I wanted to poke around with IF development, which I last did fleetingly about 10 years ago, and it appears the two major systems are still TADs and Inform. Is there a semi-current comparison of the major differences between the two?
And it’s great! TADs 3 and Inform 7 seem to be the current versions, but the article itself is from 2008-2009. Is it safe to assume the information is reasonably accurate? Is there a better comparison of the two out there?
For parser IF, Quest is popular too. It doesn’t get discussed as much here, I think because it has its own forum, but there’s lots of activity and discussion around it there.
At least for TADS the article is still accurate and very useful. Of course over the years TADS got major new features such as webplay mode and whole alternative library, but the article is focused rather on more generic principles behind those systems and how to understand their differences than on enumerating every single feature. In fact I’ve spotted only one significant out-of-date information - a fully-featured HTML TADS interpreter is no longer available for Windows only.
Thanks for the input, folks. I did read about the parser replacement library for TADS, looks like the latest version came out earlier this year. I think TADS is what I’ll poke around with. I don’t really plan on developing a project right now, I just want to make a sandbox and play a little. Programming is part of what I do for a living and I’m pretty comfortable with object-oriented design paradigms, so I think I’ll pick it up pretty quick.