PA Alternative Launcher v0.4

I still have another PC to test on, but I just tried it on my AMD one, and it worked fine, even without unzipping it, except that the first time a launched it, it gave me the (1) (-3) thing, until I restarted it. It seems to only be the first time that you run it that the issue occurs. I have no idea why. Aside from that, awesome job snooping and fixing it, even if it's a strange issue to begin with.

@DeathByDenim I've just (finally) downloaded and installed PA. It seems to work great, except that weird Decompression thing on first launch. I'd even be willing to say that you could advertise it as a functional alternative for Uber's Launcher for those having issues.

Yeah. I'd like to fix that though. I just finished the Mac version. That one also sometimes gets it. And I even had it once with the Linux version. I don't quite understand it. I might have an idea on how to recover from it that I'd like to try, but it requires some work (resumable downloads basically).

"package is of bad quality" warning that you have to ignore on the ubuntu software center.

other than that, top notch work man!

It doesn't use actual folder? where is it installing to?

and what is optirun and primusrun. I do have nvidia.

Oh, oops. I guess putting in a default install location would be nice. I guess if you don't fill in anything, it will install to the current working directory, wherever that may be. So, short answer, I don't know.

optirun and primusrun are for hybrid graphics, so mainly laptops with an Intel i[3|5|7] and a dedicated NVidia card (even AMD, I think?). It allows you to get the acceleration of the dedicated card for PA.

Thanks for the "bad quality" info by the way. I wasn't aware it did that. Apparently I am building the deb package wrong and it's more complicated than I thought.

oh it installed it to home.


ok so i don't need to tick those options since it will only be using my graphics card anyways.

and no problem.

ok so i don't need to tick those options since it will only be using my graphics card anyways.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, but if you install the PTE stream, it will install over the stable if you keep both install locations empty. You can find it with:

Code:

find ~ -name PA

That will search your home dir for the PA executable and folder.

And yeah, just keep it at "Don't use Optimus".

@DeathByDenim for me your palauncher refuses to run PA.

Yeah, that makes sense. It tries to run <Install path>/PA, so no install path means it's trying to run "/PA", i.e. it's looking in the root of the file system. It should do "./PA". Your best bet is to find out wherever it install PA with the find command I gave earlier and enter the path in the launcher. Then click download and install again. It will the just verify your installation and not actually download anything, but it will also know about the full path then.

one last thing. I guess it's just terminal working it's magic there but why is your patcher so much slower than the terminal based one?

Is it? It's supposed to be multi-threaded, unzip while downloading multiple bundles at the same time and generally does everything all at once. In theory anyway. Guess not.
Eh, I'll have a look.

@DeathByDenim I redownloaded PA in the right folder (E.G. /home/t/.local/Uber Entertainment/Planetary Annihilation/stable) and now this new download doesn't have the icon.

EDIT: after more usage I discovered that this download (and checked) is virtually unusable.

one out of two times it opens a transparent window with nothing inside. even though you get the sounds for mouseover on buttons. when it runs a bit better it gets stuck at "login accepted" everytime.

That's odd... I've been using this thing for exclusively for a month now and had zero problems. Could you run the launcher from the command-line with "-v", do a "download and install" and post "/tmp/PAAlternativeLauncher.log"?

First off: Great work; seems to work as advertised.

I have a question/recommendation, though. I am running on Kubuntu 15 with the open source Radeon drivers. Steam (and thus PA, since it bundles the runtime) comes with an old version of libstdc++which is incompatible with the libraries coming with the OS. Deleting the bundled libraries makes everything work nicely again.
Updating via the launcher pulls those in again, of course, leading to me having to delete them manually.

Would you consider checking for users running Ubuntu 14+ with open source Radeon drivers and prompt them for removing those interfering libraries? That would be most convenient.
I also need to always run PA with --software-ui, mayhaps that could be made a default for this setup.

I could certainly making not installing the steam-runtime an option, yeah. That shouldn't be too hard. I feel it should be a manually option to set though as it could lead to crashes in PA. That's the reason they started including the steam-runtime on Linux anyway.

But the --software-ui is only a one-time thing you only need to set using the Advanced button, right? Once set, you never should have to worry about it again.

Sure enough, I was just wondering whether that is a general thing with my setup that others are experiencing, too. Always nice for such things to be taken care of without having to crawl the forums for information first.

Just a thought, though; keep it up! =)