Frequently Asked Questions

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The following questions are commonly asked by visitors to AGS. Please see if your question is answered here first before asking it.

Q: Where can I see some games made with AGS to see what it can do?
A: Check out the Games page. The Award Winners page gives a good idea of what sort of games have been made with AGS.

Q: How do I make my character animate like he's bending down?
Q: How do I make an intro where the man walks across the screen?

A: Please post questions like this to the forums. As much as I love your e-mails, I really don't want have to spend time replying personally to every little problem, when other AGS users will be more than willing to help you. I also read the message board, so if no-one else answers then I will make sure you get a response.

Q: Is AGS freeware? What's the license?
A: AGS is free for non-commercial use. However, it is not open source.
If you wish to make money from your game (either shareware or commercial) you should read the Legal Information Page to be clear on the license agreements of AGS components. AGS itself has no license fee and is free for commercial use, bearing in mind the terms of the legal information page.

Q: Why don't you want people to register?
A: I'm not in this to make money, I'm in this to do my bit to help revive the 2D adventure genre.

Q: Won't you at least accept a donation?
A: If a future situation was to leave me in financial hardship, I would consider accepting donations. However, for now, I have a full-time job and it's not an issue.

Q: What's the average age of people in the AGS community?
A: A survey on the messageboard back in 2001 showed that most people who use AGS are in the 16-25 age group, although of course there are people of all ages there.
The actual average age on the forums at present is 22 years old.

There is, of course, a reason for the majority age group being young adults - people that are aged about 20 now would have played games like Monkey Island and King's Quest when they were children, and are now old enough to want to recreate the games.
People much younger than 15 will probably not have played adventure games in their heyday and will instead have been brought up on the Quakes and Counter-Strikes we have today.
Similarly, people much older than 25 are more likely to have played the text adventure games (the Infocom era) and will more likely be into Interactive Fictrion game creation systems.

Q: When will the next version of AGS be released?
A: The only answer I can give is - whenever it's ready. AGS has a large user base and new releases need to be kept in beta for a fair length of time to ensure they don't cause any backwards compatibility problems.
If you can't wait for the next official version, beta versions can usually be found on the Technical Forum; but bear in mind that they are likely to have bugs and will not be as stable as using the officially released version.

Q: Can you point me towards any good tutorials on learning AGS?
A: The manual is written in the form of a tutorial. However, if you find it hard to follow, you can check out the Resources and Links pages which have some websites with tutorials on them. Sadly there are not as many as we'd like, so once you're comfortable with AGS, why not write a tutorial to help other new users.

Q: Have you personally made any adventure games?
A: No, sorry. Other than the original Demo Quest I have not had the time to make any games.

Q: I sent you a mail 2 days ago. Why aren't you answering my e-mail?
A: I do have a life outside AGS, which means I don't use the internet (forums or e-mail) every day of the week. You should get a reply within a week of asking though, so if it takes longer try again.

Q. What did you use to make AGS?
A. The DOS version is written with DJGPP, the Windows version with Microsoft Visual C++. Both use the Allegro library for multimedia output.

Q. Is AGS available for Linux?
A. There is an official Linux (Intel x86) port of the game engine, which can run AGS games created with v2.5 and later. You can find it on the Download page. There is currently no Linux version of the game editor - one may be created if there is enough demand for it.

Q. What about a Mac port?
A. There is a Mac port in development; you can find a beta version of it in the Technical Forum.

Q. Will you do a Palm / BeOS / etc. port?
A. Due to me having only a limited experience with these operating systems, I will not port it to any further OS at this time. Also, due to AGS's resource requirements, it is not really practical to port it to any hand-held systems.

Q. Then can I have the source code, to port it myself?
A. Sorry, AGS is not open-source. There are many reasons for this which I will not go into here. The main two are:
(1) I made another application open-source in the past, and someone took it, changed the copyright and tried to release it as their own
(2) The AGS file formats are proprietary to make it harder for people to "hack" other people's games. If the source code was available, it would be easy for someone to write some sort of de-compiler for use with other peoples games.

Q. But the GPL will protect you... go on, can I have the source?
A. No it won't. In theory it does, but what happens when someone goes and breaches it? I don't have the time or energy to waste chasing up lamers who have blatantly ignored the license agreement. Sorry.