TADS is a programming system for creating interactive fiction games. The name is an acronym for "Text Adventure Development System".
History
The original TADS 1 was released by High Energy Software as shareware in the late 80s, 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However, Graham Nelson's Inform has, since its release in 1993, slowly gained popularity and superseded TADS in the last half of the 90s.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, or virtual machine, exists on it, anyway. In this respect, TADS is similar to both Inform and languages like 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/
- TADS 2 and 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/