Interactive Fiction/Text Adventures - How to Start?

[Vinic]

Lately I've been getting really interested in IF, programming it in-particular. How should I start out? Are there PHP or Python libraries available? What's the best way to make in-browser IF games? What about portable, self-updating Open Source programs? Any ideas?

[papillon]

Probably a much better place to ask *that* question would be in the newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction - most people here don't have much to do with IF.

There is a java applet available to run one of the standard IF development languages and that's probably what I would suggest.

[Vinic]

Alright, I'll check that out, thanks.

I'm really interested in developing a game that uses a mySQL database for its rooms/items, etc. That could make for easy group-editing and real-time developing.

[svero]

There are a number of well known tools/languages to write interactive fiction titles. One of the best known ones is TADS (text adventure development system). You can get more info at...

http://www.tads.org/

Also there's something called zcode which is used to play the infamous infocom text adventures and a number of zcode interpreters and clients for windows. (one windows client is called frotz - which I believe was the name of the light spell used in enchanter)

Also check out...

http://www.ifarchive.org/

for a huge archive of tools/games etc...

[impossible]

www.inform-fiction.org has some great resources, including full books and tons of examples and tutorials.

[Mark Sheeky]

I think that TADS is the way to go. It's cross platform, the program and dev-kit is free, and there are lots of games for it already.

Mark