This is driving me crazy…
I have managed to get my project converted over to webui, I can test it in the debugger.
I even worked out how to get the debugger to disclose the PORT and URL it is using so that I can test it in a REAL browser.
The problem now is:
I add the webuires folder to the project, and it uses my files, not the lib ones, everything is great.
But when I close and reopen the project (because now in webui it seems to crash a lot) my webuires folder is automatically replaced by one pointing to the libs version.
In summary;
open the project, add the webuires folder pointing to MY copy, test, everything fine.
close project, open .t3m file in notepad, and i can see a webuires entry under the -res section… still fine.
open the project, and the workbench mangles the directory to point to the lib copy of the folder (and i say ‘mangles’ because it adds multiple / characters sometimes, or even doubles the path or parts of it)
Just when I thought I was finally getting somewhere!
Does anyone have any idea what is going on?
I haven’t dabbled with the webUI yet in the process of making a TADS game, but I know the TADS webUI has been discussed on this site within a week or so. Did you see any of those posts?
The only answers I’ve found for this are:
- Run Workbench as admin. Copy the files in the original /webuires folder and save them somewhere, just in case. Then make whatever changes you want to the original files in the Workbench project. It’s not perfect, but it works.
- Folders with names other than /webuires seem to be fine.
Workbench is very buggy running WebUI. I’ve been running .t3 files on a server using frobTads and using Chrome devtools to test css - that’s very stable.
Yes, I had noticed almost immediately how buggy the workbench is when working with WebUI, which is a shame, as the code debugging features are something I am very used to as a professional dev (and therefore use).
Its kinda weird, when I first decided to stick my toe into IF development, I was on my Linux box, and I played with various ideas before becoming dissillusioned with Inform 7 and deciding to give TADS3 a go.
And that’s why I moved onto a Windows machine; initially it seemed that TADS3 development was only really well catered for there, with Workbench being a solely Windows thing.
As of (late) last night, my frustrations brought me to the following:
- (As suggested) Teach Workbench who is boss, by modifying its copy of the files directly… naughty Workbench!
- Have 2 versions of my .t3m file, one for ‘WebUI’ one for, ‘console’, debug in the console version. (Less than ideal, as they will quickly differ I think)
- Edit the code somewhere else, I started to use visual studio, because it has very nice tools integrated for things like LESS for CSS, and even Typescript, if the javascript needs became intese, and it is not too difficult to get it to call a build routine to compile.
This is however as far as I managed to get, because whatever I do I cant get t3make.exe to build my .t3m file.
I’m using adv3lite and I get the message:
unable to open library file "adv3LiteWeb.tl"
I have tried using -Fs switch to tell it where the files for adv3lite are, both with standard and relative paths, but nothing, same error every time.
So I guess I’m going to have to make another post about that and see if someone knows what to do.
Scratch that last bit, after a little extra fiddling, and moving my adv3lite directory INTO the libs folder of TADS3 (rather than externally where it was) I can now get t3make.exe to build it.
So that gets me (almost) back to where I was before I decided to convert to WebUI!
It would be nice if I knew how to get htmltads.exe/tadsweb.exe to open my .t3 file and host it on a specific port/etc, rather than the way I do it now - some JS tells me what URL is being used, and I simply copy that into my browser.
As for TADS 3 only being catered for on Windows, I’m working on a large TADS 3 game on a Mac (therefore sans Workbench) and I feel like I’m getting along fine…