I’ve been getting some requests to do a launcher for Origin and Uplay games the same way I did for Blizzard so I figured I’d I’d make a post about it to let everyone know where I stand and possibly inform them of options they’ve been unaware.
Origin
There has been a lot of people smarter them me creating tools to make Origin users life easier. Stuff like Origin Requirement Remover which made Origin optional on games older then Battlefield 4, or for the Battlefield series the Battlelogium launcher which made using battlelog website much more present and less prone to headakes.
Has I don’t own anything more recent then Battlefield 4 all the games I own are already covered by those two great tools as such I wouldn’t have much to add to them.
Uplay
Unlike Origin, Uplay games still sell on steam, thus they pretty much work out of the box, just add them as a non-steam game and they will launch just fine with steam overlay. However there was one small nagging issue for me which was that Uplay itself did not close after I exited the game. I reckoned it wouldn’t bother anyone else so I just made a tiny launcher that just automatically closed Uplay window on exit for my use only.
Totally overkill and unnecessary (it just saves a single mouse click on game exit), but hey if you’re as annoyed as me you can grab noUplayNag and give it a go yourself.
TL/DR
In short, Uplay games are already fully steam compatible and there’s Origin tools to make it easier to start from steam, as such I won’t be doing anything for those two platforms.
I remember I used your program from github as a Base for my program for every game that requires automatization. It switches sound configuration, turn fans on, kills launcher wheh i quit the game, etc. Every time It crashes due to game/launcher update cause im too lazy to write exception i see your “nouplay…”. Thanks.
I downloaded nouplaynag but I don’t know how to use it, could you help me? Sorry I’m not good at this kind of stuff.
You add it to steam and then put the path of the game exe you’re launching as the argument. however afaik it doesn’t work with newer uplay games and there’s better alternatives out there like OSOL.
Ok great, I’ll try to add the d3d11_b version instead and then just experiment with other and future titles. I really don’t expect any kind of support on a “product” like this, I just felt that maybe I missed something really obvious or something. Thanks again! ^_^
Hm, I think I might’ve screwed up a little. I added noUplayNag.exe to Steam as a non-Steam game, and then I added the full path to the actual Uplay game in question right before the noUplayNag path in the Target box (in Steam shortcut prefs). The minimize to system tray option in Uplay is unchecked. Game launches fine through Steam, but behaves like without noUplayNag when I exit (Uplay doesn’t close). What am I missing? Should I put the noUplayNag executable in a specific location? 🙂
What you did would be it, however the utility is not very smart since I never really expected it to have wide use. It requires the right game exe to be passed, for example Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon it would be “…\Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon\bin\fc3_blooddragon_d3d11_b.exe” instead of the “fc3_blooddragon.exe” in the same folder. It also fails to close uplay if it takes too long to start, which happens if uplay needs to update itself or the game.
I see, the noUplayNag executable is the script. Well, it makes sense, perhaps people in general won’t really care in the first place, but my OCD and I thank you for compiling this and making it so easy to use.
I’m one of the persons who made such requests, and it’s fully understandable why you choose not to develop anything like the bnetlauncher for Origin/Uplay. Especially after all the extra work you had to put into the project after releasing it to the public. However, I’m still really, really curious about the purpose and functionality of the script you mentioned for launching some of your Ubi titles 😛
There was really no much to it as you can see in this gist. It just annoyed me that uplay would always reopen when I closed the game, forcing me to manualy close it, so this script automated that part, and I moved it to an executable to make it easier to add to steam.