LauncherGen - Create .exe launchers for Non-Steam games

[bmcclure]

I've been (mostly) away from AHK for years, but I'm back with a new gaming tool!

https://github.com/bmcclure/LauncherGen

I've always been frustrated with how Non-Steam games work on Steam. Many of them are not tracked properly, the overlay often does not work, they end up with ugly shortcut arrows on the icons, and they usually need to be edited after adding them to Steam, making it a hassle if you ever need to add them back again later.

I created an open-source tool with AutoHotKey to generate small .exe launcher files for any Non-Steam game that make it simple to add them to Steam, makes sure Steam tracks the game fully, and ensures the overlay works.

LauncherGen itself is an AHK script, which in turn reads a simple JSON config file and builds small AHK scripts (which it also compiles to .exe) for each game.

Each game launcher's job is simply to (a) remain active for the duration of your playtime, and (b) pass control to the game via the appropriate mechanism for the Steam overlay to function if at all possible.

Each one can have a custom name and icon so they look great in Steam, and many launcher types are already supported:

• Battle.net

• Epic Games Launcher

• Origin

• Bethesda Launcher

• Custom launchers and games without launchers

It'll even do the work of extracting the icon you wish to use from the game's (or any other) .exe file if you wish.

I'm looking for feedback and contributions on GitHub are very welcome! I'm planning to introduce a UI with additional functionality at some point, including a configuration GUI for visually creating the Launchers.json file.

Thanks for reading, and I hope it helps some people out!

ps. I'm not actually new to these forums, I was active years back, but either that activity was lost or this forum account is different since it says I joined last year. I've been using it for well over 10 years.

[bmcclure]

I released some quick source updates to GitHub, haven't made a new official release yet. Now it supports a built-in database of game configuration, so your Launchers.json file can simply reference a game in the database without having to provide any configuration (but any config values can be overridden still). And any games not in the database can be specified just like before--the database is only a convenience and is not required.

This will be expanded greatly in the future, ultimately with a separate, online database of games, and I am still working on a full configuration GUI for creating your Launchers.json file and customizing other settings.

[bmcclure]

You no longer need to select an existing shortcut file with the latest dev version, you can not point it directly at a game's .exe file and it'll create the shortcut for you, eliminating one extra step.

At this point typically 1-3 short lines of JSON should be all you need to generate a Steam-compatible launcher.

[bmcclure]

The latest update lets you choose between either prompting you when to close a launcher (the existing behavior) or killing the launcher executable.

I don't particularly like killing the executable--since it doesn't happen gracefully, the launcher might be in the middle of performing a cloud sync after you finish playing a game, for example. I built in a configurable delay for that reason--currently per-launcher type, but I'll make it overridable per game as well.

I would really like to find a way to tell Origin (for example) to exit properly, which I believe would by default wait for any cloud syncing to complete. But I'm not sure what commands I would need to send to the application to do that yet.