Himalia Enemy Territory Launcher

Information for Enemy Territory players.
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gaoesa
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Himalia Enemy Territory Launcher

Post by gaoesa »

I made a small program that combines some usual third party utilities in one program. My motivation was that I already had minimizer and I was looking for raw input as I saw some texts about it. But I didn't want to start installing and running several programs for just playing a game. Also, I wanted to reinvent the wheel on some parts as an excercise. Therefore, I made this program which combines raw input, game window minimizer and saveable configurations. Also, this program includes an easy way to set some settings that are typically set in the command line. Such as memory settings, overbrightness, execing a config file and by request, screen resolution settings. You can also give any other commandline parameters you wish. All of the settings can be saved in separate configurations, so you can get one set of settings for one server and another set of settings for another server, by just one mouse click.

The program is tested to be working on Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1.

Here are screenshots of the program and its different views:
mainview.png
mainview.png (69.8 KiB) Viewed 35803 times
mainview_menu.png
mainview_menu.png (48.03 KiB) Viewed 35803 times
etoptions.png
etoptions.png (25.42 KiB) Viewed 35803 times
Since raw input can be little less familiar to many players, here is an explanation why it is used.

Negative Acceleration

When playing an oldgame like Enemy Territory in Windows with high sensitivity mouse, it often happens that with fast moves the screen view does not move the correct length. That is called negative acceleration. It can make aiming harder as everytime you move your mouse fast, the crosshair stops at different place. This is caused by few factors, the dpi setting of the mouse, the screen resolution, the way the game engine is reading the mouse and your FPS. Old game engines calculate the movement on the screen by asking Windows the mouse cursor position and then returning it to the center. If your mouse moves so fast that it will hit the side of the screen, then the full movement is not taken into account. The cursor position is polled once on every draw frame. So, the lower is your FPS, the bigger is the impact.

Raw Input

Raw Input is not based on polling the mouse cursor, but in windows messages that are delivered when the mouse moves. This will completely remove the limitations of the resolution and the effects of the mouse cursor hitting the screen side.

Raw Input in Himalia Enemy Territory Launcher

The raw input in the launcher, works by setting up this raw input device and overriding the windows functions that the game is using to poll the mouse cursor. It keeps track of the mouse movement and when the game polls the cursor position, it gives the game full offset. This method also completely removes any other acceleration types that are often enabled in Windows. A drawback is that it will not be possible to use for example x-fire in-game overlay as the additional window it creates, makes the mouse completely stuck in-game.

Note: Raw input in Himalia Enemy Territory Launcher does not require Administrator privileges, unless you run the ET.exe as an administrator. You can install ET to a non restricted folder (outside of Program Files) and use the raw input without setting anything to run as an administrator.


For security aware users, here is the MD5 sum of the installer file inside the zip (just in case you would be downloading it from another source):

8b9860e0f1c06629a422249289be2436

Bug reports and feedback

Please post all feedback, negative and positive, tested systems, bugs and feature requests in this thread. Thank you.

Tested Systems
  1. Windows 7
  2. Windows 8
  3. Windows 8.1
Attachments
HimaliaSetup.zip
(947.22 KiB) Downloaded 2362 times
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Gaunt
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Re: Himalia Enemy Territory Launcher

Post by Gaunt »

Very nice, I tried it just now without any problem. I was thinking maybe can be useful to add something like et affinity for multicores handling.
Thanx for sharing, and great work with silence mod!!
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free.
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Joined: 27 Aug 2012, 14:35

Re: Himalia Enemy Territory Launcher

Post by free. »

wow! some really cool stuff!
thaank you very much!
gaoesa
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Re: Himalia Enemy Territory Launcher

Post by gaoesa »

Note for users,

If you place the auto-execed config file into a mod folder, you must use +set fs_game <mod> as an additional parameter. Otherwise it will just execute from the etmain directory.

The execution order is so that the additional command line parameters are added to the command line last, but before the auto-execed config file and connect command for the IP/address if set.
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*26*
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Re: Himalia Enemy Territory Launcher

Post by *26* »

xfire is best for that kind of game:)
gaoesa
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Re: Himalia Enemy Territory Launcher

Post by gaoesa »

X-Fire is a chat program. It does not do raw input. Which was the point of this program.
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gaoesa
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Re: Himalia Enemy Territory Launcher

Post by gaoesa »

Today, suddenly my Norton decided to remove the etlauncher.dll from my computer. Because it may have happened to others, I'll be making this post. Here are the new VirusTotal results of this file:
https://www.virustotal.com/fi/file/e6eb ... 379785217/

I made one before uploading also.

It does inject dll into the ET process after it has launched the ET. But this is not in itself enough to flag it as a virus and not uncommon enough for just in case behaviour. New virus scan after restarting the computer didn't remove it anymore, so it may have been a hickup from Norton after the computer had been on for a long time. Or some virus infecting it, but that is less likely.

Just for the information in case this has happened to others.
He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.
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Redl1ne
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Re: Himalia Enemy Territory Launcher

Post by Redl1ne »

Very Nice. [smilie=drinks.gif]


I got to work and it is very easy to use.

Ty Gaoesa [smilie=friends.gif]
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Naku
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Re: Himalia Enemy Territory Launcher

Post by Naku »

Great stuff.Now i can put my resolution where i want.It allways reset all my system settings,dunno why,even if i write them in console [smilie=pleasantry.gif]
gaoesa
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Re: Himalia Enemy Territory Launcher

Post by gaoesa »

On few occations, Windows has whined me that the program didn't run correctly after closing the launcher and it would need to be run as an administrator. This is false. I repeat on a separate post in this thread that neither the launcher nor the raw input require to be run as an administrator. Please don't run ET with administrator privileges, but instead place the full game outside of the "Program Files (x86)" directory where Administrator privileges are not required.

The program will popup a message box that tells, if it couldn't succeed on something because of privileges. At that time, please do what I suggested above and just copy the full "Wolfenstein..." directory to a non restricted location, and remove the run as administrator selection from the ET.exe. You may need to use the "Browse" button to find the ET.exe file after this.
He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.
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