#AlephOne-Launcher

#A graphical Launcher for AlephOne's Marathon engine for Linux.

The launcher is a program written in Vala. It will download and unzip the marathon game files to your ~/.local/share/AlephOne/ folder and give you buttons for each game. It comes with a .desktop file so you never have to open the command line after you install it.

#Known Issues

These just effect the launcher, not the game as a whole.

• The launcher locks up when downloading files. That's not something I've figured a way around yet.
• The buttons don't update when the download is complete.
• The way I'm handling icon display is bad (icons will frequently be broken) but doesn't effect functionality.

#Installing

#Flatpak Installation

I've pre-built this as a flatpak and host it on my website. Runtimes from Flathub are required. If you have flatpak set up you likely have these installed already.

sudo flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists alephonelauncher https://elagost.com/flatpak/repo_launcher.flatpakrepo
sudo flatpak install com.elagost.alephone-launcher -y

The Flatpak build includes the game engine, so you don't have to install or build it separately.

#Building from source:

Build Dependencies:

• gtk4 or gtk3 dev libraries
• vala compiler (valac)
• make

Runtime dependencies:

• gtk4 or gtk3
• unzip
• wget
• The launcher doesn't include the game engine by default. You'll need to build the alephone engine from source too.

#Building the flatpak from source:

Install flatpak and flatpak-builder from your distro's repositories. You will need the Flathub remote configured.

If flathub is configured at a user (not system) level, instead of flatpak install run flatpak install --user in the commands below. Check this with flatpak remotes.

flatpak install flathub org.gnome.Sdk//43 org.gnome.Platform//43 -y
flatpak-builder --force-clean --repo=./.flatpakrepo .builddir ./flatpak.yml
flatpak build-bundle .flatpakrepo launcher.flatpak com.elagost.alephone-launcher
flatpak install ./launcher.flatpak
flatpak run com.elagost.alephone-launcher

#Questions, comments, etc?

If you have any suggestions please submit a ticket here.

Goals:

• [x] kill the .sh file; move functionality into the launcher itself
• [x] gtk4 port
• [x] flatpak
• [ ] native downloads instead of shelling out to wget
• [ ] better icon display mechanism
• [ ] fix broken button label setting
• [ ] validate downloads
• [ ] improve Makefile