What are your IF Hot Takes and Unpopular Opinions?

[morgan (Morgan Willcock)]

@blindHunter

most people overlook TADS in favor of Inform because (A) they’re not code-minded, and are more comfortable writing their code in a more natural language (which is fine, even though it’s not my cup of tea, personally), or (B) there aren’t enough resources, which just loops back to the beginning.

I am actively looking for something to use and I ruled it out purely because of its license.

I guess my hot take is that the current license means that TADS has no viable future, regardless of how great it may be or quality of available resources.

[Angstsmurf (Petter Sjölund)]

@preroq

coders produce code and programmers produce programs.

However, programs no longer exist. They are apps now. The proper term for people that make apps is appers.

[preroq]

This made me laugh Well, in my day job we do produce a web app, but it has many backend microservices on kubernetes as well as standalone programs as utilities. I suppose we could be called microservicers

[johnnywz00 (John Ziegler)]

@blindHunter

I personally learned the basics of TADS within a few weeks with the excellent “Learning TADS 3,” but that’s because I had already reconfigured my brain to think in code to some degree.

I learned not just TADS3, but my first ever programming concepts, through @Eric_Eve 's Learning TADS 3… I didn’t start off with a code-configured brain Personally, I got hooked and hungrier for more…

[Mewtamer (Jeffery wright)]

to whoever said something along the lines of “If I can’t play it on my phone, I’m not likely to play it at all”, I’m kind of the opposite on the tech spectrum, If I can’t run it in the Linux console, I’m not likely to play it.

As for the different IF creation systems discussion, I feel like for most other game types, writing and programming would be two separate things and it would be unusual for a narrative heavy game to be a one person endeavor. But IF is a format that’s rather niche, soe one person projects are the norm in this area and I suspect this is an area where most creators are more writers than programmers, so it makes sense a system that is more writer oriented than programmer oriented would dominate.

That said, I’m more of a programmer than a writer and the language I’m most comfortable with is C++, so I kind of bounce off Inform 7’s attempt to be a natural language system.

Personally, my ideal would just be a C++ library I could #include to add a parser interface and handle a world map without having to write everything from scratch, but this thread has me curious about TADS.

Not really a fan of IDEs and prefer to just type my code in a stand alone editor and compile at the command line, so does TADS support this workflow, and is the compiler available for Linux? And what is the issue with the license hinted above?

[Lava_Ghost]

I suppose I will return with my own hot take: cruelty is fun. You have to have the right mindset: the game itself is one big puzzle, in which resetting the board is a valid move. This forces a higher degree of engagement with the game, resulting in a more memorable and rewarding experience. I get why people find retracing their steps to be onerous, but look at it another way: it’s about building mastery over the game. I played Varicella recently and it was real satisfying to work out the sequence.

Also: Floyd is profoundly irritating.

[BrettW (Brett Witty)]

@Mewtamer

Not really a fan of IDEs and prefer to just type my code in a stand alone editor and compile at the command line, so does TADS support this workflow, and is the compiler available for Linux? And what is the issue with the license hinted above?

It does and it is. I write my code in Emacs on Linux with @alexispurslane 's TADS3-mode and compile on the command line with a simple Makefile. No problem.

[johnnywz00 (John Ziegler)]

@Mewtamer

Personally, my ideal would just be a C++ library I could #include to add a parser interface and handle a world map without having to write everything from scratch, but this thread has me curious about TADS.

C++ is my main language as well (well, outside of TADS3), so I can sympathize. But TADS is in the C family, and I think if you gave it a try you’d have to admit some of the syntax that simplifies object creation and string printing is a pretty nifty step above coding in raw C++! You create so many little subclasses of the library classes that you will probably appreciate not having to rewrite constructors, keep track of everything that’s virtual, etc. And the modify blocks for making small tweaks to the library classes… I don’t know what I’d do without them.
There are lots of things about TADS that make it specifically streamlined for coding an IF game but with a C-like syntax.

[sue (Susan Davis)]

@Michael.Penner

As a side point in the discussion of the old Infocom titles and their (sometimes) cruel puzzling, it’s easy to forget they were sold, typically for $40-50 (or $138+ equivalent today). I think they were designed to take weeks or months to solve and had to be rather convoluted for people to feel like they got their money’s worth.

It’s less easy to forget if you lived through it. One of our neighbours had my Mom send me over at one point to help her solve Colossal Cave.

[sue (Susan Davis)]

@Draconis

Oh, here’s a hot take. I love Dialog but I think the insistence on never increasing the word size past 16-bit is a horrible choice.

I love Dialog, but if Linus isn’t coming back, we need to fork it and continue development. In particular, I’d love to be able to use it for Glulx games. Likewise for Tara and ZILF. (Discovering Dialog derailed my attempt to get into ZIL, but it’s a language on my radar.)

(I’m using “we” advisedly here – I spent the first decade of the IF renaissance fiddling with tools rather than actually writing any games, and it’s not a rabbit hole I’m eager to send myself down again.)

[sue (Susan Davis)]

Hot take: the Skein isn’t (or shouldn’t be) the be all and end all of testing, and real tool chains including unit test frameworks and source control need to be normalized.

[zdillon (Zachary Dillon)]

@HanonO

To be honest, the I7 documentation is wordy but it’s structured as a PhD level course on how to use the tool.

Well, then I’m gonna need help from this forum and other places while writing my thesis, because the course itself is pretty bad at teaching the material.

Don’t get me wrong—Inform itself is an awesome tool, and I will continue to learn it because I know it’s the best tool for what I want to do. But I’ll learn it despite the documentation, not thanks to.

There are ways to organize this material (even with a similarly progressive building-block thrust) that would be far more accessible and quick start-oriented than its current state.

[J_J_Guest]

I was very nearly a TADS 3 author. When TADS 3 came out in 2006 I had only recently learned TADS 2 in order to write a better and more durable version of my ADRIFT game To Hell in a Hamper, and I found the language both powerful and intuitive. I’d looked at Inform 6 and decided I liked TADS better.

But then I found myself in the High Beech area of Epping Forest shooting my short film, The Visitation. By a strange coincidence, I had cast Tommy Herbert, author of Bellclap, in a significant role, without knowing that he was the same Tommy Herbert who had beta-tested To Hell in a Hamper a few years earlier. I, in turn, had beta-tested Bellclap. Anyway, there we were in Epping Forest with me behind the camera and Tommy doing yoga asanas as the character Stephen Pickford.

Between takes Tommy asked me, “have you tried the new Inform 7?” I told him I was a TADS person and wasn’t interested. He said, “oh, no, this version’s different,” and explained the whole natural language thing. The conversation was enough to pique my interest, and the rest is history.

By another curious coincidence, Tommy went to college with, and was friends with Robin Johnson. Small world! I’d love to know what he’s up to now.

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

Dialog is open-source, so we can…legally speaking, at least. But I’ve tried over the last several months to understand how the compiler works, and not succeeded. I’d love to help port it to Glulx, but I’m struggling with the lack of documentation and comments…

[sue (Susan Davis)]

@blindHunter

I will say this about the TADS vs Inform discussion: Indeed, there needs to be more resources, but most people overlook TADS in favor of Inform because (A) they’re not code-minded, and are more comfortable writing their code in a more natural language (which is fine, even though it’s not my cup of tea, personally), or (B) there aren’t enough resources, which just loops back to the beginning.

I overlook TADS because it was commercial software on DOS when Inform 6 (and 5 and 4 and so on) was free. I couldn’t have TADS on my system (a NeXT, followed by a series of workstations) at all back in the day. Also, I was still going down my “let’s make a new version of ADVSYS and fix its deficiencies” kick until long afterwards.

[sue (Susan Davis)]

@Draconis

Dialog is open-source, so we can…legally speaking, at least. But I’ve tried over the last several months to understand how the compiler works, and not succeeded. I’d love to help port it to Glulx, but I’m struggling with the lack of documentation and comments…

I hear you, and it’s a hill that I’ve declined to charge up myself.

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

Honestly, the Glulx port wouldn’t be that bad. The architecture is similar enough to the Z-machine. The problem would be adapting it to a 32-bit word size, because if it can’t use the larger address space, we’ve gained nothing.

[mathbrush (Brian Rushton)]

Here’s my hot take (it used to be my real take until someone pointed out some flaws but let’s pretend I still wholeheartedly believe it to try to make this thread hotter):

all efforts to modernize and popularize IF just inevitably lead to the concept of ‘video game’, which is obviously a very successful genre. “Oh, let’s replace text entry with other ways to do actions. And add location images. Maybe some walking segments to space out stories. With a budget, we could animate the characters talking! Maybe put in some minigames to spruce things up.” Eventually you just end up with Disco Elysium or Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s a false path forward.

[J_J_Guest]

@mathbrush

all efforts to modernize and popularize IF just inevitably lead to the concept of ‘video game’, which is obviously a very successful genre.

Oh, absolutely. 100%. I think sometimes it’s just insecurity that leads us to believe that “text isn’t enough.” It is.

[Jamespking (Marco Innocenti)]

I had to begin learning Inform6, that I decided 2 decades ago it was not for me, because I REALLY wanted to make a good game for the C64.
Now I have made 2 games and I’m completing 2 more on the go, in less than 2 years. The first effort took 3 weeks (A1RL0CK). It means Inform6 can’t be that hard, right? If just I had a fully functional IDE like Inform7 I would drop those silly terminal windows.

This said:
My hot take, given from a very inexperienced point of view: cheap_scenery in PunyInform is the single best idea since Inform6 was invented.