Optionally, AGS can set up Windows Explorer so that you can double-click on a save game file to directly launch the game and continue from where you left off.

Setting it up

In order to enable this, open the General Settings pane, and look for the "Saved Games" section. Here, there is an option called "Enhanced Save Games". If you switch this on, then AGS will enable the integration with Windows Explorer.

To make this work, you need to set the Save Game File Extension setting to a file extension. This is how Windows will identify the save game files, and you must supply an extension of between 5 and 20 characters in length ("DemoQuestSave" would be an appropriate extension for Demo Quest, for example).

By changing these settings, your game's saved game filenames will change, and therefore you will lose access to any existing saved games.

Windows Vista extras

If the player is running Windows Vista, then this feature will also allow them to see the save game description and screenshot (if enabled) in the Explorer preview window:

Save games with embedded screenshots on Vista

Enabling the integration

Once you've built the game, the integration won't be enabled immediately. If you want to use this feature, you'll need to distribute your game in an installer rather than a zip file, because there's an extra step you need to run after installation to set up the association.

In your installer, you need to run the game executable with the special parameter -registergame When you do this, AGS will create the necessary associations in Explorer to get the feature working. If it is successful, it will not display any messages.

You can manually test this by creating a shortcut to your game EXE file, and modifying it to add -registergame to the end of the command line. Then, run the shorcut and the associations should be created for you.

For un-installing, run the game EXE again but with a -unregistergame parameter. This will cause AGS to remove the associations from the player's system.

Cross-Platform Support

Windows: Yes
MS-DOS: No
Linux: No
MacOS: No