Back From Open Sauce 2024!

In case you missed it, LANCommander was at Open Sauce 2024 in San Franciso! Software is notoriously difficult to demo at shows like these, so I decided to hold a 6 machine LAN party. This was basically the perfect use case for the platform as the setup was closed loop and completely offline. If you're reading this post because you saw us at Open Sauce, welcome!

We were able to run through a few games at the event, but it was largely relegated to first person shooters. I think in total we ran through:
- Quake 3
- Unreal Tournament
- Unreal Tournament 2004
- Battlefield 1942
- StarCraft
- Counter-Strike: Source

Other than some hiccups with drivers on the laptops we had, the whole setup ran like butter. The demographic of attendees pretty much covered the full spectrum. Some people sat down just to escape for a few minutes to click some heads (including a 6 year old who emphatically ran up and asked "Is this Quake?? Can I play?!"), others just wanted to hear about the project. It was actually pretty refreshing and inspiring to be in an area saturated with engineers who were actually interested in the project, how it was built, and what we're aiming to solve.

Our booth was in the main exhibit hall in the row with all the other gamers and we had some great neighbors (shout out to DangerDook and his luggable PC that ran LANCommander all weekend! Both of us were ping ponging (long ponging?) attendees between our booths all weekend). The weekend was fairly busy, so unfortunately I didn't get to see as many exhibits/creators/panels as I wanted, but maybe that means we'll just have to go back next year!

We were even able to have a little BitBuilt meetup with YveltalGriffin, loopj, and Shank making an appearance. I just saw these guys back in April for Midwest Gaming Classic here in Milwaukee, but it's always great to see con friends.

Oh yeah, and those mousepads? Those were screen printed by hand the Sunday before Open Sauce. It took over 8 hours, but we filled a suitcase with 200 mousepads and we were actually able to give them all out over the course of the weekend. You can check out this Instagram reel to see the printing machine (known to most as Sierra) here:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C8A7RS9uMlM/

Official LANCommander Launcher

As mentioned in the last post, a new launcher for LANCommander is in the works and was debuted at Open Sauce. The preview builds for this launcher are now available and we are closing in on a full release soon, hopefully over the next couple of weeks.

When designing the launcher, I wanted to create something that was minimalist, easy to use, and familiar. Almost all of the core functionality is implemented, and now I'm working mostly on gold plating and optimization. I'm pretty happy how well it's turned out given that development only started about 5 weeks ago. There's not much to say here really, but I will absolutely be doing a large post once the full release hits.

Keep in mind, the launcher is currently still in preview until v0.9.0 and some features may not work correctly. Preview builds are available at the GitHub Releases page, including builds for macOS and Linux. Don't get your hopes up, these will be largely unusable until a new PowerShell runtime is put into place... most likely by 1.0.0.

Recent Features/Fixes

As promised, v0.8.0 dropped recently and I wanted to highlight a few fixes and features that have made its way into the latest version.

ZIP64 Support

For those that don't know, LANCommander is, under the hood, a fairly simple system. At the core of this is being able to distribute game files by relying on the ZIP file format. It's not the best format, and there are certainly better options out there, but ZIP is ubiquitous. Almost everyone knows what it is and it's actually a pretty simple format when you get down to it.

That being said, as ZIP was created in the late 80's, it wasn't really built with future proofing in mind. At the time, the idea of a single file in an archive being larger than 4GB seemed like sci-fi. As anyone who has played a modern video game and has tried to get it working with LANCommander, this is now part of daily life. When installing games pre-v0.8.1, LC would skip every file after it had extracted a file that was larger than 4GB.

This bug was actually in a dependency called SharpCompress, a wonderful .NET library that allows you to compress/decompress a wide variety of archive formats. There was some incorrect handling of ZIP64 headers when accessing an archive in a stream, which I was able to step through and create a patch for. I'm slowly getting better at working with file formats, and it's really paying off.

Additional Media Support

v0.8.x also adds support for two new media types on games, logos and manuals! These new types were introduced to better support the new client. Manuals can be read directly in-app, and logos overlay the hero background for the game.

Steam Scraping Support

In previous versions, media was only searchable via SteamGridDB. Support has now been added to also scrape some of these assets from Steam's store pages. This should yield some more accurate art for some of the more obscure games out there that may have a Steam release.

Final Thoughts

That's about it for now! No updates on what I'm playing at the moment... mostly because between real life and preparing for Open Sauce there hasn't been much time for gaming. Development is moving forward at a great pace and I'm in the part of the year where I can slow down and enjoy the process a bit more.

I've started doing some dev streams over at my YouTube channel. Since this is a side project I can't promise any schedule. If you happen to catch a live one, feel free to hang out, ask questions, or share what you've been playing lately. I'm probably going to stream some game prep as well, in case you wanted to see my process.

Stay tuned! More features are on the way!