How to use the Adventure Game Studio engine

T

tobik@

Developer
This is small howto for games/ags, the Adventure Game Studio engine. It gives us access to many old-school adventure games on FreeBSD. It is not immediately obvious how to run games with it, so I thought that a short howto on the forums is a good idea.

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Many games come with a Windows setup file. The general procedure to install such games is this:
  1. Install games/ags and archivers/innoextract
  2. Download the Windows version of the game. Let's call the downloaded file setup.exe.
  3. Extract it with innoextract setup.exe
  4. Most games I've tested so far will extract files to app/, so rename it to something more recognizable. Save games are stored in ~/.local/share/ags, so it's safe to put the games on a read-only filesystem.
  5. You can start the game with ags /path/to/game/dir. The path to the game data has to be absolute. Games will start in full screen mode, but as pointed out by fernandel, you can use Alt-Enter to switch between windowed and fullscreen mode. To start games in windowed mode simply add the --windowed flag.

Where to get games (some are free and some are not):

Upstream warns that the engine is not compatible with all AGS games and that the following restrictions apply:
  • Supported AGS versions right now are all starting from 2.50; games between 2.5 and 3.2 are supported in theory, but may have yet unknown compatibility issues.
  • Savegames are compatible between the different platforms if they are created with the same engine version.
  • Games that depend on plugins for which there is no platform-independent replacement will not load.

If you successfully complete a game without issues please leave a comment here :)
 
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