Adventure Game Studio Features. This is a game engine that focuses on a specific genre. If you were a fan of point and click adventure games in the 1990s like Myst, Grim Fandango, 7th Guest, and Toonstruck – or recent ones like Machinarium – then this software is worth exploring. Back in April of 2011 it received its latest update that. Jul 30, 2021 Adventure Game Studio (AGS) provides the tools to make your own adventure, for free! Bring your story and artwork and slot it in, and let AGS do the rest. AGS provides everything you need from within one easy-to-use application. Create, test and debug your game, all in one place.

Music and sound

Sound and music are an essential part of any gameplay experience, and AGS 3.2 and higher provides a re-written audio system giving you full control over your game audio.

File formats

AGS is able to play the following types of audio file: OGG, MP3, MIDI, WAV (uncompressed), MOD, XM, IT, S3M and VOC.

The only limitation to this is that AGS is only able to play one MIDI file at a time. If you attempt to play two MIDI music files simultaneously, the first one will be cut off when the second one starts playing.

OGG is a digital music format similar to MP3, but achieving better compression and higher quality. More importantly, it is a totally free format so no royalty payments or licenses are required to use it. For more information and programs to encode your music to OGG, see https://www.vorbis.org/

Audio in the Editor

Look under the 'Audio' branch in the project tree. Here you'll find sub-nodes called 'Speech', 'Types' and two default folders called 'Music' and 'Sounds'.

Speech

At the moment, voice speech files are not set up within the editor. See the Speech help page to find out more about adding speech to your game.

Audio Types

Audio Types allow you to group together similar types of audio files. The standard distinction here is between Sound and Music, whereby you usually only want one Music file to be playing at any one time; whereas you might have several simultaneous sound effects.

Double-click on an Audio Type and it will open up; you can see its properties in the Property Grid. Here, the 'MaxChannels' setting allows you to specify how many audio clips of this type are allowed to play at the same time. The 'VolumeReductionWhenSpeechPlaying' setting allows you to have AGS automatically reduce the volume of these audio clips while speech is playing, to make it easier for the player to hear the speech over the background music.

You'll probably find that the default settings here are fine, and in many games you won't need to change them.

Importing audio files

Now let's get on to the important question -- how do you add sound and music to your game? Well, if you right-click on the 'Sound' or 'Music' folders (or any other folders that you create yourself), you'll see an option called 'Add Audio Files'.

Select this option, and you'll be given a dialog box to find the audio files that you want to import. Once imported, they'll be assigned script names automatically. If you already name the soundfiles you create and want to use in a short and descriptive way you don't have to rename them in the game project and save a lot of time and keep both your game project and the assets organized.

Double-click an audio file in the project tree to open a window where you can preview it, as well as change its properties in the Property Grid.

Using folders to organize sounds

Rightclick on the main music node, on one of the subordinate type folders or any user-created subfolder to these to create a subfolder to that node. It is good practice to add some new subfolders when you start a new project or you will have to drag and drop a lot of files later (as you can not drag and drop them in droves but only one at a time). You could split your music into Chapter 1 music, Chapter 2 music, etc or split it to 'music calm' and 'music battle' or whatever you need.
The same applies to the folder for sounds and sound effects, add subfolders to it to split your sound library into 'Menu sounds' for button presses and 'game sounds' for in-game sounds. Sort them by chapter or by room, this will make finding, navigating and addressing the sounds so much easier.

Playing audio in the game

The script to play an audio clip in the game is very simple. For example:

plays the audio clip called aExplosion.

Priorities and channels

AGS currently has an 8-channel audio system, which means that up to 8 sounds can be playing at the same time. One channel is always reserved for the speech voice-over and you cannot change that, so you have 7 at your disposal. By default Audio Types reserve one channel for music and one for ambient sounds; thus leaving 5 available for other types, but you can change that to your needs.

NOTE: Because total number of channels is a constant, AGS does not guarantee to reserve exactly as many channels as you set. Channels are reserved in the order of types in the project, so if you set 'MaxChannels' to 5 for music and 5 for sounds, then at runtime the game will reserve 5 for music and only 2 remaining for sounds.

If you try to play an audio clip and there are no channels available, then an existing one will be stopped and the new one will take its place. However, this will only happen if the new audio clip has an equal or higher priority than one of the currently playing sounds.

Thus, the priority allows you to decide which audio clips are more important than others. For example, you might set a footstep sound as low priority, and a door opening as high priority. This can be configured at the folder level in the editor, and also by changing the properties of an individual audio clip (by default they will inherit from their containing folder).

Sometimes you might not want the priority of the sound to be fixed in the editor -- you might want to decide it at run-time in the script. For this reason the Play command has an optional parameter which allows you to explicitly specify the priority when you play it, for example:

NOTE: having only one channel reserved for an audio type and all clips having same priority by default will make any new played sound of that type replace the previous one automatically. This may be useful, for example, to ensure that only one music clip is playing at the same time in your game.

See also:AGS Audio Channel Troubleshooting

Seeking and changing volume

So, how do you change a sound once it is playing? Well, there are no methods on the Audio Clip to do this, because you might be playing two copies of the same sound at once, and then AGS wouldn't know which one you wanted to access. That's where Audio Channels come to the rescue.

When you use the Play() command, AGS returns to you an AudioChannel* instance representing the channel on which the sound is playing. You can store this to a global variable and access it later on. For example:

This will start the aExplosion audio clip playing, and then change its volume to 20%.

Using Audio Channels

Supposing you want to start playing a sound now, and then change its volume or panning later on. How would you do that? Well, you'd need to keep the AudioChannel around, so that you can access it later. The easiest way to do that is to make it a Global Variable; if you open the Global Variables editor, you can create a new AudioChannel* variable (let's call it longWindedSound). Then when you play the sound you set it like this:

longWindedSound = aExplosion.Play();

later on, elsewhere in the script, you can change the volume by doing:

Note the check for null here -- this makes sure that your game won't crash if the sound isn't playing (it might have finished, or not have been started yet).

Overall system volume

There is a property called System.Volume that controls the overall game volume, which you can use with some sort of volume control slider for the player. All individual sound volumes work within the overall system volume.

Conclusion

The new audio system in AGS gives you much more control over your game audio. Please see the following sections for a complete list of the supported commands:

AudioClip reference, AudioChannel reference

Voice speech

With AGS you can link a line of dialog to a speech file, to enable 'talkie'- style games. Suppose you have a dialog script with the following:

Normally this would display the words in the speech text above the characters heads. However, you can add the special character '&' to symbolize that a voice file should also be played.

The file name has format XXXXY.EXT, where XXXX is made of up to first four letters of the character's script name (except the leading 'c'), the Y is the speech file number (with no leading or trailing zeroes or padding of any kind), and EXT is the file extension.

For example, if you have dialog script:

or common script using Say script function:

Both of those examples would play EGO10.WAV with the first line, and MICH7.WAV with the second. When a line of text has a voice linked to it, the text on the screen will not be removed until the voice file has finished playing. If the player interrupts it by clicking the mouse or pressing a key, the text and voice will be stopped. Voice files must be placed in the 'Speech' sub-directory of the game folder.

NOTE: WAV, OGG and MP3 format files can be used for speech.

NOTE: You cannot use speech file numbers above 9999. That is, you can have EGO1.OGG all the way up to EGO9999.OGG, but not EGO10000.OGG or higher.

Speech is compiled into a file called SPEECH.VOX and is separate from the rest of your game data so that you can offer it as an optional extra download to the player. The game will function correctly if the file is not present.

SeeAlso:Speech.VoiceMode

The AudioCache folder

When you import audio files into AGS, you'll probably notice that a folder inside your game folder, called AudioCache, starts to fill up with files. What is it and why is it there?

Well, when you import audio into AGS, you might be importing it from anywhere -- it could be off your hard drive, but it might also be off a USB stick or a CD. AGS can't rely on the audio files always being there because you might remove the USB stick or delete the files on it.

Therefore, when you import audio into AGS it makes a copy of the file in the AudioCache folder. AGS also remembers where the file came from, and when you compile your game it will check if the file has been updated in its original location -- if so it will copy the latest version to the AudioCache.

But if the source file no longer exists, your game will continue to build just fine because AGS has its own copy of the file.

This allows AGS to stick to one of its core principles, that all the files you need to build your game are within the game's folder. That way, you have complete security in knowing that by backing up your game folder, your game will be safe if the worst happens.

Adventure Game Studio is an open source development tool that is primarily used to create graphic adventure games.

Adventure Game Studio Manual

ROMS

Accepted File Extensions: .exe

Place your AGS files in

Troubleshooting

Ensure that you have RetroPie-Setup script version 4.3.8 or later before installing AGS, as several issues (such as content not appearing in EmulationStation and MIDI music playback) have been fixed.

Video issues - window manager and graphics driver

More recent Retropie images have not included a desktop or window manager as part of the image (including many Xorg libraries). It also does not automatically enable OpenGL drivers (which are still experimental). In contrast, when installing the AGS package it relies on Xorg as it uses xinit for display and it also defaults to using an OpenGL graphics driver (at least the last time I installed AGS this was the case). As a result the resolution was incorrect and performance was poor, both to the point where it was unusable.

In order to rectify this I followed these steps:

Adventure Game Studio

Install Pixel desktop environment

After opening the Retropie setup script (either from the command line or via ES): Configuration / Tools -> Raspbian tools -> Install pixel desktop environment

Modify AGS emulators.cfg file

Edit the contents of /opt/retropie/configs/ags/emulators.cfg to contain:

Adventure Game Studio Dialog

Note that the '--gfxfilter hqx 1' is not required and can be omitted if you prefer to have the non-filtered graphics.

I elected to change the driver AGS was using rather than enable the OpenGL driver in Retropie as it is still experimental and is known to still cause issues for other emulators. I haven't actually tested AGS using the driver though so not sure if that works or not.

Controls

AGS requires a mouse attached to the Raspberry Pi

Useful Links

https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/tree/master/debian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Game_Studio
https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Adventure_Game_Studio/