Don't get too excited yet, but...

…does this game’s IFDB page look different to you?

ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=sicva377zqygxcq2

I’ve seen this few days back, but I’ve resisted to spoil out :slight_smile: Still I’m looking forward for an official release so I can play with the code.

Mike really doesn’t do things by halves, does he?

customizedisplay.jpg

I am hoping to see IFDB profile integration for custom settings, but that can wait until after the official launch.

Multi-user sessions are the killer feature for me. My brother swears he will play IF as soon as we can go through the same game together. It looks like now we can.

It seems like the way the web UI is set up you’ll be able to make pretty much whatever interface you want with Javascript as well?

That’s right. You just have to modify the webui resources that get packed into the T3 file. Or roll a webui of your own and link to it instead.

There is a Flash dependency (TADS.swf) but I’m not sure how much functionality is tied to it. Font picking and file handling, at least.

Uh, no? It looks exactly like every other IFDB page. What am I missing?

That flash object is there for sound output and for some font measurement on initialization.

The Play Online button.

Ah, yes.

Bad news for iOS users, then?

It’s optional. You can check by disabling Flash; it will still work.

This is cool. I see that it works on Firefox and Chrome. I do notice that IE 9 doesn’t work. I haven’t been able to try on any other IE version yet.

But you’ll get stuff like this in the console view:

SCRIPT575: Could not complete the operation due to error c00c023f.
util.js, line 2777 character 9

You may also see:

SCRIPT5007: Unable to get value of the property ‘htmlify’: object is null or undefined
?TADS_session=63a800ad-0344-1605-9615d8943c01-2672, line 963 character 5

If you try refreshing, you’ll probably see:

Resource: /webui/getEvent
HTTP Status: 12029 Unknown

That being said, I personally can’t stand the Internet Explorer browser and I would be quite happy with this working as well as it seemingly does on Chrome and Firefox.

Well, hmm. I did get it to work on IE 6 – and IE 6 barely even works with itself. I did have to install Adobe Flash Player 11.1. But after that it worked like a champ.

Then I tried it on another IE 9 and it also worked fine.

Interestingly, the IE 9 that I tried it on that did not work also cannot call up Gmail in Enhanced view. No idea if that is relevant, but clearly something is wonky with that IE 9.

So – never mind. This seems to work really well. Pretty cool stuff.

And if it’s not clear, this isn’t done and Mike hasn’t announced it. I was just too excited :slight_smile:.

Wow, this is big news. Shouldn’t this be elsewhere on the forum where it gets more visibility? It’s not just a TADS-related thing, it’s a new web-interpreter for TADS. Which is awesome and should be announced elsewhere.

<daydreams about playing TADS and Glulx games on his J2ME mobile phone, realises it’s not going to happen, and sighs deeply, deeply>

It’s not an official release, AFAIK. It’s a stealth thing. And even when it is officially released, my understanding is that you won’t be able to use it to play existing TADS games. In order to take advantage of the browser/web playback, the author will have to recompile the game.

One hopes this will be a fairly simple process. I certainly plan to do it with my TADS games. But the point is, it will be a TADS-specific announcement, because TADS authors will have to do some work before it trickles down (or out) to players.

Aaaaaaah. I’d managed to skip that. Ok, thanks.

There’s a good chance a release will happen before the end of the month. Unless some show-stopper bug pops up, of course.

Yay! Another reason to get busy with the post-comp release of It…