I have been reading a lot of the various TADS manuals and I cannot find anything that actually describes the webui or tadsnet APIs.
What I would like to do is, with my own mainCommon, runGame etc (essentially a custom loop) I would like to be able to handle multiple clients and be able to distinguish between them as independent entities. I think the most basic manifestation of what I’d like to see as a minimal example would just be a very simple chat client that presents a prompt for nickname from any user connecting to a new session and then simply broadcasting any further commands from each person as “nickname says, ‘whatever they said’” and to yourself you see, “You say, ‘whatever you said’”.
This output distinction is a minimal but equivalent function to what I’d like to do in more sophisticated programs but seeing or having some additional information on how to implement this basic chat system would go a long way in helping me.
Eric, anyone else, do you guys have an idea of how to use the webui in this manner?
But I’m afraid that you would need to study webui library sources and accompanying javascript files in detail to learn it all and understand it in deep to do what you want.
Cooperative multiplayer is already there. More than one people can connect to a running game and play one game together in similar style as Club Floyd plays a game together over IRC(?). Anyone can enter commands and TADS prefixes their input byt nick name. (Host, Guest1,… I think there is an infrastructure to customize nickname, but no UI for it yet. Still didn’t have a time to look at it.) However there is no distinction between who enters the command beside labeling in the output, game is still in fact singleplayer.
When Mike released the shiny new web play I’ve tried to examine it and as a side product I programmed a little chat extension! The thing is I still have no time to finish it into something reasonably complete, but I have published it so you can look how it works: http://tads.cz/en/download.
Maybe you could start to hack it a little to see how it works and maybe compare modified files to their original versions to see how it works internally. It is not precisely what you asked for (it is a chat beside normal game, not a chat alone), but I thing it is actually better to start from something working and change it step by step, because the whole webui is quite a large to learn in whole at once or start coding entirely from scratch.