Hello, early adopter!
Since I haven't even started writing the real TADS 3 manual yet, I've prepared this brief overview of TADS 3, the latest incarnation of the Text Adventure Development System. This overview is designed for people who have used TADS 2, so if you're not familiar with previous versions of TADS, I apologize for the lack of enlightenment this document is likely to bring you. On the other hand, at the time of this writing, TADS 3 is nearly ready for library authors, but certainly not for game authors; so if you're new to TADS, you probably should look to an earlier, more finished version anyway.
TADS 3 differs from past versions of TADS in that very little related to adventure games is built in to the system. Instead, the language and the virtual machine are designed for extensibility, so that the adventure features can be built as a library, or better yet as several alternative libraries, written in the TADS language itself. By moving as much code as possible to libraries, it is my hope that the new system will offer much more versatility than past versions. There is as yet no library (although, as of this writing, it is well underway); I have created this release specifically to enable potential library authors to see what's in TADS 3, and to start building.
Finally, my apologies if your web browser has any trouble with this documentation. I have been using Microsoft Word to prepare it, which really wasn't a good idea because of all of the extraneous garbage Word adds to the HTML it generates. I hope to move at some point soon to an editor that generates more browser-friendly files, at which point I'll try to remove all of the Word wackiness.
Palo Alto, California
June 17, 2000