Sturm Und Drang IF: A Stormy Romance

Until recently, I was in a TADS workshop. Then I actually tried to install TADS. Doing so was so inordinately frustrating that now I am a former member of the workshop.

The warning bell was going off when I visited the TADS 3 site. No IDE for Macs except for one in pre-beta? Hmm. Ok. I went and downloaded that, only to find that it required a G4 or G5, which excluded my trusty Pismo — even though I was running the correct OS (10.4). Just for grins, I tried to run it anyways. No dice.

Next, I tried scouring through the IF archive (which STILL has no search — yeah, I know), and there I found a discontinued, unsupported IDE for OS 9. Cool! I downloaded that and tried to compile the first program in the Getting Started manual. Of course I updated to the latest libraries, like any good geek would, but no amount of inserting the latest 3.0.18 adv3 libraries would work. So then I tried 3.0.8 libraries. They too failed. So then I reinstalled the IDE, hoping to get down to a level that I could compile a ten-line program. THAT didn’t work either.

The second line of the program was #charset, but there’s no matching charset in the libraries. Somehow I find out that the IDE doesn’t support charsets. Fine. I commented it out, only to be hit with a different set of 70+ errors.

Then I go to R*IF and look around. No-one has any binaries for the Mac (OS 9 or X) that they’re sharing. Even years ago, it was apparently a well-known fact that developing TADS 3 on the Mac involves compiling FrobTads from the source, which eliminates all graphics, sounds, and movies from the output. At this moment, I’m staring at the screen in irony.

The reason to code in TADS is to take advantage of its multimedia capabilities, but in order to develop a TADS 3 game on the Mac requires you to basically forgo that. And the reason why you’d use TADS 3 instead of TADS 2 is that you don’t have to hack the libraries extensively to do what you want.

TADS 3 sucks like a black hole.