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Comment by khimaros | Hacker News Reader

this is a confusing take to me. could you explain your aversion to launchers?

Most launchers I see aren't necessary for any technical reason. Most don't even bother to enable any functionality at all to the end user's benefit. They're instead used to exert some form of control in a way that's usually palatable enough to not cause a huge PR backlash. As a default stance, being anti-launcher as an end user seems reasonable.

To me launchers are / can be another pattern of dark-ui. Why is a launcher required?

Is the launcher spying on my system, sending information back to HQ?

Can't you tell me the game needs updating when I play the game and then update the game in-game?

Are you going to throw me advertisement banners when you're not making or being greedy?

What if the update fails?

It's one thing I have to wait upon to play the game but launchers come bloated. A carousel of graphics taking a gig of space then requiring an additional 10GB download for the actual game.

It's not clear to me how these are dark. You aren't being tricked, and all of these traits might be in the game client itself as well (game could phone home, auto update, fail to auto update, be slow, etc)

Maybe not this game but it always ends that way.

Example: EA Origins. Atrocious launcher.

No one can seem to answer why does the game need a launcher?

You're afraid of the launcher spying on you, but not the actual game?

I accept that anything windows is spying on me.

But I expect to play the game, when clicking the game icon. Not being thrown in to a launcher waiting for me while I then thrown advertisements for their next game.

Take a look at EA Origin, it's horrific. It updates then the whole launcher implodes with some alien error code like as one of a printer.

chill bro all mmos and such have used launchers since the dawn of time

Yeah? Sure. Quake 3 never needed required a launcher.

Q3 was from times without trivially available persistent internet connections. You had to hunt down the patches and mods yourself manually, hoping not to get malware instead. It was a different time. The updates also were much more spread out - last 3 were from 2001, 2002, 2006.

It's just not comparable to how things work today.

It was also a LAN party game more or less.

in this case, the launcher and the game are both open source. does that change the calculus at all? this launcher clocks in at 22mb.

> Can't you tell me the game needs updating when I play the game and then update the game in-game?

Can you explain this a little? Do you have any examples? Unless you're installing a completely new copy of the game, you're not going to be able to play while you update, making this look an awful lot like a launcher. I'm not aware of any games that are hot-updatable.

Patch files. I recall Quake requiring a binary release to update.

Command & Conquer Red Alert 2 had in game patching when you went online. Both world class games.

> Why is a launcher required?

Because Veloren's update cadence for most servers is substantially more frequent than most package repositories are willing to handle (trust us, we've tried!). You can install the game without the launcher, but don't expect it to be compatible with most servers.

> Is the launcher spying on my system, sending information back to HQ?

Categorically, no. The only information we record is an incrementing counter for each architecture downloaded. You can see this data here: https://grafana.veloren.net/d/boL6rzSGk/airshipper?orgId=1

> Can't you tell me the game needs updating when I play the game and then update the game in-game?

That's exactly what the launcher is doing.

> Are you going to throw me advertisement banners when you're not making or being greedy?

Categorically, no. Veloren is open-source (GPL 3), and developed by a close-knit and dedicated community of volunteers. It's a hobby project and will always be free-as-in-liberty as well as free-as-in-beer.

> What if the update fails?

I'm not sure why it would (bar an iffy connection), but the launcher works in offline mode just fine too.

> but launchers come bloated.

Ours doesn't.

> then requiring an additional 10GB download for the actual game

I think we're up at a few hundred MB right now. Most of that is music. It's worth it :)

> You can install the game without the launcher, but don't expect it to be compatible with most servers.

How so? More specifically, if I compile the same version as the launcher, can I play on most servers?

Yes, just that server and client are very much tied, and we have a release cadence of one new version per week. So, you would need to track the release of each week and compile it, to be able to connect to the official server.

I see, the server is sensible to version mismatchs. Thank you!

Launchers have their place. For example Minecraft needs a launcher: different servers run on different versions (because of heavy customization that doesn't instantly update on a new game release), so being able to select an arbitrary version and launching it is essential. And the snapshot/beta channel works best if you make it easy for people to play the current, stable version, then quickly check out the latest release, then switch back to stable.

Many early-access games do the same via Steam's "beta" feature. If you don't use Steam, you have to replicate the same in a launcher. Or you do it like Adobe and have an entire separate "not a launcher" program to manage which versions are installed.

Verloren currently doesn't seem to actually offer much version management in the launcher, but it seems like a likely future requirement.

> Is the launcher spying on my system, sending information back to HQ?

The game and the launcher is published by the same people. If they wanted to spy on you, there's no reason not to do that in the game as well.

> Can't you tell me the game needs updating when I play the game and then update the game in-game?

While not impossible, this is way more difficult to do safely and reliably in-game. There's a reason most updaters live outside of the main app process.

> What if the update fails?

Then it's a lot easier to recover from this in a separate, dedicated, minimal app, than as part of the game itself.

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