A new adventure is waiting for you, this time you're a sixteen-year-old Mage in Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements.
Note: Key provided by GOG.
Direct Link
Features:
- A uniquely-crafted RPG/Adventure game.
- Gain new spells as your character improves. No stat grinding!
- Replay as one of four Mage classes (Water, Air, Fire, and Earth), each with unique spells, puzzles, and solutions.
- Beautifully detailed pixel-art character animations.
- Over 30 detailed character portraits. Over 9,000 voiced and lip-synced speech lines.
- A complete digital music soundtrack, brimming with magic and mystery.
- Battle against a horrid horde of monsters or avoid combat and focus on adventure.
- Multiple story paths, depending on your in-game choices.
- More than 50 magical gemstones to enhance your magical power.
Honestly, I'm really happy to see a small resurgence in the point and click genre like this, with developers taking elements from some of the classics and putting their own spin on it. Nostalgia is a powerful thing, but I often find the classics a little too retro, so being able to jump into a new adventure with a familiar but updated feel is awesome.
That said, the experience at least for me wasn't good at all. It loaded with a resolution stretched across two screens, while displaying on one. So what I actually saw was half a black screen and half of the game—ouch! Honestly, it's 2019 and I really don't understand how this is still an issue for some games. Two monitors isn't that uncommon now. I hardly ever have a good experience with games built with Adventure Game Studio, they need to do better.
You can force it into windowed mode, by editing the config file and setting "windowed=1". However, this is not the config file in the game's main directory. You need to edit the config file of the same name, in your local save folder found in "/home/username/.local/share/ags/Mage's Initiation/acsetup.cfg".
Next problem: serious and unplayable mouse-lag. This I've seen reported across Windows and Linux. I've tried many suggestions, adding various different mouse options directly into the configuration file and nothing solves it. Overall, looks like they need some serious polishing on it before it's properly playable.
Article updated with new configuration info after publishing.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Yes AGS has some horrible warts on Linux. That mouse lag issue is a common one (I recall seeing a fix for it in the steam forums for both Gemini Rue and Lamplight City, the two AGS games I have). There are some other quality of life issues that should be fixed without too much trouble (e.g. sound stuttering when you change the volume using media keys). Yes Allegro is archaic, but the real problem AFAICS is just that the AGS development community doesn't have contributors who are using Linux as their primary OS. If any readers are looking for a C++ gaming project to get involved with, my experience has been that AGS is open to contributors.
Quoting: GuestIndeed games made with AGS are always broken. Looks like these developers don’t bother to test their games...
The github link above shows a bug reported by these guys that we spent days debugging last Christmas/New Year. So we know they did some Linux testing at least.
Shutting down Allegro due to signal #2
Quoting: liamdaweQuoting: ShmerlMust be this: https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/issues/162Which is already in allegro, so does AGS need to pull in an update or what? This has affected multiple AGS games lately.
AFAIK 256colour, who posted on that thread, was working on this game. So they should have the fix? Obviously not though. I think they preload their own version of allegro.
Quoting: ShmerlI just tried to start the game (GOG version) and it simply produces black screen and nothing else.
Looking at https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/issues/510#issuecomment-451679883 it seems they dump the console output into a file called log.txt, maybe there are some clues there you could share. If it is using OpenGL, maybe try switching to the software renderer instead? See https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/blob/master/OPTIONS.md for a list of options that can be set.
Last edited by Shmerl on 1 February 2019 at 12:11 am UTC
Quoting: liamdaweYeah, it's really not the best experience right now :P
A bit crude workaround is probably using the Windows version in Wine. I'll try building AGS with that X events patch re-applied to see if it helps.
Last edited by Shmerl on 1 February 2019 at 12:23 am UTC
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