AGS -> XAGE Conversion

Over Easter weekend I finally got around to taking a proper look at Adventure Game Studio. The first thing I discovered was that the main container for an AGS Project (*.agf) is in XML format.

More as a proof of concept than anything, I've added an option to convert AGS projects to XAGE. The process so far only takes a few minutes - here's a quick video of Demo Quest 3-1 being converted to and running in XAGE:



As above, the sprites and room images need to be exported first (the player character is currently bald as AGS seems to export to 32bit bitmaps instead of 8bit). XAGE gathers up the exported sprites into a single texture for each character and creates the animation frames automatically.

It's a nice start, but there are quite a few limitations:

• As AGS and XAGE are both engines for the same genre, there's inevitably a great many similarities. There are also, however, a number of crucial structural differences. For this reason there will never be a 1 to 1 perfect automatic conversion.


• Unfortunately the individual room data (objects, walkable areas etc) is not wrapped up into XML but some other format (.crm?), so I'm not currently able to convert any of the scripts over - the real meat of the game.

At the very least, the conversion process removes some of the donkey work for anyone who may want to port their finished AGS game to the Xbox360.