I was actually planning to write an LD_PRELOAD hook but I just never had the time and, now that Flatpak is around, I figure I might as well go for the more comprehensive solution that doesn't require me to write any C.

(Though I still do plan to write a hook to fix games like Dungeons of Dredmor which only allow you to select valid fullscreen resolutions for windowed mode, which keeps them from playing nicely with a MetaModes line that locks the desktop resolution. That one, I actually started work on years ago, but couldn't figure out how to write a dlsym(RTLD_NEXT, "SDL_ListModes") function pointer signature that the compiler would accept... and then other things kept coming up so I've just not been playing Dredmor.)

I figure that, since the core of my launcher is already being ported from Python to Rust for reusability and stricter type checks, I might as well write the LD_PRELOAD helper using something like redhook ( https://crates.io/crates/redhook ) or hooky ( https://crates.io/crates/hooky ) so I get a language I'm more familiar with and a function pointer syntax that's not so squirrely.

Those are interesting, thanks for pointing them out!

I just bought Slime Rancher, and it has a nasty bug with fullscreen mode (it basically hangs on startup with flickering screen). There is a known workaround to pass -screen-fullscreen 0 to the binary, which will force Unity to start in Windowed mode. I decided to tweak start.sh to do that, and noticed something strange.

There is a function: execute_game_with_params in gog_com.shlib, which is doing this:

./"${bin_64}" "$@"

Which is fine, except it's not shifting GOG internal parameters before passing extra ones to the actual game. That's clearly wrong, so I had to add

shift 6

there after all internal parameters are read, so $@ would only mean game parameters. Not sure how it ever worked otherwise. I hope this helps.

Also, it's better to use simply $@ there, not "$@", since the later makes it into a single parameter instead of multiple ones.

no, "$@" is correct since it makes sure things work properly if a parameter contains spaces

from man bash

No, actually, "$@" is special and results in separately-quoted parameters. You're thinking of "$*".

Here's the relevant part of man bash:

Special Parameters

The shell treats several parameters specially. These parameters may only be referenced; assignment to them is not allowed.

* Expands to the positional parameters, starting from one. When the expansion is not within double quotes, each positional parameter expands to a separate word. In contexts where it is performed, those words are subject to further word splitting and pathname expansion. When the expansion occurs within double quotes, it expands to a single word with the value of each parameter separated by the first character of the IFS special variable. That is, "$*" is equivalent to "$1c$2c...", where c is the first character of the value of the IFS variable. If IFS is unset, the parameters are separated by spaces. If IFS is null, the parameters are joined without intervening separators.

@ Expands to the positional parameters, starting from one. When the expansion occurs within double quotes, each parameter expands to a separate word. That is, "$@" is equivalent to "$1" "$2" ... If the double-quoted expansion occurs within a word, the expansion of the first parameter is joined with the beginning part of the original word, and the expansion of the last parameter is joined with the last part of the original word. When there are no positional parameters, "$@" and $@ expand to nothing (i.e., they are removed).

This maybe explain my struggle to use command line option for Chaos Reborn (as it has full screen problem with newer Unity too, at the moment I'm running it in borderless maximized window). Although it just may be I did something wrong when I was trying out command line options, didn't pay much attention in the hurry.

Interesting, since in the past I had exactly this problem with $@ turning into a single parameter. But may be it was related to too many levels of indirection / quotations or may be it was indeed with $*.

Hi!

You may think (by reading this post) that I am an actual carbon-based life-form, but in truth I am a teletypewriter entity living in an 80-character wide world. Though I rarely leave my allocated framebuffer space, on occasion (like now) I can use curl hacks to communicate with the outside world.

I have to ask, is there any chance we'll ever see a revival of the .tar.gz "installer" format or maybe even (are your ready for this?) .tar.xz (holy smokes!)?

As a teletypewriter entity I can't play most games of course, especially none of these 3D devilries kids are playing these days, but I sure like to unpack things neatly from the command line before I attempt to launch something potentially hyperdimensional.

And before you say I can just unzip the current installers and move some stuff around to get the same end result, I hope you realize it's just not the same thing.

U+2404 (␄)

I have an idea. Release Witcher 3 on Linux.

Since CDPR sadly aren't interested in that, every single day, march over to their offices in a big penguin suite and run around the place pretending to be one for a few hours. At least they should notice the penguin in the room.

I'm sure some GOG Linux folks already bugged CDPR about it. It's a problem with CDPR management which they can't really fix :)

There is a problem with such fix, since the game always reverts those changes (you can set read only bit on the file of course in extended attributes).

I think the current method is fine, as both sides win. As long as I'm able to extract them without the installer (which is all I need) I'm more than happy.

Just my opinion of course.

*adopts Nilfgaardian accent* I see you are a man of good taste unlike these barbarians in the north. You mean to bring back embellished tar archives. Marvelous, quite marvelous!

You're probably right, of course... I tend to get a bit unreasonable whenever I hear of "Linux installers", but I'm guessing some people feel more comfortable with this approach.