Adventure Game News for 18 Aug 06

Mike Roberts has made TADS 3 Release Candidate 2 available for your downloading pleasure. It's been nearly a year since the first release candidate, so there've been a lot of changes. Some of the more notable are:

• Objects can now be associated with more than one CollectiveGroup.
• SEARCH is handled differently than LOOK IN for Containers and Openables, since the former usually implies a more physical search than the latter.
• Many tweaks to how various THROW commands are handled.
• A new travel connector class, DeadEndConnector, for directions that are blocked off, but you can only learn that by attempting to travel in that direction.
• You can now write directly to a game's log file.
• Better support for libraries including multimedia resources. For example, a library that implemented a compass rose could include graphics for that rose in such a way that, if the library is loaded into a project, so are the graphics.
• The compiler now warns about nested block comments.

Furthermore, Mike Roberts has set a schedule for reaching the official TADS 3.0 release. Release Candidate 3 will be posted September 8th, with the official TADS 3.0 release to follow on September 15th.

What was a competition for games based on people's vivid dreams called the MCDream mini-competition has been retitled "IF Dreams" and become an ongoing anthology of works of interactive fiction based on people's vivid dreams. The first volume contains three games:

• Dreadwine, by Eric Eve
• Retreat, by J.D. Clemens
• No Famous, by Erik Wennstrom

All three games are available from the IF Archive.

Games entered in The Hourglass Competition, a competition for games written with ADRIFT in three hours or fewer, are now available for you to download, play, and judge. The entrants are:

• Boiled Eggs, by Anna Fruen
• The Long Barrow, by C. Hensaw
• Pilfers, by Daniel Budle
• Choose Your Own Three Hour Adventure, by David Whyld
• The Skydiver, by Fenris
• Quest for Food, by Lumin
• 3 Minutes to Live, by Ren
• Over the Edge, by Ren
• Dancing Even Him?, by Richard Otter
• Rolling the Dough, by Richard Otter
• Smote, by Robert Street
• The Road Leads to Nowhere, by The Dominant Species
• Herr Doktor von Nördlingendinkelsbühlhündchen-am-Rhein, by The Mad Monk

A judging form is included with the games. Fill it out and send it to Woodfish by August 31, 2006 to be a judge.

Git, Iain Merrick's very fast Glulx interpreter for works of interactive fiction, now supports Unicode as of version 1.1.1.

Similarly to Git, Windows Glulxe has been updated to version 0.4.0 (available as a zip archive or as an installer).