I started making a custom game launcher similar to Riot’s for Valorant.
Feature List:
UE4 Editor Plugin that can upload release versions or new patches or DLCs to AWS S3.
UE4 runtime plugin that can update the game launcher or download the game launcher if it is missing.
Custom but customizable and flexible game launcher written in C# with WPF that can update the current UE4 game.
About
I started creating this tool because most of my UE4 apps are not games and are not meant to be published on platforms like Steam or the Epics Game Launcher.
How it will work
The Editor Plugin will be able to upload new versions of the game to a server. It will only upload the changed files (exe, pak, pakchunks, etc.) together with a changelog.
Within the game launcher, the user can use all available versions of the game. The game launcher itself just downloads the files it needs, deletes the old ones, and starts the UE4 app.
Open Source
I plan to make this available on Github for free if there’s enough interest.
Also on the TODO list:
Upload to different types of servers such as FTP
Jenkins scripts to automate the upload process
User login for the Game Launcher with AWS Cognito
The user can start an Aplha, Beta or Release version of the app via the game launcher
If this already exists, please let me know and provide information on where I can find it
Definitely sounds very interesting.
That would make it really easy for people to just update and play with the click of a button instead of having to unpack a rar file to a folder (yeah, that’s pretty easy too as well, but I’ve seen some people having trouble with that xD).
Hope you get enough interest to release it ^^
And thank you for doing it.
Great job!
That was exactly the workflow :D. Uploading the zip to google drive and the customer downloads it. If you have huge projects and just want to fix a small bug this workflow is absolute ■■■■■■■■.
With a custom update tool for your ue4 application your updates can have the size of a few kB instead of gB.
The problem with this system is that if for some reason your ue4 app doesn’t start anymore, you cannot fix it. A game launcher takes care of it. He can check if you have the necessary files to start the app and if not he will download them. And the ue4 app takes care of the game launcher in case it breaks.
