This may not be the best place to ask, but here goes…
I’ve developed a medium sized puzzle oriented work in adv3lite 1.2, and it’s about one to two weeks out from beta testing. On Windows, this is all well and good, but on Linux I’ve run into some snags getting recent versions of frobtads and qtads from the repo’s. This is in no way the if community’s fault, but just a case of distros lagging behind.
My question is this: if I decide to enter this game into ifcomp this year, will that affect the judges’ ability to play it? Older versions of frobtads will not work with anything using tads 3.1.
To make sure mine works, I always just compile frobtads from source.
I use QTads on my Linux computer to play the games, I’ve not had any issues with TADS 3.1 (frobTads or QTads) when it comes to playing 3.1 games. QTads does not support WebUI games, but frobTads does (it displays a link that one can copy/paste into a browser.) I got frobTads from the tads.org website and compiled it with no problems. (I’m using OpenSUSE 13.1)
One other thing to keep in mind is that Gargoyle is (probably) still fairly widely used on Linux, and its TADS support is not as up-to-date as QTads’.
I’m not entirely sure how well newer TADS games will work with the current Gargoyle release, but it’d be worth testing, and if the results are subpar, providing a note in the package suggesting that judges use QTads (or frobtads).
I keep meaning to update Gargoye’s TADS interpreter, but it’s the most complex interpreter in Gargoyle by far, so I’ve been putting it off for fear of subtly breaking things. Plus there’re no plans for an imminent Gargoyle release, meaning it wouldn’t be ready for the competition anyway, in all likelihood.
Recent TADS 3 games won’t work at all in Gargoyle - there were too many changes and additions in TADS 3.1 for 3.1 games to be backwards-compatible with 3.0.x interpreters. For simplicity’s sake, I just recommend QTADS for all operating systems (or playing online instead, of course).
There’s also a stand-alone Linux download on the QTads website, which doesn’t even require installation, so there’s no need to compile anything. People can just download that and run it.