# Getting What You Need

The first thing you need is the latest version of the TADS 3 authoring system. To use adv3Lite you need TADS 3.1.2 (or higher). If you have an earlier version of TADS 3 than version 3.1.2 please update to the latest version of TADS 3 now, before attempting to do anything else suggested in this book.

For a Windows system, you want the Windows authoring kit that comes with Windows Workbench. For Mac O/S X or Linuz/Unix the recommended TADS authoring system is FrobTADS. Both of these can be downloaded from http://www.tads.org/tads3.htm. Even if you don't have a Windows system, however, you might want to consider trying to run Windows Workbench under WINE, Parallels or Crossover (see, for example, the discussion about this on int-fiction.org), since using Workbench gives you an integrated development environment (IDE) that makes many TADS 3 authoring tasks a whole lot easier, although I understand that running Workbench on a non-Windows system like this can be problematic. If you're using a non-Windows system and you don't want to use Workbench (or you can't get it to work) you'll also need to download a text editor for writing your code; Jim Aikin recommends TextWrangler for MacOS (it's free).

The other thing you'll need (obviously) is the adv3Lite library. The fact that you're reading this probably means that you've obtained a copy of it already, but in case you haven't (maybe you're reading this on-line or on someone else's machine), you can obtain the latest version either from http://sdrv.ms/QBBpQW or from the IF-Archive.

The adv3Lite library comes in a zip archive containing an adv3Lite folder/directory and a number of subfolders. A good place to unzip this into is the extensions folder/directory under the folder/directory in which you keep, or plan to keep, your TADS 3 game source code. On a Windows system this will typically be under My Documents\TADS 3; the TADS 3 author's kit setup program should create both this folder and the extensions folder under it. On a non-Windows system you may need to create these directories manually yourself.

You should therefore end up with all the adv3Lite material in a folder somewhere like ...\My Documents\extensions\adv3Lite (where ... is the path to your My Documents folder or its equivalent on a non-Windows system). If you need to reinstall adv3Lite (for example, because you want to update to a newer version) I recommend that you first delete the existing extensions\adv3Lite folder/directory before unzipping the new adv3Lite folder to the same location; this should avoid any problems that might arise from remnants of an older version interfering with the newer version.

adv3Lite Library Tutorial
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