The TADS 3 Launcher provides a simple unified launcher for all TADS 3 game files, including Web UI files and regular game files.
This is designed to solve one of the biggest complaints with TADS 3 from a player's perspective, which is that there is no easy to use, self-contained player that you can use to run Web UI games, and even if there was, there's no ex ante way to tell whether a TADS 3 game file is a Web UI file or a regular one, and regular interpreters can't play Web UI files and Web UI files can't play regular HTML TADS game files, so you'd have to figure it out by trial and error.
TADS 3 Launcher solves this problem by automatically checking whether the binary game file opened by the player includes the telltale plain-text symbols used by Web UI games or not. If it does, then it can safely be assumed that this game file is a Web UI game, so the launcher uses the correct Web UI-enabled runner (either t3run or frobTADS depending on your platform) behind the scenes to run the game server, and provides you with an inline webview to the Web UI game, thus appearing like a normal self-contained interpreter. If it is not a Web UI game, but a regular HTML TADS or text-only TADS game, it launches QTADS under the hood and embeds the QTADS window as a frameless widget, so that this also gives the appearance of being perfectly self contained.
This way, not only has TADS 3 Launcher, for the first time ever, provided an easy way to play Web UI games, but for the first time it provides a unified means of playing all TADS 3 games!
Screenshot of the launcher:
Screenshot of the launcher playing a Web UI demo game:
Screenshot of the launcher playing a regular HTML TADS game:
