Number Six

I've seen accessibility for new players brought up a few times, but is it really such a bad thing for brand new players to be encouraged to explore the game world a little bit first before they start fast-traveling around everywhere?

I ran all the files through VirusTotal and everything is coming back clean except for the 32-bit version of launchercli, which BitDefender and a couple of other oddball engines are flagging. Amusing that it doesn't like that, but has no problem with the 64-bit launchercli that has the exact same behavior... I saw someone mention that the particular heuristic (Gen:Variant.Fugrafa) may be related to an executable that don't have an icon. Which is... an odd thing to detect potential malware with, but ok. I'll slap an icon on it in the next build and see if it makes any difference.

Looks like it's failing to rename launchercli.exe in place after an update. The download is successfully, it just can't install it. I know we've had some AV false positives on that file (Bitdefender is the one I remember). A little weird since it does nothing except run the main launcher with a console window attached, but for whatever reason they don't like that. Any way to check and see if there are any recent applications blocked?

Can I get a launcher.log (from the logs\launcher directory) from either of you with the bootstrap problem? Best to PM that since it might have file paths that contain your windows username.

Are you able to run the 64-bit client through Tequila? There is an issue that it's not remembering the 'No' choice if you tell it not to install the runtime -- that will be fixed soon. But the detection method is so simple and common I'm not really seeing how it could possibly fail. Maybe if antivirus or something decided to block crtcheck.exe.

This should be fixed, though you will need to delete the partial install and redownload the installer.

If somebody does get that working, please go ahead and send a fulldump (under the 'more' or 'advanced' section). The launcher is small enough that a fulldump won't be that big and would be helpful in figuring out what the trigger is.

The first procedure would probably work. Or they could copy it in after it crashes, then try to run the launcher again by running bin/win64/launcher.exe. You can't rename the exe though. If it's not named "crashhandler.exe", it won't be invoked in order to submit a report / memory dump.

Do you have a crash directory? The "launcher starts to install but just disappears" issue I've seen so far involves a crash when the main UI starts. It's in the middle of the image resampling code*, which is a little baffling, but all I have to go on right now are some stack traces pulled from manually posted reports so it's difficult to pin down why. Haven't gotten a memory dump since it happens before the crash handler is downloaded and installed. It might be possible to get a dump by manually copying crashhandler.exe to the bin/win64 (or bin/win32) directories from an existing game install.

In addition to the per-profile setting in the options window, there's also a -noselfupdate command line flag that suppresses the launcher's mechanism for updating itself. It's really intended for temporary use for troubleshooting or extreme cases like a broken launcher update or an OS patch that causes a newer version to not work. Since it also disables updates of the bootstrap config, using it long term could leave you with a broken launcher or inability to update the game if/when new features are added to the package format. But if you're paranoid and want to make absolutely sure it doesn't reach out for updates, it's there. Addendum: I'm not sure that checkbox will do exactly what @CrudeVileTerror is asking, since it disables the automatic update, but still checks to see if a newer package is available. The traffic is minimal though; it uses an HTTP HEAD with Last-Modified set, so it's just a 304 response with no content if there isn't a new version. Not like Tequila where it downloads the whole manifest xml every time.

This can probably be added to the drop-down menu easily enough. The only catch is that I may have to bypass some internal logic. There's a hardcoded 5-minute lockout timer on checking for updates that the UI doesn't have access to. It's a failsafe to make sure that some unforeseen circumstance or programming error can't cause it to get stuck in an update loop.

They should adjust to the screen size, at least to the size that Windows itself is set to scale for. What is the scaling in your display properties?

The answer to that one is 'no'. Activation effects are completely separate from normal power effects. They aren't "auto-hit" in the traditional sense -- instead they don't use hit roll mechanics at all. They: Are always applied when the power activates, regardless if it hit anything or not. Apply only to the caster. Target specification in child AttribMods is meaningless because the target is always the caster. Apply only once regardless of how many targets are (or aren't) hit. Do not trigger procs. They don't even check because these effects are applied separately outside of the main targeting loop.

Have you tried uninstalling the runtime? If you’re getting that prompt it means it tried to load the runtime but failed, which if it thinks it’s already there indicates a broken runtime install.

Which folders are you looking for? All AE stuff should go under architect in the new layout. PlayerCreatedSouvenierClues.txt should go directly under architect (I believe the installer tries to do this already). The subdirs are all listed in the deep dive post unless I missed one.

We've semi-officially moved into a "soft launch" phase. You'll notice that the Homecoming Launcher is now linked from the install guide rather than Tequila, but we haven't made a lot of noise about it just yet. There's two outstanding issues that need to be fixed. One of them involves migration of files from Tequila: it needs to ignore certain files from the old Paragon Chat map pack that a few people have lying around and can cause game crashes, but that only applies people installing it for the first time and doing the migration. The other is a bizarre crash on startup that a small number of people are getting and is related to, oddly enough, resizing the images used by the UI. If you're not affected by either of those, it's safe to go ahead and consider it "released".

@Lockpick That's a known issue with Shinobi from /Ninja that is fixed internally and I believe should be in the next beta build.

Those who are experiencing this, if you are running the new launcher, can you please try to reproduce it in build 26.5.3018 on Prerelease? There is a change there that may help, but if it doesn't should at least provide some more information to help track this one down.

Positive. It was only on a single developer's machine and was never committed or sent to a test server, since the double animation made it look very glitchy.

It's something I looked at a while back and even had a proof of concept demo (sorta, keep reading), but isn't really feasible without some serious animation work. The main problem is that there are not existing animations for transitioning from the flying ready state directly to the fly poses, only from the "flying forward" pose to them. So when moving forward it has to make your character go into the standard fly pose and then immediately shift to the chosen one. That gets really clunky and bad looking once you start moving around and changing directions a lot.

@srmalloy It's actually kind of backwards from that. Fold space and the LRT accolade came first during development, which led to a general revamp of the various teleportation powers, which led to discussions of "I guess we should finally fix enterbasefrompasscode now that the recharges on P2W/day job powers are getting reduced", which led to the creation of the base portal power* since it's something I had wanted to do whenever the command was patched. Somewhere in the middle of all that, we got some additional information about things related to the systemwide improvements to input validation in the travel/portal UI that made the whole thing more urgent. That all happened in maybe the very last week before it went to open beta. So the design you're seeing today is definitely subject to change and may not be the final design. * which let to several engine updates to support that, but that's a whole other rabbit hole

@Postalityjr Yes. Many of the developers and GMs have been using the new launcher for 1-2 months now; we were just waiting on the code signing certificate to start the public beta. I never run tequila anymore.

Yes, it will. I edited it right after posting to mention that, but in case you didn't see it in the scroll of new messages.

The existing macros will work if you're standing next to a base portal (including the new summonable mini-portals), or have the window open after using the base transporter power. Or if you're in a base already, for quick base-to-base movement.

Bad news then, Page 6 is not going to beta today. 😉