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The name is an acronym for "Text Adventure Development System".
==
The original TADS 1 was released by High Energy Software as shareware in the late 80s,
* Official web site: http://www.tads.org/▼
and was followed by TADS 2 not long after.
In the early 90s, TADS established itself as the number one development tool for interactive fiction,
in place of simpler systems like AGT ([[Adventure Game Toolkit]]).
However, [[Graham Nelson]]'s [[Inform_programming_language|Inform]] has, since its release in 1993,
slowly gained popularity and superseded TADS in the last half of the 90s.
Nevertheless, TADS 2 has been maintained and updated at regular intervals by its creator, [[Michael J. Roberts]], even after it became freeware in July 1996.
Multimedia TADS, introduced in 1998, allows games to display graphics, animation and play sounds, if the platform
supports it.
Recently, TADS received a major overhaul with the release of '''TADS 3''', which is a complete rewrite of the TADS engine, only retaining the platform-dependant code to ease porting.
With its efficient dynamic objects (with [[automatic garbage collection]]), structured exceptions, native UTF-8 strings,
and a range of usefull functions classes, TADS 3 is without question the most advanced development tool for interactive fiction seen to date.
==TADS games==
Games written in TADS are compiled to a platform-independent format that can be played on any computer -- assuming
a suitable [[interpreter (computer software)|interpreter]], or [[virtual machine]], exists on it, anyway.
In this respect, TADS is similar to both Inform and languages like [[Java programming language|Java]].
Whereas the TADS 1 and 2 interpreters had to [[parse]] the commands entered by the player, before sending the results on to the game,
TADS 3 employs a more general-purpose virtual machine, where the command-parsing is done by the game itself.
==External links==
* The TADS page: http://teladesign.com/tads/
▲* Official web site: http://www.tads.org/
* [http://wurb.com/if/platform/2 TADS 2] and [http://wurb.com/if/platform/39 TADS 3] games on Baf's Guide
* TADS 2 interpreters for several platforms: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/programming/tads2/executables/
* TADS 3 interpreters for DOS, Windows, and source for Unix: http://www.tads.org/t3dl.htm
* HyperTADS, a MacOS multimedia interpreter for TADS 2 and 3: http://www.hypertads.org/
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