CS.RIN.RU - Steam Underground Community

imo UGL is better at the moment; with support for server browsing and customisable to the hilt! SBR is a great little proggy too, so ultimately, it just comes down to taste (and i think both authors (several if u include the handful which have improved upon Mitsus code) have done wonderful jobs with the launchers.

Cheers

Camm

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< Striding Purposefully Backwards >

Ralou, sometimes when I start UGL, I can't launch ANY installed steam games. I doubleclick on game's icon but nothing happens. If I doubleclick on some not installed game, it extracts needed data but doesn't start the game too. If I doubleclick on any custom added game, it starts normally. Could you please check that? The error disapeared when I selected steamapps dir in options (one more time) and restarted UGL. It was the same dir though....

And a suggestion about custom icons: why don't you add custom icon editbox to "Add new content"? Now user has to add the game, and then edit it to select custom icon...

Here is a new version of UGL !
Changes :
- New interface based on tabs, with a customisable gradient.
- Games are now automatically sorted according to their type (HL1 game, Source game, mods ...)


Please give your impressions about the new GUI.

This version is highly experimental ! ... yes it's possible to do worse than the previous versions
Please give a lot of details in your bug reports.

@ gedis : I really don't know what can cause that bug ...

edit : fixed a bug related to list resizing

Now that is nice! But please add "All" tab
And maybe an option to select tab position (left, right, top, bottom) if it's posible?

First bug. After some window resizing and tabs switchig:



About that error (not launching games), could it occur because I have little free space on the hard drive where I extract games?

Thanks. I've planned to add an "All" Tab as well as a tab for the tools (SDK & co)
And no it's not possible to chose where to put the tabs ... i've spent a few hours to make the tabs draw nicely on the left so i guess i'd spend a few days to make them draw to a selectable place ...

edit : Fixed bug discovered by gedis related to list resizing. Added the possibility to chose a custom icon when adding a game.

@ gedis, yes, launch failure can be related to very low disk space ( a few mb )
btw, nice "skin" !

Ralou and Cynric,
Thank you for your contributions and sharing of your updates to UGL. I really like where you are taking it, and you have my blessing to go on and on and keep the open source dream alive

I am far too busy to continue this, and would like to suggest that you (Ralou) start a new thread with your version to enable you to keep the updates neat and tidy and downloadable from the first page.

I will of course help with any questions or even provide specific coding requests if you need any help, but it looks like you've got it covered

You may have guessed that VB is not the language I use day to day, but it was always my intention to open up a project like this to as many people as possible, and this in my opinion made VB the first choice for developing UGL.

Please never forget hCUPa's part in all of this, and I wish you all the best for the future. If you do start a thread of your own, then PM me and I will redirect the downloads to you and make the necessary informative changes in this thread. And, please PM me if you need anything else.

Thanks again

It's too bad you have to stop working on UGL. I hope you'll be able to contribute from time to time.
I'll start a new thread when the new GUI is finished.


Well, VB.NET is not my favourite language too ... it's even the first time I develop for the .NET framework. But it's true that this language is simple and thus perfect for a community project like UGL.


Yes, hCUPa's emu is really great and we wouldn't have got there without him.

I still have a few ideas for UGL but I won't be able to maintain it for a long time (1/2 weeks). However I'll try to do my best to improve it

Thanks a lot for starting that project and leading it to the point where it is !

server querying is soooooooooo slow, but everything else is good. I think the querying is slow because you have to ping the servers.

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A wise man once said: If you like the game, go buy it!
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@mitsukarina: first of all, thank you for all your time and efforts you spent setting up ugl! it's wonderful to see what some people are able and willing to do to treat thier kids (and to share this efforts with the community).
although i only contributed very little, i enjoyed improving this great program and watching it become better and better. if i have any useful ideas in the future i will try to continue to do so

@battledead: nope, the servers are not pinged when the list refreshes; the shown ping is just the time, the servers took to reply with the information about map, players, etc. the exact ping of a server is only queried when you hit the refresh server button (right one).
the problem why it takes so long is that VB (as far as i know, please correct me, if i'm wrong) is a straight-forward language, where it is not possible to run a specific subroutine multiple times parallel...

*EDIT*
Ralou has just released UGL Beta2 with a lot of code modifications and bug fixes, you can download it from the first page.



Thanks Cynric, and I'm glad there are people out there willing to spend their own time and effort to improve the program, a community project is always good for a community

On the slow server question, you can lower the default timeout to speed up the queries, but I do believe you could also multicast the query with VB - as i'm not into online gaming, I couldn't be too bothered to look into it too much, maybe someone else will give it a go

You may also have noticed the steamprotocol file that a newer version of UGL uses to define the protocol dynamically, this is not required for the beta1 version I released as the steam protocol was hard coded. The newer version can also query UT2k/BF2 servers etc just by providing the correct protocol definition file, but I think most people around here are only interested in steam on the whole. The new version also gets game names and definitions directly from the clientregistry.blob file, so the steamemu.ini file is only used for additional GCFs, but this needed cleaning up a bit, and I'm not sure anybody would be too bothered as the ini works fine at the moment and I just haven't got time to finish it.

Thanks again, to all of you who are trying to help improve UGL

"StartIndex cannot be less than zero.
Parameter name: startIndex" this occurs when going to Options window.
"Conversion from string "" to type 'Integer' is not valid." - this error occurs when I save options....
In options window "Language" static bar "steps on" language combobox...
I'll continue using b1r2.3.

I must say, I did a quick test (not extensive) and it seemed to work. I have just removed my UGL folder, copied in the files from the archive and setup the options again, and that still works for me.

It might be worth clearing out your UGL folder first then copying in the files from this archive?

Do you have some outdated files in your UGL folder ?
There have been some changes in the ini format ...

Yeah, thanks! It occurs when UGL.ini is deleted, I tried to import settings from earlier version. Will you fix that or leave it how it is?
And I don't really like the fact, that I need to restart UGL when I edit steamapps folder the first time, it doesn't show any games until I restart.

Mitsukarina in HL1Mods if icon is not "game.ico" then it is "<GameDir of mod name>.ico"

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