TADS is a programming system for creating interactive fiction games. The name is an acronym for "Text Adventure Development System".
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slowly gained popularity and superseded TADS in the last half of the 90s.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.
TADS 3 has many new features, such as its efficient dynamic objects (with automatic garbage collection), structured exceptions, native UTF-8 strings,
and many useful function classes.
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, akin to Inform. The rationale for this is that it is easier to customize the parser.
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).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 closely follows the original Infocom Z-machines approach and quite similar to modern languages such as Java and C#.External links
