Autostart Dark Souls

[Chronial]

Should we add a flag to autostart Dark Souls with DSCM? That would probably make life easier for most users.

[Wulf2k]

Maybe a button. I'm not sure on autostart. Not opposed, just not sure.

Is it easy to do?

Keep in mind, it's not as simple as launching the EXE. Steam launches it in some unique way, or else it just immediately exits.

[Chronial]

A button would defeat the purpose: To save on clicks. Yes, it's quite easy. The trick is hidden in the shortcuts that steam creates in your startmenu. Opening steam://rungameid/211420 will run the game via steam.

[Wulf2k]

Keep in mind the possibility of machines that could have Steam sandboxed, or just have the steam:// association broken. As long as it handles failure properly then I'm ok with it being automatic.

[gpotter2]

It is pretty easy actually to start dark souls without the "steam://" association:
you just got to start steam.exe with the "-applaunch 211420" param.
I added the function here: #84

It might also be a good idea to add an option to disable it... But as adding checkboxes again and again would not have been relevent, i haven't done that...

[Chronial]

How is it a better idea to rely on undocumented registry values instead of using the documented way?

[gpotter2]

Huh, that's what wulf2k just said (or at least what i've understood 😄 )

Keep in mind the possibility of machines that could have Steam sandboxed, or just have the steam:// association broken.

Cause if the "steam://" association is broken,

steam://rungameid/211420

won't do anything at all... where as using directly the steam.exe will work.

Those values are not documented, but there are used by any steam program to get the steam path, so they always exist

[Wulf2k]

I was thinking more of a "fail gracefully" situation than anything else.

I'm at work right now so I can't look into the code here yet.

[Chronial]

Why do you think that there could be a situation where the registry keys that you look at are set, but the registry keys required for steam: to work are not?

[gpotter2]

Well, i don't really know
We could use the steam: of course, but if the user reseted the url protocols, it won't work... Moreover, it's harder to detect if the link is working or not, than just launching a file...

[Chronial]

I think this is blocked by #94.
When we add this, we should probably also add a close with Dark Souls option. The question is how we should handle updates in that case. Due to DSCM-net we very much care that everybody is on the latest version, and if we autostart and -close with DS, nobody will see the update notices.

[Wulf2k]

I'm still not convinced this is a necessary feature.

What are your thoughts after a week+ of pondering it?

[Chronial]

I think it would be nice to have, but rather low priority.

[Chronial]

The people are hungry for it :)
https://www.reddit.com/r/darksouls/comments/4o26oj/is_there_a_way_to_run_dscm_automatically_when_i/
https://www.reddit.com/r/darksouls/comments/4nk0ta/tutorial_how_to_launch_dscm_dark_souls_with_one/

[karasuhebi]

Yeah I'll throw in my two cents and say that I'd like to see this feature implemented. :)

[gpotter2]

This function is still useable #84

[darkarrow]

If you do choose to implement this I would ask that you make it optional. Because I play Dark Souls using steam in-home streaming currently and it auto-starting the game wouldn't be beneficial at all.