JACL began life back in 1992 as language for writing interactive fiction. Since that time it has been extended to allow the creation of graphical web-based games. Although still most suited to adventure-style games, many other types of turn-based games can now be implemented using JACL.
Each JACL distribution comes with three different interpreters: the console-based interpreter for text-only games (jacl), the new web-enabled interpreter (cgijacl) and a version compiled with FastCGI for use with an external web server such as Apache (fcgijacl).
The JACL language is easy to learn and the web-enabled version easy to configure and run. If desired, games that do not require a complex graphical interface can be written in such a way that the same game file can be run by both the console-based and web-based interpreters.
This is the third edition of the JACL Author's Guide and covers all the language features of version 1.13 of the interpreter. The tutorial chapter of this guide walks you through the creation of a complete text adventure game. This game demonstrates all the main principles of the JACL language. Adding graphics, sound and a mouse-driven interface is covered in the chapter on HTTP and HTML.
The latest version of JACL and other JACL related resources can be found at http://jacl.sourceforge.net/index.html.
I would also like to thank to Andreas Matthias for contributing the webjacl code and Niels Haedecke for his work on translation and internationalisation.
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Stuart Allen Sydney, Australia December 2007 stuart@animats.net |