Welcome to the TADS Author's Kit

Thanks for installing the TADS Author's Kit! This kit has everything you need to create your own Interactive Fiction with TADS.

About TADS

TADS (the Text Adventure Development System) is a programming language for writing high-quality Interactive Fiction. Games that you create with TADS are instantly portable to most types of computers, including Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux/Unix systems. TADS games can be purely text-based, or they can incorporate graphics, music, sound effects, and fancy text formatting using HTML, the standard Web layout language.

For news and information about TADS, visit the TADS web site at www.tads.org.

Get the Player Kit

Now that you've installed the Author's Kit, you might also want to install the TADS Player Kit. The Player Kit is a combined version of the Interpreter that can play games for both TADS 2 and TADS 3, and also features the Game Chest for organizing your favorite games. You can find the Player Kit download on tads.org.

Problems?

If you run into any problems with TADS, please check the System Compatibility Notes. There are a few known problems with certain Windows configurations, and the notes explain how to fix these. You should read the compatibility notes in particular if:

HTML TADS is crashing;
you're using Wine;
you're using a non-English version of Windows.

Getting Started

If you've never used TADS before, here are step-by-step instructions for creating your first game.

If you're new to TADS programming, or programming in general, take a look at Mark Engelberg's TADS Tutorial.

You can find more TADS documentation, along with links to the Interactive Fiction community and other IF resources, on tads.org.

Documentation

If you're upgrading from an earlier version of TADS, you might be interested in seeing what's new. Recent Changes to HTML TADS has the latest updates related to the Windows Author's Kit, and Recent Changes to TADS lists updates to the TADS language and the VM engine.

You can view the TADS manuals from within Workbench using the Help menu. If you installed the Full Documentation version of the Author's Kit, the manuals were installed on your hard disk; it you chose the "no documentation" version, you can still view the manuals on-line, as long as you have an Internet connection.

You can also download the TADS Author's Manual in other electronic formats, if you prefer another format for viewing or printing. It's available in several formats on the IF Archive in the directory if-archive/programming/tads2/manuals/:

HTML: tadsman255.zip
Adobe Acrobat: tadsman.pdf
TeX (this is the original version, from which the HTML and Acrobat conversions were derived, but TeX is an older format which is seldom used on Windows these days): tadsman.zip

The TADS Parser Manual provides up-to-date documentation of the TADS player command parser and how it interacts with your game program. The Parser Manual supersedes the chapter "Writing Adventures" from the Author's Manual, so this is an important supplement that you'll want to have handy as you develop your games. You can download the Parser Manual in HTML format from tads_pm.zip.

HTML TADS lets you embed HTML formatting instructions, including graphics and sound, in your game. You write a game for HTML TADS exactly the same way as for regular TADS, but you can embed essentially any valid HTML tags (from version 3.2 of the HTML specification) in the text you display in your game. The HTML TADS Documentation, included in this Author's Kit, has full details.

The IF Archive

Several of the links listed above point to the IF Archive. The IF Archive has the Internet's most extensive collection of material related to Interactive Fiction, including games, articles, and programming systems. The Archive is nicely organized and actively maintained. TADS 2 software, documentation, and examples can be found in if-archive/programming/tads2, and many games written with TADS are available in if-archive/games/tads/.

Numerous examples of TADS source code, including some add-in libraries, are available in if-archive/programming/tads2/examples/. The source code for many complete TADS games is in if-archive/games/source/tads/.

License

TADS is freeware: you can use it without any cost. The TADS software and documentation are copyrighted ©1999, 2012 by Michael J. Roberts. The author places a few simple restrictions on the use of this software; please refer to the LICENSE.TXT file for details.