Locking for someone willing to write documentation for an improved Launcher.

[han]

Starting out as a pure need many year ago at the advent of hardware with dynamic speedstepping which caused DeusEx to run in slow motion, i started writing Launchers (based on the Launch found in unreal224pubsrc) so i could at least play my favorite Unreal Engine games again (and develop!). However that was nothing fancy and just some hacky shit at that time, but turns out that at least that version was used by some people in the nerf community. However a few months back i started a clean rewrite and adding features and getting it done right, unlike some other collection of bad hacks (which some other launchers are). I'm rather conversative add adding features and like to keep it the way the Unreal Engine was designed (e.g. fix things in the right places and not use tons of hacks inside the launcher). But as this is growing to be sth. quite useful, i want to release it (including source) at some time. However even if i just release the binaries, i want at least to have some good documentation about how to use the features of it, but i plain don't have the time working on documentation and I would rather like to put this time into the Launcher or the Revision Framework, so I'm asking for help on the documentation part. At least some basic technical understanding or the ability to look up descriptions about some stuff on MSDN to sum up some stuff, so people don't blow their legs up would be appriciated. Also i started hacking an UCC together for RF, first just to have the compile time displayed, and to simply use another ini file as default. But i decided that this will be merged into the Launcher project, as both project should share some code, like changed FConfigCacheIni.h, etc. One thing i would love to add to the UCC is to have some .ini so set ini file out of which Editpackages is loaded, etc.

However to sum up the concept is pretty much:
- If name is .exe (in this case DeusEx.exe) it should behave (despite fixes) like the old Game.exe.
- If the name is not .exe (e.g. Launch.exe) the launcher will use Launch.ini (this is buildin UE stuff), but LaunchUser.ini and if there is an LaunchDefault.ini file it will prefer this over Default.ini. Same for DefUser.ini, Help\LaunchLogo.bmp (i guess thats vanilla UE Engine behaviour too), but in case of DeusEx it will also prefer Help\LaunchLogoSmall.bmp, but in any case if thats not found it falls back. And thats really nice if you start with a mod, as you don't have all this -INI= shit and it uses the right Default.ini files. It also uses LaunchStory.txt if someone really wants have it, and other stuff...

Some planed features are: 24 Bit Logo.bmp support, selection dialogue for resolution after changing the render devive, selection dialogue for audio subsystem, etc.

This is nothing like a totally new thing, but rather an old thing somewhat enhanced.

Oh.. and you don't need recompile at all, this all works by just renaming the file..

So please, help me with writing the documentation, so people can start using it and start going to editing work and not just waste time with things which can be just done automatic based on a file name.

Thats my project page, the intro is like a few years old, and probably most of the text should be rewritten too (source is outdated on that page and has nothing todo with this rewrite anymore, but maybe helpful to see how different games do things a bit different):
http://coding.hanfling.de/launch/

/edit:
This is not fixed to DeusEx in any way, i simply use DeusEx as the base for my development as it has headers for packages which other games don't have and I still want to play that game in a fully working coop. (:

/edit2:
I would also like to have some sets of "good" updated Default.ini/DefUser.ini files around for at least DeusEx and Nerf (or other games) which are based on the old shipping/patch set of those, but with useful settings applied, e.g. increase default res to 800x600, use 32 bit, good looking/sounding options for the various renderdevs/audiosubs, update masterservers, etc.). So i can include them when distributing it.

/edit: I would also not mind if someone would make up some Help/Logo*.bmp files