Tale

Tale
Authoring system
Links	Home page Download
Developers	Irmen de Jong, Lasse Schuirmann
Format	Other
Interaction style	Parser
Systems	Windows, Linux
System details	Python libraries in an object-oriented style
Latest version	4.6 / 21 Feb 2019
Status	Stable
Uses interpreter
Multimedia support	Runs as a server, hence all web media supported.
License	GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0
Notes
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Tale comes from the MUD tradition, but supports single-player IF also.

• Requires Python 3.5 or newer
• Single-player Interactive Fiction mode and multi-player MUD mode
• Selectable interface types: text console interface, GUI (Tkinter), or web browser interface
• MUD mode runs as a web server (no old-skool console access via telnet or ssh for now)
• Can load and run games/stories directly from a zipfile or from extracted folders.
• The parser uses a soul based on the classic LPC-MUD’s ‘soul.c’ from the late 90’s
• The soul has 250+ ‘emotes’ such as ‘bounce’, ‘shrug’ and ‘ponder’.
• It knows 2200+ adverbs that you can use with these emotes. It does prefix matching so you don’t have to type it out in full (gives a list of suggestions if multiple words match).
• It knows about bodyparts that you can target certain actions (such as kick or pat) at.
• It can deal with object names that consist of multiple words (i.e. contain spaces). For instance, it understands when you type ‘get the blue pill’ when there are multiple pills on the table.
• You can refer to earlier used items and persons by using a pronoun (“examine box / drop it”, “examine idiot / slap him”).
• Game can be saved (and reloaded); pickle is used to serialize the full game world state
• There’s a list of 70+ creature races, adapted from the Dead Souls 2 mudlib
• Supports two kinds of money: fantasy (gold/silver/copper) and modern (dollars). Text descriptions adapt to this.
• Game clock is independent of real-time wall clock, configurable speed and start time
• Easy definition of commands in separate functions, uses docstrings to define command help texts
• A lock/unlock/open/close door mechanism is provided with internal door codes to match keys (or key-like objects) against.
• Action and event notification mechanism: objects are notified when things happen (such as the player entering a room, or someone saying a line of text) and can react on that.
• Hint and story-recap system that can adapt dynamically to the progress of the story.