SteamLauncher

[JedExodus]

On 11/7/2019 at 11:09 AM, Lahma said:

Just wanted to let you guys know I got the plugin fixed and 100% working with Steam stable and the Steam beta. I just need to cleanup my code a bit and compile a new release. I will try to get it pushed out later today (tomorrow for me.. it is 5am and I still haven't gone to bed) if possible.

You magnificent son of a gun! Cheers man, as always no rush. Everyone's lucky to have you

[Lahma]

Guys, I swear I haven't forgotten about y'all lol... Life has been crazy these last few weeks... Seeing as getting an official update out is taking a, quite frankly, ridiculous amount of time, please use this temporary release in the meantime. I compiled it the other day for someone specifically, but as far as I'm aware, it is working perfectly. Again, I'm really sorry for taking so long with this... I'm doing my best given the craziness life has thrown at me in recent days. It would be super useful if y'all could give me any feedback with this unofficial release before I actually post the official one. Please let me know if you have any problems.

 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=14MKAQ-nAi4g9LaDnGHCY13i0U-J1Z6sj

Edited November 18, 2019 by Lahma

[JedExodus]

5 hours ago, Lahma said:

Guys, I swear I haven't forgotten about y'all lol... Life has been crazy these last few weeks... Seeing as getting an official update out is taking a, quite frankly, ridiculous amount of time, please use this temporary release in the meantime. I compiled it the other day for someone specifically, but as far as I'm aware, it is working perfectly. Again, I'm really sorry for taking so long with this... I'm doing my best given the craziness life has thrown at me in recent days. It would be super useful if y'all could give me any feedback with this unofficial release before I actually post the official one. Please let me know if you have any problems.

 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=14MKAQ-nAi4g9LaDnGHCY13i0U-J1Z6sj

Thanks kindly man, Will let you know how I get on. Real-life always always comes first, don't feel any pressure on my end (or anyone else's for that matter) to get the release out.

Thanks again, you're a gentleman.

[coleroddy]

On 11/18/2019 at 11:20 AM, Lahma said:

Guys, I swear I haven't forgotten about y'all lol... Life has been crazy these last few weeks... Seeing as getting an official update out is taking a, quite frankly, ridiculous amount of time, please use this temporary release in the meantime. I compiled it the other day for someone specifically, but as far as I'm aware, it is working perfectly. Again, I'm really sorry for taking so long with this... I'm doing my best given the craziness life has thrown at me in recent days. It would be super useful if y'all could give me any feedback with this unofficial release before I actually post the official one. Please let me know if you have any problems.

 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=14MKAQ-nAi4g9LaDnGHCY13i0U-J1Z6sj

Hi. First of all, thanks very much for the plugin. I'm using this beta version you've uploaded and it works great. But I encountered just two issues that I think it's worth mentioning.

The first one is regarding the name of the games that the plugin gets to display as "Now Playing". The issue is: if the name of the game on launchbox/BigBox has a number at the start or at the end of the game's name, it displays with a lot of zeros.

An example: "18 Wheeler: American Pro Trucker" for Dreamcast is displayed as "0000000018 Wheeler: American Pro Trucker (Sega Dreamcast)". Another example: "Bloody Roar 2" for the PSX is displayed as "Bloady Roar 00000000002 (Sony Playstation)".

I did some further testing by renaming the games on launchbox and got the following results:

If I add an underscore ("_") to the start or the end of the name, then the name is displayed correctly. For example: "_18 Wheeler: American Pro Trucker" is displayed as "_18 Wheeler: American Pro Trucker (Sega Dreamcast)".

The same goes for Bloady Roar 2, if I change the name to "Bloady Roar 2_" the name is displayed as "Bloady Roar 2_ (Sony Playstation)".

It doesn't need to be an underscore. It can be any letter or character that isn't a number at the start or at the end of the game's name.

The second issue is that I can't bring Retroarch's menu up by pressing the guide button or even a button combo on the Xbox controller (L3+RB). I'm forced to press F1 on the keyboard to bring the menu up on screen, and after that I can mess with the retroarch menu using the joystick. With the plugin disabled, I can use the controller to bring up the menu using the guide button or a combo normally.

I hope it helps you to fix the issues. And again: thanks very much for the plugin. Is really usefull. I didn't had any crashes or hicups or anything besides the ones that I've mentioned. Really happy with it.

ps.:Most people just download it and never give feedback, but sometimes people are just not confortable with english language or they are just shy of posting on forums. But I can bet the ones that use your software are very happy that it works.

Edited February 20, 2020 by coleroddy

[C-Beats]

Sounds like the Sort Title is being displayed instead of the actual Game Title.

[coleroddy]

10 minutes ago, C-Beats said:

Sounds like the Sort Title is being displayed instead of the actual Game Title.

Thanks for the help! In that case, is there anything I can do to remedy the situation? Or is it bound to the plugin software's code?

[C-Beats]

I would assume the plugin software is doing that. Was mostly leaving it as a note for the developer that they are probably calling the wrong title from the interface.

[coleroddy]

Ah I see. Thanks anyway, C-Beats. It's a small issue. Nothing game breaking though. Let's hope everything is ok with Lahma's life, so he could fix the issues when is possible.

[The_Keeper86]

@coleroddy I've noticed this as well for a few PS3 games.

[coleroddy]

18 minutes ago, The_Keeper86 said:

@coleroddy I've noticed this as well for a few PS3 games.

WoW. Talk about coincidence. I was just testing exactly some ps3 games, and I came back to report just that I found the same issue on them. But the issue is not as I described earlier. It seems the numbers on names doesn't need necessary to be at the start or at the end of the name. They show a lot of zeroes if there are numbers in the middle of the name too. I tried "Persona 4 Arena Ultimax" and it showed the "4" in the name something like "Persona 0000004". Anyway, let's hope Lahma can solve the issue when he get time to do so.

Edited February 20, 2020 by coleroddy

[The_Keeper86]

3 hours ago, coleroddy said:

WoW. Talk about coincidence. I was just testing exactly some ps3 games, and I came back to report just that I found the same issue on them. But the issue is not as I described earlier. It seems the numbers on names doesn't need necessary to be at the start or at the end of the name. They show a lot of zeroes if there are numbers in the middle of the name too. I tried "Persona 4 Arena Ultimax" and it showed the "4" in the name something like "Persona 0000004". Anyway, let's hope Lahma can solve the issue when he get time to do so.

Yeah, its a very strange issue ha ha. I have him on Steam I'll try messaging him.

[imbrock]

Hello!

I've been using Big Box for a couple of months now, and was having a bit of trouble with it until I found this plugin. The Steam Launcher plugin is the cornerstone of my games integration and I absolutely love it!  It lets me rebind controls in nearly every game I want to play across emulators and GOG and Origin games. Honestly it should be base functionality of  big box its so good.

I have been using the beta version posted from drive, it mostly works great but I have encountered a couple of pretty minor bugs that I'm going to give too much information on bugs, sorry;

 

Bug 1 - Occasional glitch

PCSX2 emulator application path changes to Plugins\SteamLauncher\SteamLauncherProxy.exe when the plugin is enabled. Not all the time but randomly, sometimes I am able to use it at a few times before this happens sometimes it happens after the first play. I'm assuming that the plugin changes the target path after the emulator launches so that the proxy can target into steam and probably is supposed to change back after.

 

Bug 2 - Effects limited number of games solvable by switching SteamLauncher off

So this probably isn't actually a bug, I'm pretty sure these games / the stores that they come from and the associated DRM are intentionally designed to not start up when the steam overlay is starting. So whats happening is if the SteamLauncher plugin is activated the games will just fail to load, in tetris effects case it plays two startup videos and then exits.

On the easy solutions side, having SteamLauncher detect windows store and epic store games and disabling itself automatically so they could start would be a work around so that users don't have to go flip the switch to play two or three games.

I'm not sure what the best way of detecting games running through those, maybe from the game shortcut that launchbox is using? I've included two examples from the games I've been having problems with.

com.epicgames.launcher://apps/Kiwi?action=launch&silent=true   - I made a desktop link and pointed launchbox at it.

 

..\Desktop\Sea of Thieves.lnk    - I found this secret windows application folder from a youtube video (Link) and made a shortcut on the desktop and pointed launchbox at it.

 

I'm often playing games with my steam controller which is admittedly pretty niche and basically just breaks without the steam overlay so I would just have to switch over to one of my other controllers.

If you're into more complicated solutions there is an open source app that does something similarish to hook into windows store games, not sure if what its doing is useful in the context of the SteamLauncher.

https://alia5.github.io/GloSC/ Is kind of like a system wide version of the SteamLauncher plugin that was made for using the steam controller everywhere. If I hadn't have found steam launcher I probably would have used this along with big picture mode to run my game and emulator collection.

 

[Lahma]

Hey guys, just wanted to write a quick post to let you guys know I am back online. I've been rebuilding my rig and have been out of commission for a few weeks. I've finally gotten things mostly back up and running and got Steam reinstalled a couple of days ago. @The_Keeper86 messaged me on Steam and notified me that there was some new activity on the plugin support thread (I swear I didn't get email notifications.. although I bet if I check, they will be buried somewhere amongst my much too numerous emails). I haven't even read the new posts since my last post yet as I am in a hurry to run do some service calls but when I get back, I will read the posts and personally respond to all of them. Talk to y'all a bit later this evening. Again, sorry for my extended absence. I promise I have not forgotten about the plugin!

I just wanted to add one thing: I encourage any of you having issues, suggestions, or think you might have any valuable insights for me to add me on Steam and shoot me a message. I'm always available for any of the users of my plugin and I would love talking with all of you. I think all of my Steam info is on the plugin download page but if you need further info to add me, just let me know. Its been a long day, but I'm still going to try to catch up on the thread tonight or possibly first thing in the morning.

Edited March 10, 2020 by Lahma

[Lahma]

Just wanted to update the thread and let everyone know I'm looking into the reported issues. The strange behavior where certain titles are having extra zeroes inserted into their title in Steam is definitely a new issue and it has to be related to something that Steam changed on their end. If I had to take a random guess, I would bet that it is related to Steam FINALLY fixing a unicode encoding bug that has been present in Steam for many, many years (maybe even a decade). I had to implement a workaround in the plugin in order to have certain strings properly encoded/decoded (Steam uses UTF8 internally) and if Steam did actually finally fix the bug, I suspect my workaround is what is now causing this strange behavior.

Being that I have some new additions to the plugin only partially implemented right now, its going to make it a little tricky for me to implement a quick fix for a bug like this as I would have to implement it in an older version of the source code and then when I finish the additions, I would have to port it forward to the current version. Ideally, it would be best to just finish these couple of additions and implement the bug fixes simultaneously and just do one release. Let me figure out if my assumption about the problem is correct and then I will decide what to do about pushing out a fix.

P.S. If there are any other fixes, additions, or suggestions you would like implemented in the next release, now is the time to speak up!

[Lahma]

On 3/7/2020 at 1:14 PM, imbrock said:

Hello!

I've been using Big Box for a couple of months now, and was having a bit of trouble with it until I found this plugin. The Steam Launcher plugin is the cornerstone of my games integration and I absolutely love it!  It lets me rebind controls in nearly every game I want to play across emulators and GOG and Origin games. Honestly it should be base functionality of  big box its so good.

 

Hey @imbrock , I'm glad my plugin has proven to be so useful to you! We definitely don't have a large user base but the reason I made the plugin, and why I maintain it, is for the users who do find it so essential to their gaming "workflow" (including myself). I apologize for not having maintained it as well as I would like to these past months but hopefully with all the craziness going on right now in the world, I think I'm going to have a good chunk of time to commit to pushing out a new update.

On 3/7/2020 at 1:14 PM, imbrock said:

Bug 1 - Occasional glitch

PCSX2 emulator application path changes to Plugins\SteamLauncher\SteamLauncherProxy.exe when the plugin is enabled. Not all the time but randomly, sometimes I am able to use it at a few times before this happens sometimes it happens after the first play. I'm assuming that the plugin changes the target path after the emulator launches so that the proxy can target into steam and probably is supposed to change back after.

Your assumption about how the proxy works is mostly correct. The process by which the plugin accomplishes this is a bit complicated, containing many exceptions, edge cases, and workarounds, but I really thought I had eliminated the possibility of this happening... The plugin swaps the application path for only a matter of milliseconds and it stores the original application path in a file in case the plugin, Steam, and/or LaunchBox crashes within that millisecond window... If that happens, the plugin is supposed to restore the original path upon next startup immediately. Obviously there is something wonky going on there and this certainly isn't the 1st time that PCSX2 has caused problems not seen in any other emulator/game. I've added this to my list of bugs to resolve and as long as I can replicate the problem, I will have it fixed in the next update. Could you possibly give me a bit more info concerning the problem? Does it seem to occur occasionally regardless of the rom or does it seem to only happen with specific roms? Also, it might be helpful to get a debug log from you that records the bug occurring. I will try it out myself 1st though and if I'm having problems replicating the behavior, I'll ask you for a debug log then.

On 3/7/2020 at 1:14 PM, imbrock said:

Bug 2 - Effects limited number of games solvable by switching SteamLauncher off

So this probably isn't actually a bug, I'm pretty sure these games / the stores that they come from and the associated DRM are intentionally designed to not start up when the steam overlay is starting. So whats happening is if the SteamLauncher plugin is activated the games will just fail to load, in tetris effects case it plays two startup videos and then exits.

On the easy solutions side, having SteamLauncher detect windows store and epic store games and disabling itself automatically so they could start would be a work around so that users don't have to go flip the switch to play two or three games.

I'm not sure what the best way of detecting games running through those, maybe from the game shortcut that launchbox is using? I've included two examples from the games I've been having problems with.

Windows Store (UWP) games cause problems with everything.. and for a good reason.. The UWP architecture is complicated and bizarre in the way that it operates and it seems to be that way for no good reason at all. I use GlosC with a couple of Windows Store games but even that solution has some problems, so I generally just don't use the Steam overlay with Windows Store games. There are a number of ways we could accomplish what you desire (preventing the plugin from activating on specific titles only without having to turn it off globally). I could add an option for disabling the plugin with Windows Store games as it should be easy to determine which games are UWP titles as they don't point to an EXE but instead point to a Windows Store package name (such as "Microsoft.Patagonia_8wekyb3d8bbwe!App"). Additionally (or in place of), I could also implement a feature for adding specific game exceptions in the settings file which would always be ignored by the plugin (causing them to be run normally without the plugin intervening). The next release should have a GUI window for managing all of the plugin settings that you would normally have to manage by altering the settings file in a text editor. That would make it pretty easy to add exceptions if we went that route. If you have a preference on how you would prefer this be implemented, let me know (both options should be pretty easy so we might just do both).

Ramblings by me about how insane the UWP/Windows Store app architecture is (I moved it down here since nobody probably wants to hear me ramble on anyways):
Did you know that Windows Store games actually run/operate from a hidden virtual disk volume? Sure, you can see the game files in the WindowsApps folder (if you take ownership of it), but Microsoft actually mounts that data in a hidden volume prior to running the app. This has a lot of weird implications that can cause all sorts of problems. For example, if you run Windows Firewall in the mode where it blocks all outgoing traffic by default, allowing outgoing traffic only from apps you've specifically designated a rule for, you cannot create an allow rule for a Windows Store game by simply selecting its exe from the game directory inside of the WindowsApps folder... It simply won't work. Even stranger, Microsoft has implemented a feature in Windows Firewall for selecting UWP apps in a different way (by providing their package name) yet using this feature to add an allow rule for a Windows Store game will not work when your firewall is set to block all outgoing traffic by default. The ONLY way to create a working allow rule is to use a 3rd party disk management utility to mount the hidden virtual volume (called XVD) that is created by Windows to a drive letter and then create a rule using the game executable located within that volume.

[Lahma]

On 2/20/2020 at 3:14 PM, coleroddy said:

WoW. Talk about coincidence. I was just testing exactly some ps3 games, and I came back to report just that I found the same issue on them. But the issue is not as I described earlier. It seems the numbers on names doesn't need necessary to be at the start or at the end of the name. They show a lot of zeroes if there are numbers in the middle of the name too. I tried "Persona 4 Arena Ultimax" and it showed the "4" in the name something like "Persona 0000004". Anyway, let's hope Lahma can solve the issue when he get time to do so.

I've also noticed this behavior and I will be fixing it in the next update. For more details see my previous post:

 

[coleroddy]

9 hours ago, Lahma said:

I've also noticed this behavior and I will be fixing it in the next update. For more details see my previous post:

 

Thanks so much for looking into the issue.

[Lahma]

So it turns out that the issue with strange extraneous numbers being displayed in a game's title has nothing to do with any changes made by Valve. Instead, the culprit this time is LaunchBox. For a game's title, I was using the property named "SortTitleOrTitle" instead of the more obvious, "Title". For many games (at least previously), there was no difference between the 2. The only instance where they would be different is when a title started with "The", "A", or some other word that you would want to filter out as far as sorting goes. For example, the game "The Lost Vikings 2" would have the following properties:

SortTitleOrTitle: "Lost Vikings 2"
Title: "The Lost Vikings 2"

I can't remember now exactly why I switched over to using 'SortTitleOrTitle' instead of 'Title', but I do remember specifically changing which property I was using in a previous update. Again, I just can't remember why I did it now as using 'Title' certainly seems to be the more obvious choice. Anyways, moving on... For some reason, the LaunchBox devs have changed the way that 'SortTitleOrTitle' is formatted. They are now formatting any numbers inside of the title as some type of float value but padding out the values on the left hand side with zeros. It now looks like this:

Old 'SortTitleOrTitle': "Lost Vikings 2"
New 'SortTitleOrTitle': "Lost Vikings 0000000002.0000000000"

I'm not sure why they are doing this, but I'm sure they have a good reason for doing so. I doubt they ever intended for the sort title to be used for display anyways. Long story short, I'm going to change the plugin to go back to using 'Title' instead which should fix this problem.

Users should be aware though that this can result in any controller profiles previously customized/assigned to a specific title not to show up automatically when the game is launched using the new version of the plugin. Steam decides what controller profile is assigned to which game based on the title of the game so if you previously had setup a controller profile for "Lost Vikings 0000000002.0000000000" (or even "Lost Vikings 2"), whenever you go to launch the same game with the updated plugin the title will now be changed to "The Lost Vikings 2" and any controller assigned to the previous title will not be automatically loaded. I would suggest therefore specifically saving any controller profiles that you think might be affected by this change so that you can manually load them whenever you launch the game with the new plugin version.

I'm looking into some other reported issues as well as making some additional quality of life changes to the plugin before I release the update, but it should not be much longer (famous last words, right?).

[The_Keeper86]

@Lahma Awesome news thanks!!

[C-Beats]

3 hours ago, Lahma said:

For some reason, the LaunchBox devs have changed the way that 'SortTitleOrTitle' is formatted

This was done intentionally to allow the numeric sorting to work. We take the SortTitle that game has been given via the user and then format it to make the sort appear correctly.