Hi so I’m wondering how I should start approaching when I want to create a game launcher for our game, it would need to be able to download the game and patches and maybe show patch notes and something like a twitter feed or something similar
Hi,
Standalone application to download, update game componets or could be via steam or some other software
You’d have to make something like that from scratch, unless someone shared theirs. It could be done using the unreal framework, with the gui made using slate (this seems like a fairly ugly idea, and it probably is, but that’s also how they made their own launcher), or you could try writing it in C# or pretty much anything else… endless options.
You could also try to use the electron framework, especially since you want to embed a twitter feed and news from your website.
We wrote our (still a work in progress) game launcher in C#. There are some tutorials on Youtube about the basics. Our launcher downloads and copies the files for an entire new version. Incremental patching is more difficult and spans from overwriting individual changed files to doing diff’ed binary patches.
There is an open source patcher here on the forums that does the later. I have been told, however, that it is not friendly to all versions of Windows and uses some uncommon dependencies.