Number Six

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. 😉

Long-standing annoyance: Teleport powers have never worked inside that ring. It's because the geometry for the force field only has triangles facing outward instead of two layers like everything else, so the teleport checks find backfacing polygons and think that you're trying to teleport out of bounds. Not really feasible to fix short of a new model for the whole ball. Could really use one anyway; it's way too low detail to be running around inside and there are seam mismatches everywhere.

It is. The launcher core already builds on Linux and I was testing the CLI at one point. In theory the UI should also be portable since IUP supports GTK, though it hasn't been tried yet and there may be some issues to sort out due to slight differences between the platforms. There isn't a whole lot of reason to do so though. The design intent is that the launcher should be closely tied to the architecture of the game, as it makes things like launching with the correct parameters and working directory much easier. A Linux native launcher might be useful for updating, but couldn't actually launch the game since it can't install or use wine on whatever distribution you happen to be running, and there really isn't much benefit to be gained by dealing with the headache of that extra complexity. If and when there's a native Linux game client, then would be the time for the native build of the launcher to match it.

The launcher is static and doesn’t draw any frames unless you’re interacting with it in some way and it needs to repaint. It uses Direct2D by default so if the GPU is sending less frames to the monitor it may be a video driver thing, possibly doing vsync when it does update. What if you also have something else running that is updating the screen more frequently? You could try modifying the shortcut to start the launcher with a -nowdl flag. That will fall back to GDI rendering like any standard Windows application, though it may be slightly less responsive.

From the log it looks like something is going wrong with the UI code and causing it not to run. The launcher core is actually starting to download files, but you can’t see what it’s doing. If you kill the process and run the launcher again (not the install but the one under bin/win64), what happens?

Hit cancel and look for a launcher.log file under logs in the location where you installed it. It sounds like it's having trouble downloading the launcher package with the latest version of itself.

I see it, thanks! It may take a little bit to dig into since it wasn't the obvious case, but hopefully that will have the information I need to determine the actual root cause.

Not in this build. Whatever is causing that one is smashing the stack badly enough that the crash reporter can't run, making it impossible to get a memory dump or even a stacktrace. The windows event logs confirm that it's a crash, however since it's happening inside ntdll it doesn't give me anything to go on. I suspect some sort of graphics-related overflow in the rendering engine from so many objects appearing at once, but don't have solid enough information to prove that.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to reproduce it under controlled circumstances -- the ones that I could reproduce were just fixed but it seems to still be happening for some people -- and the clues in the memory dump don't seem to point to anything useful. The next time it happens, can you go to the advanced options and select "Full Memory Dump"? The upload will be quite large, so please only do this once, and also indicate in the notes that it's the one with the fulldump so that I can find it easier.

Please try it now on the latest update. 26.5.2778 if using the new launcher, or... restart Tequila and hope for the best since I don't think it shows the version number anywhere.

Yep, got it. Looks like it's just randomly dying after checking the packages for updates; no indication of problems up to that point. Do you have a 'crash' subdirectory, and if so can you send me the files inside?

Can you grab C:\Homecoming\logs\launcher\launcher.log and DM it to me so I can take a look?

It’s better in the long run to use relative paths rather than absolute, but still requires some editing. You would need to log out of the forums first in order to do that, since we’re currently using them as the IDP and the authentication is integrated. But there really isn’t any reason to switch accounts in the launcher at the moment. The location on the Mac doesn’t matter at all, since the game is running under wine it sees the virtualized file system as c:\coh

This thread is for suggestions for enhancements or additional features. Already planned: Keyboard navigation of the main launcher screen Single sign-on option to launch the game and automatically log into the account that the launcher is logged into Some method of linking additional accounts for multiboxing (probably a right-click option to launch with a secondary account) Basic account management like password changes from within the launcher itself Custom profiles for quickly switching between different graphics presets, etc Addon manager and updating

This thread is for general feedback on the experience of installing / using the launcher. Bug reports should be created as separate threads to make tracking easier.

Unfortunately Island Rum for Windows doesn't seem to have a convenient registry key that can be used to find out where it's installed. On Mac it's always installed in the same place under the wine root, but on Windows it could be anywhere. 😕

Thanks for the feedback! For 1, you don't have to hit the play button, you can just click on the profile itself instead. For play and update actions, the whole thing acts as a giant button. Install and cancel require hitting the smaller button since those are more invasive actions. What's your windows display scaling set to? The launcher should be fully compliant with modern high-DPI displays, including multimonitor support, and increase its resolution on those screens, but I'm not sure how many of the early field testers were running 4k. For 2, can you elaborate a little on your setup and how it broke? There's an automatic migration that tries to copy things that look like keybind files to the correct place, but it doesn't work on some complex setups (like mine) using nested subdirectories or unusual naming conventions. Depending on what is failing there it could possibly be improved.

Please post bug reports as separate threads in the Homecoming Launcher subforum. That way I can track them and lock the threads once they've been fixed. The UI scale resetting is expected, since it was moved from being a global setting to an account-wide setting, something that wasn't a thing until now. Chat timestamps and recharge timers will likely also have to be reset if they were enabled. As to your question, I'll expand a bit on Tahquitz's answer. It's fairly intentional; one of the design goals of this launcher was to be something that could be trusted out of the box, for an easier setup for new players. That's fundamentally not really compatible with the ability to add manifests from external sources -- even if they were signed, those server operators don't have our signing key and so you'd have to manually trust a different certificate. That enables them to download anything they want, making the whole thing something that we can't guarantee the safety of. While that's probably not ideal for everyone, other servers had already started moving towards using their own launchers and it's only a matter of time before some of them abandon the manifest format in favor of better options. There are now quite a few different ones out there including the new Sunrise* launcher. * Ironically, we had originally been planning to switch to Sunrise as the recommended launcher to replace Tequila, but there was a long period of time where it seemed to have stalled out and died. By the time there was news about it being revived, a significant amount of work had already gone into this project and yielded a lot of features that would be unlikely to be available elsewhere -- package signing, heavily multithreaded and efficient operation, a framework designed with delta patching in mind, automated deployments, etc.

This should hopefully get better as more people use it and build reputation associated with our signing cert. One of the frustrating things small independent developers have to deal with. The hotspot extends quite a distance above the dots which may help. You can also right click on the profile button to get that menu if it's easier. Can you clarify which popup buttons you're talking about in your second comment? What OS are you running on? You might try running the launcher with -nowdl to force it to fall back to standard GDI drawing instead of using Direct2D.

That's correct, in some cases it's more accurate to say it won't download code that doesn't chain back to something that can be validated. There are two tiers of things that have signatures. There's the launcher code itself, which is relatively small, is signed, and does verify the signature every time it's run. The launcher executable has a publicly verifiable Authenticode signature which Windows will check, and once it's running the launcher takes care of verifying that the LuaUI code it runs is signed by the internal HC CA. The game files, which include the exes and also all the piggs, are indirectly protected. The package json is signed by our CA, and contains sha256 hashes of all the files (chain of trust). Since the package data can't be modified without invalidating the signature, the sha256 hashes inside it are known to be good. The sha256 hash is checked at download/patch time and the file will be rejected and deleted rather than moved into place if it doesn't match. It does the hashing inline as the data is streamed into a temporary file. For performance reasons, the hashes of the game files aren't checked on every file at startup, so it won't detect local modifications done after the fact like you mentioned, unless you run a full verify. Also please feel free to ask tech questions in the deep dive thread, that's what it's there for.

You should install the Homecoming launcher somewhere else. The game client design is different and is a clean break from the Cryptic/Paragon COH install.

Which shard?

That's correct. If you don't need Tequila for anything else, you can remove it. Be sure to check screenshots before deleting it, as due to the potentially large size, that is one thing that is not automatically copied over.