Unofficial Tex Murphy

http://www.tads.org/

While thinking about BSD adventure and of you guys writing Tex Text Adventure in the forum.
I thought it would be nice for you to have a tool for easily writing text adventure without being a programmer.
And i accidentaly found that: TADS.

I didn't have a look at it. So i can't say how easy to use it is for a mortal.
But at least that's the idea.

TADS is one of several text adventure authoring systems. Other popular systems are INFORM, ALAN, and HUGO. I am afraid, however, that TADS, like the other systems still requires programming skill.

All of these systems are, essentially, interpretive languages. That is, the program that you write will require an interpreter to run it. The interpreter is sort of like a virtual machine, similar to the Java Virtual Machine.

For basic stuff, the programming is quite easy. But since the languages are reasonably powerful, one can get quite creative if one so chooses. But that requires more programming skill.

Inform is probably the most popular system with TADS being a close second. (I base this on the number of games for each system submitted to the annual interactive fiction competitions.) From what I've seen, TADS and INFORM are very similar and you can't go wrong with either one.

I, myself, use INFORM, partly because that's what I happened to get started on. Inform is also available for more platforms. For example, it will run on Palm, TADS won't. I like to play text adventures on my PalmPilot, so it's a natural for me.

My Pandora Demo and Marinedalek's recent UAKM Demo were written in Inform.

FYI, the Inform site is here:
http://www.inform-fiction.org/I7/Welcome.html

HUGO and ALAN are somewhat simpler to learn than TADS and INFORM but are not as powerful.

Anyway, systems such as TADS and INFORM are developed specifically for writing text adventure games, and they make it much simplier than starting from scratch.