@LoujoD Here are some things I think would improve the launcher:
This would allow having a shortcut to directly start the game, as well as better integration with game launchers that allow adding 3rd party games.
Also, if SC and/or SQ42 ever get a dedicated benchmark mode (which I think they should), then it would also be extremely valuable to be able to start that mode from the command line. Even more valuable if we can also point it to separate files with graphics settings.
Imagine when SQ42 releases and performance has stabilised a bit after a couple of patches. If it’s easy to automate benchmarking, then we will likely see a lot of places end up using it a lot, which is basically free publicity :slightly_smiling_face:
This would obviously be very helpful when moving between Live, PTU etc (and possibly even SQ42 in the future).
I think this should be done on a per-section basis. So key bindings, graphics settings, etc are exported/imported separately.
I believe SC recreates the settings files if they are missing, and that is definitely what it does for shaders, so just deleting it should be very easy to implement.
That should help with issues like this: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/1/thread/rsi-launcher-2-1-0-release-notes/7402937
And this: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/1/thread/rsi-launcher-2-1-0-release-notes/7403721
That said, I would expect the launcher to autocorrect when it detects something is invalid during normal operations, when possible.
This significantly improves installation time and is something that many do manually atm. So automating it would be good (especially for people that don’t know about it and download the entire thing when they don’t have to).
Besides being a nice QOL optimisation, it would obviously also decrease bandwidth costs for CIG.
Going one step further, if there is an existing PTU build on the machine, then the launcher could try to detect if Live is closer to the new build and if so override the existing files.
How I would detect this:
If the installed PTU version is greater than or equal to the installed Live version → then we can assume the installed PTU build will be closer and stop here.
If the delta between the installed Live build and the new PTU build (based on their manifests) is significantly smaller than the delta between the installed PTU build and new PTU build → then we should copy the installed Live over to PTU.
Note that the difference has to be significant enough to warrant the copy. An optimal value would be based on the user’s network bandwidth and storage speeds, but it shouldn’t be hard to figure out some reasonable default.
Also note: I use Live and PTU here, because it’s the most common example. But it should ofc take all release channels into account.
I have made this suggesting a while ago, and I still think it could be a cool little feature.
So far, SC doesn’t take too long to compile shaders compared to some other games. But sitting around in a menu when you just want to get ingame is always annoying.
I envision this as an “optional” step after the game has been installed that can be cancelled simply be clicking “launch game”.
Behind the scenes, the launcher would probably just start the game exe with a parameter that makes it launch in a headless mode where it’ll only compile shaders and exit when it’s done.
The process that is compiling shaders should probably also be set to below normal or low priority, since it’s a CPU intensive background task which should have minimal impact on whatever the user may be doing.
However, this stuff may not be worth it till Vulkan completely replaces DX11 or at least becomes the default, and I don’t expect it to be a high priority anyway (just a nice to have :slightly_smiling_face: ).
Hello @TomatoKing !
Thank you for your detailed message. I’m glad to report that most of your points are in our backlog.
We did not have the command line and Verify Launcher feature listed.
We’ll add it to the list and see what we can do about it.