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GameLaunchProxy Version 0.0.3.0 (Steam launch proxy, temporary font loading, and more)


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Well, it appears that the changes to the beta client have been pushed to the non-beta client, as my updated GameLaunchProxy is no longer working (I saw my Steam update yesterday.) When the beta stopped working, I looked into the problems that were causing it to no longer work, and it appears that its going to be a pain in the ass to fix the problem. If memory serves me right, it is specifically failing to retrieve the client engine interface. If I have some time today, I will take a look at the current state of things to see if there is any quick fix, but I suspect that is not going to be the case. I will report back here when I learn more.

Update: It appears I may have jumped the gun, as some of my GameLaunchProxy shortcuts are still working, while others are not. I'm going to do some investigation and I will report back here when I know more.

Edited by Lahma
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Sometimes, Valve likes to change timings and such, when the overlay is hooked during the launching process. I remember one time they made a change that was causing SC configs to lock, even between launches, so Nielk1 had to make a variable time to wait that is user configurable. This is the kind of stuff they end up doing a lot. Let me know if I can do any testing for you.

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Lol. Actually I'm glad you popped back into the thread Nielk1. I was wondering, have you ever messed around with signature scanning in order to use functions within DLLs which have their code changed on a regular basis (i.e. function offsets always changing and the functions you need aren't exported, such as steamclient.dll). I see that sig scanning has been used quite a bit within the Steam/Valve hacking/programming community and although it has its advantages and disadvantages just like any other method, it does seem like it might be a good method to use for such a narrow use-case application like this (adding/removing/modifying shortcuts within Steam.) I've used some IDA Python plugins (created by various members of the reversing community) to create some wildcarded function signatures from the steamclient.dll, but I have not yet had a chance to write some C# code to scan the DLL for the signatures and hook into them at the offsets where the signatures are found. It doesn't seem like it will be too difficult, but I do think that I'm going to have some questions about a few things which is why I'm asking if you have any experience in this area. As always, thanks for the neat app you created. I've had fun tinkering around with it ?

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I have never used such a thing before but it sounds very interesting.  I normally work in the managed world and rarely have to interface with stuff like this.  When my other projects clear up I do plan to get back to this and trying to make a more stable API layer out of it.

Honestly I normally dig around github until I find a user who's put table dumps up.  I am able to use IDA (I've used it to do ASM injections to N64 game save-states and to reverse engineer simplistic encryption logic) but I do so quite rarely if I can help it as the ASM world is one that leaves me tied to a reference sheet the entire time I am digging around.

Edited by Nielk1
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  • 2 weeks later...

In case anyone is wondering, the Steam Client update yesterday/today (2017-12-13) broke GameLaunchProxy. I have already fixed the problem and will be uploading version 0.0.6.1 to my GitHub shortly. Let me know if you are still have any problems (the new version should also work with the Steam Client Beta).

https://github.com/lahma69/GameLaunchProxy/releases

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  • 1 month later...

For anyone interested, I've created an entirely new app (well, plugin really) for launching roms/emulators from LaunchBox through Steam. It is a simple plugin for LaunchBox that only requires you to drop a DLL into the LaunchBox plugins directory and that's it.. everything is done automatically. You simply right click on the game you want to play in LaunchBox and select the menu option "Launch via Steam" and the emulator/rom will launch through Steam, giving you access to the Steam overlay, controller bindings, etc. CammelSpit has been helping me test it out a bit, and it appears that it is ready for public release. I am going make some final comments and cleanup the code a bit, then I will compile a final release and push it out onto GitHub. It should be up later today. Whenever its ready, I will make a new topic for it and post the topic URL here for anyone that is interested. 

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57 minutes ago, Lahma said:

For anyone interested, I've created an entirely new app (well, plugin really) for launching roms/emulators from LaunchBox through Steam. It is a simple plugin for LaunchBox that only requires you to drop a DLL into the LaunchBox plugins directory and that's it.. everything is done automatically. You simply right click on the game you want to play in LaunchBox and select the menu option "Launch via Steam" and the emulator/rom will launch through Steam, giving you access to the Steam overlay, controller bindings, etc. CammelSpit has been helping me test it out a bit, and it appears that it is ready for public release. I am going make some final comments and cleanup the code a bit, then I will compile a final release and push it out onto GitHub. It should be up later today. Whenever its ready, I will make a new topic for it and post the topic URL here for anyone that is interested. 

If you upload the file to our third party apps and plugins section of the downloads, a support forum thread will be automatically created, with a link directly to it from the file download page.

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33 minutes ago, neil9000 said:

If you upload the file to our third party apps and plugins section of the downloads, a support forum thread will be automatically created, with a link directly to it from the file download page.

Ok, sounds great. Once I'm done with the final touchups here in just a bit, I will do exactly that. Thanks for the info!

Edited by Lahma
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Looking forward to trying it out! Thanks for the work. I've been using Nvidia gamestreaming with a shield tablet and an ipega 9023 to play games remotely. Getting old and tired is sitting at the computer. Full launchbox compatibility with steam overlay support  would make it complete! 

Edited by percybuttkins
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19 minutes ago, percybuttkins said:

Looking forward to trying it out! Thanks for the work. I've been using Nvidia gamestreaming with a shield tablet and an ipega 9023 to play games remotely. Getting old and tired is sitting at the computer. Full launchbox compatibility with steam  would make it complete! 

That sounds like a neat setup! I use Nvidia gamestreaming occasionally with the Moonlight app on my Android phone or tablet. I have a GameSir G4S controller that has a built in phone mount, so I guess that sort of accomplishes the same thing as your ipega in a way.

I usually only use it when I'm out of town though, rather than when I'm at home. I host a VPN server on my router which I connect into when I'm away from home, and as long as I have a decent internet connection wherever I'm at, it surprisingly works pretty well. I didn't even think about my plugin being useful for that.. but it certainly would make it easier to setup LaunchBox/BigBox as a GameStream application and just use that to launch everything through Steam (and therefore still be able to use my normal controller bindings). 

Anyways, I'm going to get back to finishing the public build of the plugin. Should be up here in a few hours.

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I tried Steam Rom Manager, but I just hate cluttering up my Steam library with all of my roms and such... especially when LaunchBox already does such an excellent job of organizing my entire rom/emulator collection. I know the author (FrogTheFrog) of Steam Rom Manager, and he undoubtedly put a lot of time and effort into making that app, so I'm definitely not downplaying its usefulness. However, I think most of us who paid for a LaunchBox license did so because we appreciated the ease and customization that it provides for organizing a large rom collection... and that is something that Steam just wasn't made to do. 

My ultimate goal with this was to be able to continue using LaunchBox to manage my entire rom collection, but also be able to easily use the Steam overlay (and therefore Steam controller bindings) with anything launched from the LaunchBox UI. 

P.S. Speaking of FrogTheFrog, if you use the Wii U emulator Cemu, and also have a Steam controller, you should checkout his app 'Steam Gyro for CemuHook'. It is awesome!

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14 hours ago, Lahma said:

For anyone interested, I've created an entirely new app (well, plugin really) for launching roms/emulators from LaunchBox through Steam. It is a simple plugin for LaunchBox that only requires you to drop a DLL into the LaunchBox plugins directory and that's it.. everything is done automatically. You simply right click on the game you want to play in LaunchBox and select the menu option "Launch via Steam" and the emulator/rom will launch through Steam, giving you access to the Steam overlay, controller bindings, etc. CammelSpit has been helping me test it out a bit, and it appears that it is ready for public release. I am going make some final comments and cleanup the code a bit, then I will compile a final release and push it out onto GitHub. It should be up later today. Whenever its ready, I will make a new topic for it and post the topic URL here for anyone that is interested. 

That's good to hear.  I wish the plugin system had been around when I started this project, as this is the perfect candidate for that.  I will definitely check out your code when it's up.  I have my old SteamTools plugin that also needs a ton of work, so when I have time again to work on plugins things could get a bit interesting.

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8 hours ago, Nielk1 said:

That's good to hear.  I wish the plugin system had been around when I started this project, as this is the perfect candidate for that.  I will definitely check out your code when it's up.  I have my old SteamTools plugin that also needs a ton of work, so when I have time again to work on plugins things could get a bit interesting.

I didn't really look over your plugin code, but from some forum posts I saw in passing, it sounds like you managed to overcome a lot of the inherent limitations of the plugin API. I need to take some time and look through your code. Hopefully at some point, some more advanced functionality will be built into the plugin API, because there is really so many more useful things that could be accomplished with just a bit more functionality built into the API. 

By the way, sorry I didn't get the plugin pushed out yesterday guys. I've been working feverishly on it... "Wrapping up" code for public release is always a bit more time consuming than you first recon it will be. I will definitely get it pushed out today though (hopefully here shortly).

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