>I'd like to be able to calculate the actual (real) time it takes someone
>to play my TADS game. Is there any way in TADS to access the system clock
>that the game is running on?
Depends what you want to do. If you want the game to be able to time
stamp when the player first started playing the game and when s/he
finished, then yes. TADS has the ability to read the time and date
from the system clock and do stuff with it. Use the gettime() function
and RTFM. :) I use this feature to have beta versions of my game
expire after certain dates, much to the irritation of a certain
tester.
However if you want your game to sit there, in a kind of event loop
waiting for keyboard input from the player and timing that, then no.
You could write a platform-specific external command to do that (this
feature was used in Infocom's Border Zone) but TADS alone can't do it.
- Neil K.
-- 49N 16' 123W 7' / Vancouver, BC, Canada / n_k_guy@sfu.ca