danpaul88 Posted June 3, 2015 Report Share Posted June 3, 2015 One of the founding values of W3D Hub was to increase the openness of our development process and get the community more involved with the work we're doing, not just on the games but the tools and infrastructure surrounding them. As such I've decided to create this topic to see how interested our community are in the development of the launcher and see what feedback you might have on features as they're being developed. If there is a positive response to this I will consider doing more of these for the launcher and other non-game related W3D Hub projects. Anyhow, with the blurb out of the way, here are some very early WIP screenshots of a new feature for the launcher, namely the ability to download news from the website. The current plan is for each game to list its own news items individually and also provide a combined "all news" (including community news not shown under any game tab) on the "Home" page of the launcher. One of the first issues I realised we had was that we could only show you news for TSR with the way the launcher worked before - only showing you the games you were allowed to install. That has been changed now so that all games will be listed, allowing you to browse their latest news. Part of this change was adding a new "this game is not available yet" banner to the top of the game page for those games which are not yet released. This is shown in the screenshot below; For games that are released the page looks like this; The design and theming work for this is still very early WIP, some of the things that need adding are; - Date of the news post - Replacing the "i in a box" icon with an image themed to the news post (this will also go onto the w3dhub.com website homepage, which uses the same backend service to download news items) - Improved text formatting - A link to read the complete news article online We're interested to hear what you, the community, would like to see from this feature and hear any suggestions or other feedback you might have. Let us know your thoughts Also, let me know what you think about seeing future WIP updates on our tools and services. Is this something you'd like to see more of? Is there anything in particular you'd like to know more about? 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Einstein Posted June 3, 2015 Report Share Posted June 3, 2015 Moar WIP pls. Everything looks great DP. I'd sure love to see more updates on this type thing! Keep up the good work man! 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DeviousDave Posted June 3, 2015 Report Share Posted June 3, 2015 Looks Awesome with a capital A 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kushan Posted June 8, 2015 Report Share Posted June 8, 2015 What technology(ies) have you used to build the launcher? Is the source available anywhere? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
danpaul88 Posted June 8, 2015 Author Report Share Posted June 8, 2015 The launcher is built on .NET 4.0 using WPF for the user interface. It generally follows an MVVM design pattern, although I'm not religious about sticking to it too rigidly if there is a better way to implement something. At present the launcher source is only available to W3D Hub staff members via our Git repository and is unlikely to ever be open source for various reasons. I am however planning to open source a lot of the supporting library code, especially the code that deals with W3D file manipulation and whatnot. The backend APIs that the launcher interfaces with are written in PHP and use JSON to pass data back and forth. These APIs are closed source. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kushan Posted June 8, 2015 Report Share Posted June 8, 2015 Thanks for the response. It seems like a pretty nice launcher, really. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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