Since a few weeks or maybe a little bit more than that the Epic Games Launcher started to close/minimize on its own any time a project is opened. If anybody thought this could be a useful feature for various reasons I can respect that, however, this makes working with multiple projects really annoying. There are also cases in which we just need to open and close the project many times, and for people like me who makes heavy use of the launcher, this becomes a nightmare.
Could we please get at list a tick box somewhere to opt-out of this new feature?
I’ve not found it consistently, but I think I’ve found the Launcher suddenly maximizing after closing the editor too. I think the Launcher should behave the same as a normal application, and only minimize or maximize whenever the user explicitly tells it too.
I also don’t think the Launcher should ever run in the first place unless explicitly opened by the user. But that would probably be better as checkbox option.
I hate the Launcher - and I’m not even talking about the store, which is worse - it’s a broken mess that is slow, unintuitive and a pain to navigate.
Whenever I open my project, the first thing I do is close the Launcher - by going into my taskbar and rightclick -> exit launcher.
I really hate that I have to do that, and the only time the launcher should open is when I actually need it to open = I open it manually myself.
This “forced” approach is the exact reason why so many people hate Epic these days. This is not user friendly at all.
The tick box is already there, though it could be better named to make itself more obvious:
Go into the Epic Launcher, Settings, and disable [Minimize to System Tray], it’s near the top.
It’s because the launcher itself is made using UE4 and Slate, so it uses a noticeable amount of GPU time when it’s not minimized and can impact editor performance on lower end machines. Epic really should refactor the launcher frontend to use something more suited for GUI applications other than one big D3D/GL context window that is redrawing everything every frame.
I think they feel the pain too. I noticed that they started to rely on html content, as slate was probably too painful for compact and rapidly changing app like the launcher. It is still running under Slate, but I guess that content is using something like embedded browser. I am not sure how but i was able to copy launcher’s current tab link into browser and it opened whole learn tab in chrome Anyway, they should really do something about it and maybe expand the team as there are dozens of features which even basic internet stores or game launchers have. I can’t really understand why such important thing is not getting enough of progress.
I’m aware of the tickbox but that isn’t the solution in my opinion. I want the launcher to actually minimize when clicking on the close button instead of shutting down. I just don’t want the launcher to minimize on its own when opening a project. Honestly, the solution for me would just be to add an option in the editor settings.
That explains why the launcher is so slow when loading libraries and takes so much GPU! But it’s pretty cool though as a proof of concept UE4 can be used for a desktop application.
Anyway, they should really do something about it and maybe expand the team as there are dozens of features which even basic internet stores or game launchers have. I can’t really understand why such important thing is not getting enough of progress.