TADS & IFComp 2023

Just wanted to offer a big end-of-the-comp congratulations to @BrettW (Hand Me Down) and @johnnywz00 (How Prince Quisborne the Feckless Shook His Title) for entering TADS games this year.

Your hard work proves TADS is a modern IF system worthy of consideration. You’re fighting the good fight.

Good luck to you both!

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Thanks! I love TADS 3 despite the heartache it occasionally caused (I think I found a few fundamental bugs during development).

TADS 3 even gets mentions in my game! I hope the system has a long life ahead of it.

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Pretty sure you already did that with According to Cain, Jim! But thanks! Few people that have been around the forum long enough can doubt my enthusiasm for TADS3! If I hadn’t used up basically every idea in my book for Prince Quisborne, I’d probably be buried out of sight in another TADS work right now… (for my family’s sake, I’m glad I don’t have any new ideas at the moment…)

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I hope to contribute to this fight someday! no matter how yall place (I didn’t play your games so I didn’t vote for them :sweat_smile: only got to 8 games) I salute and congratulate you

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I’ve loaded TADS3 onto my computer, and intend to try it out for seed comp. I have a longer game in mind for some future competition that I’ve begun to write in draft form, but I haven’t chosen a system yet. We’ll see how the seed comp goes.

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Sounds good, Doug! Shout to the forum whenever you’ve got questions!

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I wondered idly the other day whether it’d be good to have a modern (or just another) alternative to Eric Eve’s guides to TADS 3. I guess more never hurts, but it’s hard to tell how many people are keen to learn TADS 3.

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If you want to attract people to the language, you can never have too many guides, tutorials, reference manuals and examples.

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Yes, please!

Outside of stuff written by Eric Eve and Michael J. Roberts, it’s difficult to find anything related to learning TADS.

Although Inform 7 isn’t exactly Python in terms of the availability of learning materials, it’s nice to be able to go to the “unofficial stuff” to clarify some things that the official documents gloss over or don’t explain well. That’s a lot harder to do with TADS.

I wouldn’t mind video tutorials either …

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me and a few others on this forum are working on it now, just takin a bit :slight_smile:

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There are links to a couple of other resources by other people from TADS 3 - IFWiki.

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For my part, I’ve always felt The Tads Cookbook was a great idea, and would love to see that get more traction.

As far as TADS Docs go, I just always have The TADS3 Library Reference Manual and Learning TADS3 open on my desktop. 95% of the time that’s all I need. Occasionally I’ll dip into source code, the Technical Manual, or the System Manual (or ask questions on this board!).

I would say the area that might benefit from a little more love (especially in examples!) is the presentation side of it: the banner/pane system and HTML TADS.

ALL that said, I can’t wait to see what folks come up with!

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Thank you, Eric. I frequently forget about IFWiki!

I wrote that post fast, and it might have come across as ungrateful, which was not my intent. I hope I didn’t sound like I didn’t appreciate all the work you’ve done with documentation (and of course, all the work on adv3lite)! And your documentation is written well. I just think it’s useful to see things from different angles when learning something with as many different pieces as TADS.

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