Atlas Launcher - native launcher for Linux and MacOS

[Taffer]

I've been writing a native launcher for Linux and Mac platforms - Atlas Launcher. It still requires WINE to run the game (for now...), but the file checking and downloading happens in your actual OS (like Island Rum on a Mac).

 

It's gotten to the point where the command-line prototype runs well, which means I'm playing the game more and hacking less. 😉  I figured I should mention it to improve my chances of continuing work on it, and to maybe get some really early alpha testing from brave Linux and Mac users. If you do want to give it a try, you should (currently) be comfortable using the command-line, and downloading source code from GitHub (the link above). This version uses a cache to speed up launches when the files in the manifest haven't changed. You can point it at an existing City of Heroes installation directory without disaster, or you can point it at an empty directory (or give it a directory that doesn't exist) if you want to download everything again.

 

I'm currently working on a nice GUI version that uses threading to (hopefully) speed up downloads and file checking. I've never done GTK before, so it's slow going.

 

The end goal is to have a pre-packaged binary you can just run, with a GUI.

 

A few notes on the current command-line prototype, if you want to try it:

• I've got an nVidia GPU, I don't know how to launch things properly on AMD GPUs. Or if you need to do anything to force hardware acceleration. It might fail if you use Intel video, too, I haven't tried.
• I'm using Linux Mint 20. I don't think I'm doing anything distro-specific, but I haven't tried it anywhere else.
• I've tried it on MacOS 10.15 (Catalina) using WINE installed from brew, but not recently.
• It currently uses the first URL for a file when multiple download URLs are available.

 

Clues, comments, suggestions, etc. welcome!