CASA ::

Hi,

thinBASIC Adventure Builder (aka T.A.B.) is my adventure creator project for Windows 98/2000/ME/XP/Vista/7 currently at Alpha stage.

T.A.B. was created to replace my previous authoring system, the Creative Adventure Toolkit (aka C.A.T.).

thinBASIC Adventure Builder Home Page. ScreenShots. Download the TAB Editor, the TAB Player and some games and demos. (3.48mb zip) http://tab.thinbasic.com

TAB is not meant to compete with the likes of INFORM, TADS, HUGO, ADRIFT etc. It is a personal project which I am sharing free with the Interactive Fiction community at large.
TAB operates on similar principles to popular retro adventure creators such as STAC, GAC, CAT, Quill, PAW or ACE. It has an IDE editor to enter adventure data and interprets parser commands using a condition/action 'language'. It is being developed with the thinBASIC scripting language.

Some Screenshots here: http://tab.thinbasic.com/

Version History Change Log here: http://tab.thinbasic.com/history.html

Only the freely distributable 'TAB Player' is needed to run any TAB games made using the TAB Editor.

Sound and music supported: mp3, ogg, wav, aiff, mod.
Graphics supported: jpg, gif, bmp, png.

There is also a FORUM and a Yahoo email user group.

Some Youtube videoclips here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnkmFKl ... nXjQ4zD5DG


Have fun,
Catventure.

Hi Philip, and welcome to the forum

I hope that some of the forum users will feel like giving your tool a spin. It sounds interesting, especially for those who feel that Inform is too much of a mouthful.

Could you briefly outline the major differences compared to CAT, and maybe also indicate how much of an alpha release the latest version is? I can see from your chance log that the tool has been on its way for quite some time. Is TAB stable at this point?

Gunness wrote: Could you briefly outline the major differences compared to CAT, and maybe also indicate how much of an alpha release the latest version is? I can see from your chance log that the tool has been on its way for quite some time. Is TAB stable at this point?

Hi Jacob,

CAT was an older, slower system and had problems running on some later Windows OS. Also it is now no longer being actively used or supported any more.

TAB is a lot faster - loading, saving and running game files. It's more user friendly and the Editor a lot, lot easier to use. The coding language is very similar to that of it's predecessor but has been expanded to include a lot of new stuff. Some powerful things can be done. You can create more characters, the characters can be made to carry out multiple commands eg:

>farmer, go north and get everything then s. give all to me then follow me
>jim, talk to the old lady

You can have an UNDO command and a OOPS facility. There's a QUICKSAVE command (a bit like the old Ramsave/load feature)

Even though TAB is still in development it is perfectly possible to create a standard text adventure right now using it. A few are currently so doing.

You can add music tracks, sound effects and even show pics and vids in the graphic version.

You might be interested to know that you can make a finished adventure automatically run when its game icon is activated.

I will support users thru the dedicated forum and the mailing list group.

If forum members wish to try out an example game which was entered into the IF "Spring Thing" Comp in 2009 by Amy Kerns download "Realm of Obsidian" (old skool retro text adventure) from here:
http://amethystgames.wordpress.com/92/

Regards,
Catventure.

Hi to all adventurers,

Here is a link to the latest vid I posted recently:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSoFmT5cYVI
(Demo of NPC Interaction ; Character commands)

The dedicated TAB forum provides help and support for users of the program:
https://adventure.forumotion.com/

Cheers,
catventure (Phil)

Good-day,

For those not interested in creating an adventure in TAB but might prefer to try and play an example demo game made with it then "The Crystal Keepers" by Doreen Bardon is a text adventure for the Windows platform. It is my Conversion of her original ZXSpectrum PAW game written some years ago.

When you have the UNPAW'ed/UNQuilled game sources, and with a little work, many of these sorts of homegrown retro-text adventures can be "transferred" to work with TAB for the PC without too much trouble - since the coding language cond/acts are so similar...

Doreen's game is included in the latest TAB text-only version available from:
http://tab.thinbasic.com/

Thanks,
catventure.

Hi Adventurers,

A minor update to TAB was released on 18 Jul 2012 (Release 62)

http://tab.thinbasic.com/

Regards,
catventure.

Just a line to say the program was recently updated to Version 64 on 16 Aug 2012.

http://tab.thinbasic.com/

Regards,
catventure.

I have returned to this "Windows Only" TAB Interactive fiction project after quite some time and recently released a new update (v65)

http://tab.thinbasic.com/


Regards,
catventure.

Thanks for keeping us updated! I have to admit that whatever meagre talents I might have, I'll never find the time to create an actual game worth anyone's time. At least worth more than five minutes of said time. But it's terrific that there are still viable alternatives to TADS and Inform

Hello,

A new minor release of this thinbasic text adventure creator.

25 Jan 2016 (Release 66)
================
*FIX Icons now show up in adventure window statusbar.
*FIX Action "endgame" now working correctly.

Download Link:
http://tab.thinbasic.com/

Regards,
catventure (Phil)

I posted a small clip of the TAB Adventure Player loading in demo text adventures. TAB is a retro 80's windows text adventure creator similar to popular 8-bit adventure utilities such as Quill, PAW or GAC.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnkmFKloGSA

catventure.

Another clip of TAB showing Editor data and the Player running the tutorial game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-BJInNxPug

Hi,

My Current WIP's are TAB remakes of CAT text adventures made in 2001 and 2002:

"Warriors of the Ssorc" - biblical quest by Rev Tim Gibson.
"The Sims - The Adventure" - txt/gfx by Steve Bonham.

Regards,
catventure.

A further work in progress is a remake of Rev. Tim Gibson's 2001 biblical text adventure: "The Sojourner".
Originally written in a very early version of CAT, I am updating it so it can be played on Win XP and above.
I am building it with the TAB creator @ http://tab.thinbasic.com

Regards,
catventure.

I updated the TAB userguide/tutorial a couple of days ago.

Regards,
catventure/Phil.