TADS3 animated graphics for HTML TADS

Technical Development Development Systems
21

I have now tried converting animated GIF to MNG using imagemagick (img2img). And, that works!

Thanks for the suggestion, Adrian!

We should still try to get Mike Roberts to release all of his code under GPL so we can update it – but at least there is a path forward for animated GIFs. Updating the TADS3 engine alone is probably not difficult, but you really need both the compiler and the interpreter (meaning HTMLtads) to be updated together IMHO. I will take a peak at that special port but as you cannot distribute the binary, it seems, this restricts what could potentially be a solution path.

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Maybe someone should just do it, and we’ll get Mike Roberts to show up! :laughing:

23

Is Mike Roberts in the Witness Protection program or something? Hard to believe that someone who devoted years of his life building a really powerful language has turned completely incommunicado.

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Ugh. Sorry gave credit to Adrian when I should have given credit to jbg. My apologies…

25

I have scavenged all of the TADS3 source code and there are files missing for win32 that would be extremely difficult to reconstruct. I am positive there is a deep enough talent pool here that we could migrate it to modern Windows dev system (e.g. visual studio 2017 or later).

I, too, am surprised Mike stepped away – although I can see getting burned out on something. At least he should have made it possible to update or upgrade w/o license violations…

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26

QTADS includes HTML TADS, but is GPL3 licensed. GitHub - realnc/qtads: A cross-platform, multimedia interpreter for TADS adventure games. · GitHub

Maybe @RealNC can provide some clarity on the current license situation of HTML TADS?

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27

While it supports Windows, QTADS does not seem to support any images. (There is just a blank spot where I expect an image to appear.) While HTMLTads is limited to JPG, PNG, and (for animation) MNG, QTADS does not work even with those let alone GIF (static or animated). So, it would need some work to catch up to HTMLTads.

For grins, I did a binary patch of the TADS3 compiler to allow support for GIF – and that works – but it is clear looking at the interpreter/player binary that it maps the extension to the appropriate display routine, so cannot add GIF there. Too bad, as I was hoping QTADS would support it; so – for now – I will just use imagemagick to convert my animated GIFs to MNG.

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28

QTads aims for full HTML TADS compatibility, and images should work if you put them in the same directory as the .t3 file (or a subdirectory), or embed them using the t3res utility.

For example, if you have a room like this:

startRoom: Room 'Start Room'
    "An image:\n
    <IMG SRC='blender.jpg'>\n
    An animated image:\n
    <IMG SRC='book.mng'>"
;

… then the resulting game will look like this in QTads 3.4.0:

Screenshot of QTads
Screenshot of QTads1349×1964 186 KB

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29

Ah, ok. Thanks, @StJohnLimbo . I guess the TADS workbench takes care of moving images for you while debugging (as my images were in a folder under the main source window and NOT a folder under the Debug directory where the .t3 file was located). If I had packaged for release, this would be solved as well.

QTads is now displaying the images but not displaying GIFs either – so it matches HTMLTads (except it has some weird indentation).

Meanwhile, at least I have a path forward and mostly eager to see about rebuilding the foundation. Maybe this project that is focused on the compiler can ensure GIF is supported and then use QTads. Can you use QTads for debugging code like TADS workbench supports?