Interactive Fiction Markup Language (IFML): I posted the other day about how I wished there was a Fiction Markup Language for annotating fiction. Well, it turns out there’s an Interactive Fiction Markup Language (IFML) and engine for creating text adventure games or “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style Web games.
The IFML Engine allows you to write interactive fiction (text adventures) that run in your browser. In text adventures you read a part of the story and then enter a response of your own. Your responses determine the action in the story and allow you to interact with characters and objects. Play the sample game to get a flavor of it. Interactive Fiction Markup Language (IFML) is an XML based mark up language for creating text adventures.
QML: On the heels of Fiction Markup Langauge and Interactive Fiction Markup Language comes Quest Markup Language. What is QML? QML, the Quest Markup Language, is a free XML-based Choose-Your-Own-Adventure game system. Adventures can have images, sound, states to check, random events and much more.
When is someone going to come up with Fiction Markup Language — an XML spec solely for annotating fiction? For example: Take perhaps the greatest novel ever written: Ian Fleming's 1953 classic "Casino Royale." Let's break this down from a big chunk of text to make up something more…
Last I checked, you could compile TADS games to it's "HTML TADS" multimedia-enabled version. I don't know/remember if it runs in a brower per se, but I thought you might be interested.
Hmm, href link didn't work. TADS is here: http://www.tads.org/
I also created an XML language for Choose Your Own Adventure games. It's open-source and comes with a free Windows editor, and I wrote interpreters in ASP (VBS), Python, and PHP. The language is QML, the Quest Markup Language: http://www.questml.com