One of the goals for XTads is to aid TADS game development on macOS, and it has several features to this end.
The File | Restart menu item lets you quickly reload the current game file from disk, speeding up the edit/compile/test cycle when working on a game.
In the Preferences panel:
- In the Misc. tab. check Enable development mode features.
This will display the Dev. mode tab, where you can select to display broken HTML markup and highlight spelling / grammar errors in the game’s output. - Uncheck Ask for confirmation when restarting a game (using menu).
This will make File | Restart execute without a confirmation dialog. - Check Keep command history when starting a new game.
The File | Open for Testing dialog (requires the aforesaid development mode features enabled) lets you start games with:
- A save-game position
- Recording/playback of a command script
- Recording of a full game text transcript
The Logging table in Preferences | Dev. Mode lets you filter log output on minimum severity level, for each logging part (Logger) of XTads. While the default Warning level is fine if you just want to see log entries for problems, consider setting these Loggers to level Trace to observe game behaviour: XTOutputTextParserHtml, XTResourceFinder, osxtads.
Log messages can be viewed in macOS’ Console.app, which you can find in the /Applications/Utilities folder. Once started, configure it by setting process XTads and subsystem XTads in the search field: type process:XTads and hit the Return key, then type subsystem:XTads and hit the Return key again.
Note that Console.app is a “live stream” sort of viewer – it doesn’t show log entries from before it was opened, and has a limited time window.
XTads etc. 