Lahma

February 8, 2019

Turns out I was totally wrong about a Steam update having broken compatibility with the plugin... It was just a really, really strange quirk on my machine related to some terribly coded app making some stray registry modifications. So ya... just ignore that part of my previous post.

February 8, 2019

~~SteamLauncher update to be uploaded shortly which will fix the problem introduced by the most recent Steam client update:~~

Just wanted to let any users of the plugin know that it appears that the new Steam update that was pushed out a few days ago (oddly, my client only just updated yesterday) may have broken compatibility with the plugin. It appears that they probably changed some of the vftable offsets to such a degree that SteamLauncher is no longer able to calculate the updated offset properly. I should be able to provide a plugin update which fixes this issue very quickly, and I will make another post here when that "hotfix" update is uploaded.

(Turns out, I was totally wrong about this... the plugin is still working just fine with the latest Steam client update.)

Major SteamLauncher update coming soon which will add many new features (many of which users have been requesting for awhile):

I'm actually in the middle of implementing some pretty fundamental changes to the plugin, mostly revolving around the ability to use the plugin to launch all games through Steam, by default, without having to select "Launch via Steam" in the game context menus. While this may seem like a minor change that would require a relatively small amount of work to implement, the reality is actually quite the opposite.

I've been wanting to implement such a feature since basically the first release of the plugin, but due to limitations in the LaunchBox plugin API, it was not possible. With the latest LaunchBox update, some new features were added to the plugin API which I was hoping were going to allow me to implement such a feature, as well as some other nifty stuff. Unfortunately, it turns out that the API changes did not implement the features I was hoping for.

When I created this plugin, the whole idea behind it was to eliminate the need for any type of intermediary/proxy executable to launch games through Steam, so when I say that the plugin API does not allow certain functionality to be implemented, what I really mean is that such a feature cannot be added without resorting to the use of such a proxy executable. So... I've now stated that the new API changes still don't allow for the implementation of a "launch all games through Steam by default" feature, and I've also stated that the plugin was created for the expressed purpose of eliminating the need for any complicated proxy executable. So, how am I adding such a feature then, you might ask? Well, it turns out that the new API changes add a couple of features that if used in a mangled/unintended way, combined with an EXTREMELY simple proxy executable (literally does nothing except create a hidden, zero size window that runs for the duration of the game), I can indeed implement such a feature in a less-than-ideal way.

While it requires some hackish workarounds and trickery to implement, I have fully tested the concept in a new alpha branch of the plugin, and it does indeed work, and the feature can be easily toggled on/off with a simple click of a menu item in LB/BB. Surprisingly, this new method also comes with a few benefits in other areas, which depending on the user, may make a huge difference in regards to the usefulness of the plugin in their use-case. Here are just a few examples of some of the benefits the new plugin may provide:

Support for LB/BB game startup/shutdown screens (when using SteamLauncher's new "launch all games via Steam by default" mode).
Support for LB/BB's on-the-fly rom decompression functionality. When using the plugin previously, compressed roms were not supported unless the emulator itself handled rom decompression. This was due to the way the plugin completely bypassed LB's normal game launching procedure. Since this new feature is, in a sense, "hijacking" LB's game launching procedure (instead of bypassing it altogether), features such as on-the-fly rom decompression and cleanup should now work fine.
Support for launching games via Steam using non-default emulators. This applies when you have multiple supported emulators or emulator launch configurations (such as multiple supported platform cores in Retroarch) for any given rom. Previously, only the default emulator/config was supported by the plugin due to the limitations of the LaunchBox plugin API's context menu, which did not allow you to create a variable number of context menu items (dynamically) at run-time.

With all that being said, I can't provide any definitive release date for the new features, but I think something like 2-3 weeks is probably realistic. If I run into any problems which might push the release back further than that, I will be sure to post an update. Being that I have very little information concerning how many people are actually using my plugin, any input, suggestions, or feedback would be greatly appreciated (such as, will any of these major feature changes be of any interest to anyone?).

January 7, 2019

9 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

Currently the extracted files are just deleted once the emulator closes.

The issue I can see with the file lock approach, is that LaunchBox doesn't necessarily know what file to check the lock of. If you check the lock on the ROM file, depending on the way the emulator is coded, that may or may not work (not every emulator is likely to hold a lock on the ROM file for the entire time that the game is loaded). So you'd need to check the lock on the emulator's EXE file, which would be a guaranteed way to do it, but in the case of Steam, we wouldn't necessarily even know the path to that EXE file. That is an interesting thought that I hadn't considered though.

Ya, I was referring to the EXE file specifically. I'm sure some emulators simply copy the entire rom into memory and remove the file lock (plus, there would probably be additional problems with emulators that support compressed roms). As far as the Steam game EXE paths go, I suppose that would be true for Steam games imported into LB using normal means. For the purposes of my plugin, since I am creating the Steam shortcut on-the-fly (my plugin creates a hidden shortcut when the user clicks on the 'Launch via Steam' context menu item and then deletes/recycles the shortcut the next time the user clicks the context menu item again), I obviously have the path to the EXE since I just used it to create the shortcut.

For normal uses outside of my plugin, it is not too difficult to retrieve the EXE path using the Steam appID (the X's in steam://rungameid/XXXXXX). For non-Steam shortcuts (user-created shortcuts in Steam that weren't downloaded or bought through Steam), you can get the path from shortcuts.vdf in the Steam userdata directory. For official Steam games bought/downloaded through the platform, you have to read the appmanifest_XXXXXX.acf files in the Steam/steamapps directory (the X's refer to the appID). When the Steam url only has a 6 digit value (6 of the 'X' values), it is an official Steam game. If it is more than 6 digits, it is a user-created shortcut.

If you didn't want to mess with all that though (which I could totally understand), you could always just continue using whatever method it is you are currently using for Steam games (that you said doesn't always work so well), and use the file-locking method for everything else. I'm sure you are busy though and that is probably the last of your priorities. All I really want is some way to intercept/cancel/modify-exe-path of game launches in LB/BB, and I could really care less if startup/exit screens work with it or not. Since you said extracted files are deleted once the emulator closes, I guess that relies on LB being able to properly detect when the emulator process ends (as of now anyways), so maybe until you implement some other means of process start/end detection (that is, if you decide to), you could simply expose your decompression/cleanup methods to the plugin API so that plugin developers could handle it manually? Again, I know you're probably busy and the prospects of any of these changes being made quickly are probably pretty slim, but I hope you don't blame me for asking. Thanks @Jason Carr.

January 4, 2019

1 hour ago, Jason Carr said:

Thank you @Lahma; I do understand what you're looking for now. That approach would definitely mess with the startup screens I think, even if we did get everything in place, especially since Steam closes out the process immediately. I did get Steam games working with the startup screens, but it's messy and doesn't always work well. So unfortunately, I don't think we're likely to find an ideal solution.

How does LB currently handle cleanup of decompressed roms? Does it wait for the emulator/game process to end and then delete the decompressed rom, or does it delete all decompressed roms when LB is closed/shutdown? It would be great to still be able to do what I described even if the startup screens had to be disabled during such a use case.

Just an idea, but monitoring the game/emulator exe for file locks would be one elegant way of detecting the start/end of gaming sessions (instead of monitoring a child process.) Basically, during your "PlayGame" method, you could wait a short period (say 5 sec) for a file lock to show up on the game/emulator exe, and if it doesn't, you would determine that the game failed to load, but if the file does get locked, then you know the game is running and simply wait until the file lock is removed to know the game has ended. I can't think of any instance in which this would not work since it extremely unlikely that anyone would be running multiple instances of any given game/emulator exe.

A simple method such as the following could be used in combination with a timed loop to check if the file lock has expired:

private bool IsFileLocked(string file)
{
    FileStream stream = null;
    var fileInfo = new FileInfo(file);

    try
    {
        stream = fileInfo.Open(FileMode.Open, FileAccess.ReadWrite, FileShare.None);
    }
    catch (IOException)
    {
        return true;
    }
    finally
    {
        if (stream != null)
            stream.Close();
    }
    return false;
}

January 4, 2019

Quote

Unfortunately there's no proper way to cancel the game being launched, as of yet. You might be able to get away with some trickery (like temporarily removing the startup path), but that's probably not a good idea. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by having LaunchBox run the command instead of hooking into an internal Steam function; I don't see how those would be tied together. Can you explain?

I was simply trying to make the point that instead of my plugin having to handle the launch process itself, I could simply hand LB a command line string for it to run itself. For example, if the OnBeforeGameLaunching method had a string parameter that contained the full command that LB is going to use to launch the game/emulator, my plugin could simply change that string inside of OnBeforeGameLaunching and allow LB to continue the game launching process (instead of cancelling the launch process and having to handle it myself in the plugin). This would have the added benefit of all of the startup/exit screens working as normal and it would allow LB to still handle rom decompression and everything on its own (although it would be helpful to have a path to the decompressed rom provided in one of the parameters to avoid the messy procedure of extracting it out of the [theoretical] "full command" parameter).

As an example, lets say the OnBeforeGameLaunching method had a parameter named fullCmd, and it had a value of:

"C:\RetroArch\retroarch.exe" -L "cores\snes9x_libretro.dll" "C:\roms\snes\Super Mario World (U) [!].smc"

After my plugin is finished doing all of its background work to setup a hidden Steam shortcut, all it would need to do is change the value of fullCmd (inside OnBeforeGameLaunching) to a value such as:

steam://rungameid/16354049154579693568

Then LB would continue on with its normal launch process passing that new fullcmd value to Process.Start() (or however you launch the game/emulator). The only potential problem I see with this is if LB is keeping track of when the newly launched process ends (in order to show the exit screen, call OnGameExited(), and/or clean up the decompressed rom), its going to think the process ends immediately since it would be launching an intermediate process that launches the game/emulator itself. If that would indeed be a problem, there are several relatively simple ways I can think of to get around this issue, but I guess its not worth crossing that road right now.

Quote

The overrideCommandLine parameter is used by LaunchBox if a game-specific command line is provided, which will override the emulator's command line parameters. This might be possible for you to hook into. It doesn't add additional parameters; it completely overrides the existing ones, but you could process the existing parameters, tweak them, and then send them back.

Unfortunately, this won't work for me, because as described above, my plugin would need to use a completely custom command (ex: steam://rungameid/16354049154579693568). As it is right now, the overrideCommandLine parameter is being appended to the path to the emulator, which would result in something like:

"C:\RetroArch\retroarch.exe" "steam://rungameid/16354049154579693568"

And this clearly isn't what I need.

Hopefully this hasn't give you a little better idea of what functionality I'm trying to achieve... Essentially, I just need some way to "hijack" the launch process. Let me know if there is any more info I can provide. Thanks again for taking thetime to try to understand my madness

January 1, 2019

Hey @Jason Carr , in addition to the questions I posted previously, I just thought I would let you know that the version # of Unbroken.LaunchBox.Plugins.dll is still set to 1.0.0.0 in the DLL properties. It is also referenced as 1.0.0.0 in the plugin API documentation that you added for the newly added methods. Example:

ILaunchBoxMainViewModel Interface
Provides plugin access to the LaunchBox interface. Added in LaunchBox and Big Box 9.2-beta-3.
Namespace:  Unbroken.LaunchBox.Plugins.Data
Assembly:  Unbroken.LaunchBox.Plugins (in Unbroken.LaunchBox.Plugins.dll) Version: 1.0.0.0 (1.0.0.0)

Maybe you meant to leave the version # unchanged, but I just thought I would make you aware in case you didn't know.

December 31, 2018

Hey @Jason Carr , I got a couple of quick questions for you. I've only done a cursory glance over the new plugin features, so forgive me if I'm missing something obvious, but I figured it might be easier to just get a quick answer from you than to waste a lot of time with trial/error testing only to find out what I'm trying to do still isn't possible. Oh, and just for reference, in case a little more context would help, this is the thread where I initially requested some of these features in more detail:
https://forums.launchbox-app.com/topic/44497-lb-api-additions-time-table/

Question #1:
Do the new plugin API features provide any way for me to create a dynamic number of game/rom context menu items at runtime?

In case its not clear, let me explain in a little more detail. Prior to the plugin API changes (and possibly still), I was only able to implement the IGameMenuItemPlugin interface at design time, so any changes made during runtime were not reflected in the context menu in LB/BB. This prevented me from being able to create my own context menu item similar to your "Launch With" menu item where I could create a dynamic number of "Launch via Steam (Emulator X/Y/Z)" context menu items based on the number of "Launch With" configurations available for that particular game/rom. Perhaps it is possible to get full access to change the context menu via ILaunchBoxMainViewModel, and I just missed it?

Question #2:
Does the new OnBeforeGameLaunching method/event provide any way to cancel the game from launching (such as many events that allow you to assign e.Cancel = true) so that the game launch can be intercepted and re-launched using a custom launch procedure (in my plugin's case, I am hooking the running Steam process and calling an internal function in steamclient.dll to launch a custom command line through Steam). If needed, I think I could actually do away with calling an internal Steam function to launch the game and instead pass a specific command line cmd/args to LB so that it could run the command itself, but as far as I can tell, this doesn't appear to be possible either.

Question #3:
In the new PlayGame function, is the overrideCommandLine parameter used for asking LB to run a given rom/game with a completely custom command line or is this just used to add additional parameters to the command that LB would already normally be running?

Thanks in advance for taking the time to answer my questions, and thanks again for implementing these new features into the plugin API. Some of these new features look like they were implemented as a direct answer to some of these requests I made in the thread I referenced above. I know spending the time to implement this stuff is probably only valuable to a very small subset of your users, so it means a lot that you expend the effort to implement my/our requests. Hopefully I'm just misunderstanding/missing some of the functionality and the new features will allow me to implement the changes I've been wanting to make in my plugin for quite awhile (without additional changes/work needing to be done to the API). Thanks Jason!

December 28, 2018

On 12/15/2018 at 8:11 PM, jmsulli said:

Hey, thanks so much for making this plugin! It's incredibly useful, and I really appreciate that you keep it working. I just noticed an obscure thing, not really an issue, since most people probably wont encounter it, but I noticed that this plugin doesn't play well with the pcsx2 configurator plugin (which allows for per-game configuration of pcsx2 games). When I launch a game using your plugin, it launches with whatever settings I last used for any game launched in that way, rather than my predetermined configs via pcsx2 configurator. Just thought you might be interested in knowing.

Hi @jmsulli, let me first repeat my apology that I just gave to the other person who posted a reply in this topic: sorry it took me so long to respond. I missed the emails notifying me of new responses here. Now, moving on... I've never used pcsx2 configurator, so I don't have any idea how it works. This is a LaunchBox plugin? Can you provide me with some additional info on how it works? Like how does pcsx2 configurator change pcsx2 settings on a per-game basis? Does pcsx2 itself support per-game configs or is the plugin actually swapping out the pcsx2 config file every time a game is launched through LaunchBox? Or does pcsx2 configurator modify the game's launch settings/arguments inside the LaunchBox game properties? If you can provide me with some more info in this regard, I can probably more easily determine if this is something that can be fixed or not.

If I had to guess, I would say pcsx2 configurator is probably changing something outside of LaunchBox that my plugin won't be able to get access to due to limitations in the way the plugin API works. When launchign a game with SteamLauncher, it uses the path of the default emulator assigned to that game and any other custom arguments assigned to it in order to launch the game through Steam. Again, due to limitations with the plugin API, there is no way to assign a dynamic number of context menu items based on multiple supported "Launch with" configs being available, so my only option is to use the default "Launch with" setup when launching a game by clicking "Launch via Steam". I will check back on this thread frequently so I don't miss your reply. Hopefully we can get your issue sorted out. Thanks!

December 27, 2018

Thanks for implementing these new features into the plugin API @Jason Carr! I'm a little late to the game since I only just now noticed that you updated the plugin API, but I will definitely be diving into the new features ASAP. Hopefully these changes will allow me to implement some of the features I've been wanting to implement into my SteamLauncher plugin for quite awhile.

December 27, 2018

On 12/18/2018 at 12:18 PM, SagaXIV said:

Hi, thank you so much for this plugin! I am wondering if a "Launch eveything" via steam would be a possible addition. I' d like to launch all games via this plugin, and skip the optional screen in Bigbox. Thanks in advance.

Man.. I need to figure out a better way to monitor this thread... somehow I always miss the emails notifying me of a new post. Sorry it taken me so long to respond man. Due to limitations with the LaunchBox plugin API, this has not been possible to implement. However, I just saw that @Jason Carr updated the plugin API with some new features, so this MAY be possible to do now, but I won't know for sure until I further investigate the new features. Over the next few days, I'm going to try to update the plugin with some of the new API functionality, and if it is possible to implement this feature, you can be certain that I will implement it. Some of these new features are things I've been requesting for Jason to implement for quite awhile, so I'm excited to update the plugin with some new functionality. Thanks for your support and kind words!

October 18, 2018

@Jason Carr Ya, I would love to see these changes implemented in the plugin API whenever you are able to get around to it. It would really open up a lot of possibilities when it comes to implementing additional functionality into my plugin. There is so much more I would love to do, but right now there just isn't a lot more I can do with the current limits of the API. I appreciate all the hard work going into LB. Hopefully we can get some updates to the plugin API soon, making it that much better. Thanks Jason!

October 18, 2018

Alright, I figured out the issues, and I think I got everything resolved. I just updated the plugin download page with the new version (0.9.0.5). If anyone has any problems with it, please let me know. Thanks!

Here is a quick link to the new version if you don't want to download it from the official plugin download page:
SteamLauncher_0.9.0.5.zip

P.S. I also updated the GitHub page for the plugin.

October 18, 2018

On 10/15/2018 at 8:02 PM, The_Keeper86 said:

It's freezing for me too man. Hopefully you can figure it out. Not sure what Valve did this time.

Working on a fix. As has been pretty typical recently, I haven't fixed it as quickly as I intended, but I should hopefully have a fix uploaded soon.

October 15, 2018

2 hours ago, The_Keeper86 said:

I can check. What do you want me to do?

Just see if any existing game/rom you have will launch using SteamLauncher. My LaunchBox is freezing right now when trying to use the plugin. I've been so overwhelmed the last couple of days that I haven't had any time to look into it in detaill. I did briefly attach a debugger to it, and it appears that the general Steam client API hooks are working fine, so that is what led me to believe that it could possibly be something on my system, rather than a problem caused by the recent Steam update. However, like I said, I just looked at it very briefly, so it may still have something to do with the update. If you right click on a game in LaunchBox and click "Launch via Steam", and your LaunchBox freezes, then I will at least know that it is something related to the Steam update. I may still have time to look at it tonight, but I may just wait till tomorrow. Whatever it is, I suspect it isn't going to be anything to complicated to figure out. Thanks for your help!

October 14, 2018

Can someone else confirm that they are having issues since the latest update as well? I'm fixing to start looking into it, and I just wanted to make sure it wasn't some unrelated issue specific to my system.

October 13, 2018

Looks like the Steam update last night might have broken something in the plugin. I'm looking into it. I'll try to post an update today if I can.

September 20, 2018

25 minutes ago, The_Keeper86 said:

It worked! Thanks for fixing this

No problem. Thanks for helping me fix it!

September 19, 2018

Here you go buddy. Give this one a try. I think it should resolve the issues with relative paths.

SteamLauncher_v0.9.0.4_Beta-DLL_Only.zip

September 19, 2018

58 minutes ago, The_Keeper86 said:

I think you may be right about the absolute paths. LB added a lot of my non Steam PC games automatically.

App path for Sonic Heroes ..\Sega\Sonic Heroes\Tsonic_win.exe

Root folder ..\Sega\Sonic Heroes

And no problem on the delay I totally understand. I should've thought about the absolute path before. I'm guessing Steam doesn't like those. So maybe it isn't the plugin after all and I just have to manually chnage the locations in LB?

Even if Steam did handle relative paths, the paths are relative to the LaunchBox directory, not the Steam directory, so they wouldn't work. So ya, the problem is definitely my plugin. In all instances other than the 'Root folder' ('Start in'), my plugin resolves all relative paths to absolute paths before feeding them to Steam, so its clearly just an oversight on my part (an oversight that I am a bit mystified as to how it hasn't been noticed or reported by anyone thus far). Regardless, I will fix it asap. In fact, I'm going to try to do it right now, and I will post a new release with the changes. I'll report back here as soon as I have the new release uploaded. Thanks for all your help man!

September 19, 2018

Right click on Sonic Heroes in LaunchBox, and click 'Edit'. Tell me what is the path inside of 'Application Path' under the 'Launcher' tab. Also, tell me what is the path inside of 'Root Folder' under the 'Folder' tab.

It appears that my plugin isn't resolving the relative path of the "Start in" directory to an absolute path correctly. Its kind of wild I haven't heard any complaints about this problem previously if that is indeed the issue, but I guess maybe most people are using absolute paths for that particular entry in their pc games. Once you send me back those 2 values, if that is indeed the case, I will fix it asap and upload another beta. Thanks for working with me on this, and sorry my response has been a bit delayed... Just been a bit busy, not to mention I have a serious sinus infection on top of everything else.

September 18, 2018

10 hours ago, The_Keeper86 said:

Yeah, I'm using the beta you posted it works great with the emulators I've tried just isn't working with normal PC games. I have tried a few other PC games too with the same results. So I don't think its a privileges thing.

Would it help if I posted my debug log?

I just checked, and all PC games are working fine for me. What exactly is it doing after you click "Launch via Steam"? Is anything happening at all? Go ahead and post your debug log, and I will take a look at it. One thing you can do to check if SteamLauncher is creating the temporary non-Steam shortcut correctly is to open your Steam game library, hover your mouse over "Library", click "HIDDEN", and look for a shortcut named after the last game you tried launching (it will likely be the only hidden Steam shortcut if you've never created any yourself.) By right clicking that shortcut and clicking "Properties", you can check the path, launch parameters, etc, to see if something is wrong. You can even try manually launching the shortcut. Anyways, post the debug logs, and I'll take a look. I gotta admit that I'm a little skeptical that this has anything to do with the plugin, as I haven't changed anything in regards to this functionality, but I suppose its not impossible. Hopefully we can get the problem fixed whatever it is.

September 17, 2018

8 hours ago, The_Keeper86 said:

I think I might've asked before but is it possible to launch non Steam PC games as well? When I try to launch for example Silent Hill 2 it says failed to launch

Basically anything should launch using SteamLauncher since v0.9.0.2. Have you tried any other PC game besides Silent Hill 2? Its kinda hard to offer any kind of help when the only thing you've provided is "xxxx doesn't work" and you've not provided any debug logs or anything. Also, are you using the beta release I attached to my post 1 or 2 pages back? The release on the main plugin download page will not work currently. The beta release attached to my post should work fine though.

One other thing to keep in mind when launching many PC games is escalated privileges. Just like if you try to add a non-Steam game shortcut to Steam manually, and that game requests privilege escalation as soon as it launches, but Steam isn't running escalated, the Steam overlay will not be able to attach to the game. I don't think I've actually come across a single PC game that actually needed admin privileges, but for some inexplicable reason, many publishers enable that flag on their game executables. Unless you want to run LaunchBox and Steam as admin, which I don't suggest, the easiest way around this problem is to launch your game using a command such as this:

cmd /min /C "set __COMPAT_LAYER=RUNASINVOKER && start "" "path\to\game.exe""

This will force the game to run with the same privileges as the process that starts it. Let me know if you have success using SteamLauncher (the beta release) with other games, and we can move forward from there to try to troubleshoot Silent Hill 2.

September 16, 2018

7 minutes ago, MadK9 said:

My Rocketlauncher setup works fine with steam with Overlays perfectly intact. Not sure if you mean by itself or with this plugin, but i can assure i have full overlay support.

Just out of curiosity, does it also work while using SteamLauncher?

21 hours ago, MadK9 said:

I guess this plugin is null and void to a certain degree for anyone using RL, But hey i will give it a go and see what happens

Now that I understand RL a bit better, I don't think using RL really negates the usefulness or purpose of using SteamLauncher. RL, or no RL, it still serves the exact same purpose (that is, if the Steam overlay still works). I don't know if RL has some type of controller configuration options built in, but I can confidently say that NOTHING comes close to Steam in that regard. Then again, I'm a bit of a geek when it comes to setting up controller profiles (multi-layered radial menus, custom icons in radial menus, custom mouse click coordinates [for things such as 3DS games' touch menu items], custom gyro triggers, etc). I doubt most people make such thorough use of Steam's endless advanced controller configuration options (though some people even take it much farther - *cough* @cammelspit *cough).

September 15, 2018

19 minutes ago, MadK9 said:

I use RL here for everything including steam games, but i haven't tried this plugin.

All i do is make sure you have an emulator is setup as PC Launcher and that you have ticked the virtual emulator option. Then assign that emulator to your Steam Games system in RL, then you will need to go to the module under that system and edit the module setting, add each game and set its steamid, takes a bit of time to setup each game if you have a lot installed, but once added even if you uninstall and reinstall at a later date you won't need to do it again.

As an addition you can't audit the games to green unless you go the txt/fake zip route.

Heres is some pics in case you need them

I think maybe you've misunderstood the purpose of this plugin (or maybe not, its kinda hard to tell from your post). The description of the plugin explains it very thoroughly, but the whole idea of this plugin is to allow you to launch any game, emulator/rom combo, or really anything through Steam, without the need to explicitly add any non-Steam shortcuts to Steam. It allows you to right click any game/rom inside of LaunchBox and click "Launch via Steam", and it will automatically launch that game or rom/emulator through Steam with the Steam overlay enabled, at which point you can setup any controller bindings you want, and those bindings will be saved between gaming sessions (and your Steam game library will not be cluttered with hundreds/thousands of shortcuts for all the different roms you play, as the plugin transparently reuses only 1 hidden Steam shortcut for everything it does). You also get the additional benefit of having your Steam status automatically show whatever rom/game you are playing (again, without actually having an explicit non-Steam shortcut setup for that rom/emulator). For example, your status might show "MadK9 is playing 'Super Metroid (SNES)'".

Maybe this helps explain a bit better why I was confused about HTPCei's use of RocketLauncher in combination with SteamLauncher. SteamLauncher requires you to click a context menu item for any given rom within LaunchBox itself, and then SteamLauncher handles the launching of games, roms/emus internally (it gets the proper emu/rom paths and command line arguments from LaunchBox, but then it actually utilizes a function in the Steam API to launch the newly reconfigured hidden Steam shortcut). For that reason, I'm not making the connection on how RocketLauncher fits into that equation in any way.

I guess it could just be that you have RocketLauncher setup as your emulator within LaunchBox (and then it handles actually launching the correct emulator itself), and therefore SteamLauncher is actually launching RocketLauncher, which then launches the correct emulator/rom. However, if that is the case, I'm surprised with all of that redirection, that any emulator would still open through Steam and actually display the Steam overlay correctly. If it does though, then awesome! Or maybe I've totally misunderstood this whole thing ?

September 14, 2018

2 hours ago, HTPCei said:

Hi, is anyone else using this with Rocketlauncher?

I've just downloaded the new .dll but It's not working for me unfortunately,, I'm getting RocketLauncher errors about "%default emulator%"...

Big thanks to you though Lahma, for this great plugin, I was using it for a while before the update killed it.. now I'm setting up Parsec for WAN multiplayer, and it would be great to have this feature working alongside it.

Being that I am not a user of RocketLauncher, and I know very little about it, I unfortunately probably cannot provide much help. As a result of my lack of knowledge concerning that topic, I don't really understand why you would want to use LaunchBox+RocketLauncher+SteamLauncher. Can you explain to me what the purpose of that workflow is? One thing I can state with certainty is that almost nothing has changed in SteamLauncher between the last release and this beta release. Quite literally the only change is that I'm forcing the code to use a static offset instead of trying to be "smart" about what offset to use. To the end user, the functionality is 100% identical, so if anything broke in your workflow, it should not have anything to do with SteamLauncher.

Additionally, SteamLauncher doesn't use or create any environment variables such as "%default emulator%", so that error doesn't have anything to do with SteamLauncher. If there is anything else I can help you with, or any further clarifications I can make for you, just let me know, and I'd be happy to help out however I can.

Profiles

Forums

Articles

Downloads

Gallery

Blogs

Posts posted by Lahma