically, but that didn’t mean they weren’t respected.
Another reason why it is aggravating to most of us is because we subject ourselves as that user. Even it it’s talking about a user that will play our game. Unless we have been prepped that this is a story with a female or male character. Strange, but it’s common human nature. Plus we have related tangents, like “Why does it have to be a girl that’s playing my game?” But words can go where they please, I digress 
Jeremy, if you’d like to discuss the TADS 3.1.4 release, do it in this thread.
If you’d like to have a discussion about gender and pronouns, start a thread on the off-topic board.
If you’d like to tell people that it’s OK to use masculine gender pronouns but blasphemous to use feminine gender pronouns, don’t do that here. It violates the code of conduct and derails the discussion (and it’s also insulting to men to say that 90% of us will be upset by feminine pronouns).
Again, I’m saying this as a board moderator.
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Alright Matt, understood. Take care. And to protect my character ethic from slander, I didn’t once say male of female pronouns are more acceptable over another. Nor do I believe that at all, or would I ever say it.
“It’s also insulting to say men will be offended by female pronouns”
That’s hearsay. I’m male and not offended at all. Sometimes I’m offended by either male or female pronouns when used outside general usage. Please post some well defined guidelines.
Are there any news since this topic was last active about a 3.1.4 release of TADS 3? (And maybe some new features?)
TADS is an excellent system, it’d be a shame if it just faded into oblivion.
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I think this would require a new set of developers at this point. TADS itself is a complicated system. I don’t mean the text adventure bits; I mean the actual source code to it. Right now the source for TADS 3 is coupled with that of TADS 2 and it’s really a bit of mess to work with unless you are already very familiar with it.
There’s very little innovation around the T3 virtual machine as well and, again, I think some of that is just due to the complication of the code.
There could be work done on updating the Workbench, ideally making it cross-platform from the start. But I think for most people the effort in doing so is outweighed by the relative few who would actually gain from it.
I know some would like more of a focus (or a different focus) on how web-based solutions are handled. But, again, that’s a fairly significant level of effort for what seems to be little gain.
ADV3Lite (a name I never liked) is still an entirely distinct library. Personally, I’d rather see that just become the main library (i.e., the new ADV3) or perhaps better have it incorporated into ADV3. (Which is harder than it sounds given the lack of backward compatibility in some areas.) This, at least, is an area where “new features” could be incorporated but it’s unclear what features people want from the library beyond what’s there.
In order for TADS to have any hope of sustaining, it needs an ecosystem. And that means it needs developers providing that ecosystem. Then it needs to attract game writers who want to work in that ecosystem. If that loop could get started, TADS might see momentum again. But short of that, I do think the “fade into oblivion” is the likeliest scenario at this point. And I say that with sadness.
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I’d like the ability in TADS 3 to compose bitmaps with pixel precision and to do bitmap operations on the screen (like flipping, rotating, etc.). Basically, to have the ability to position multiple bitmaps on top of other bitmaps without having to use an HTML table. (For display, the HTML table is still fine - at display time, a fully composed bitmap could be displayed as a single image.As it is now, creating multiple layers of images is impossible and using the HTML table feature, positioning is very tricky.)