Minimal Elite Dangerous Launcher

Cross-platform launcher for the game Elite Dangerous. Created mainly to avoid the long startup time of the default launcher when running on Linux. Can be used with Steam and Epic on both Windows and Linux. Game accounts purchased via Frontier or Oculus are not supported.

Features

Minimal Interface

No waiting for a GUI to load. No waiting for the embedded web browser to load. No waiting for remote logs to be sent to FDev. For those that play on Linux, no waiting for the Wine environment.
Auto-run

Automatically starts the game instead of you having to click the Play button. The default launcher also supports this by using the /autorun flag.
Auto-launch Processes

Via the Settings file, you can specify additional programs to launch automatically. This includes things like Elite Log Agent and VoiceAttack. Processes are automatically closed when the game closes. This means you don't have to run the programs on computer startup or have to remember to start them before you launch the game.
Auto-quit

Automatically close the launcher when you close your game. The default launcher also supports this by using the /autoquit flag.
Auto-restart

Automatically restart your game. This can be useful if you're grinding for manufactured engineering materials. Off by default.
Multi-Account

Rudimentary support for playing with both your Steam and Epic accounts with one game installation. See details for how this works.

Usage

This launcher doesn't setup/link new accounts. You'll need to launch Elite Dangerous at least once with the default launcher for this one to work.

Setup

Steam

Download the latest release for your operating system
Extract executable from the zip/tar archive
Place MinEdLauncher in your Elite Dangerous install location so that it's in the same folder as EDLaunch.exe. MinEdLauncher.Bootstrap is for Epic only and may be ignored. To find your install directory:
1. Right click Elite Dangerous in your Steam library
2. Select properties
3. In the Local Files tab, click Browse Local Files...
Update your launch options to point to MinEdLauncher.
1. Right click Elite Dangerous in your Steam library
2. Select properties
3. In the general tab, click Set Launch Options
4. Windows users - Set the value to cmd /c "MinEdLauncher.exe %command% /autorun /autoquit /EDH"
  
  Linux users - The command will depend on which terminal emulator you use. Examples for alacritty, gnome-terminal and konsole are below.
  
  alacritty -e ./MinEdLauncher %command% /autorun /autoquit /EDH
  
  gnome-terminal -- ./MinEdLauncher %command% /autorun /autoquit /EDH
  
  konsole -e ./MinEdLauncher %command% /autorun /autoquit /EDH
Launch your game as you normally would in Steam

Epic

Download the latest release for Windows
Extract executables from the zip archive
Navigate to your Elite Dangerous install location (folder that contains EDLaunch.exe)
Copy MinEdLauncher.exe
Delete or rename EDLaunch.exe (e.g. EDLaunch.exe.bak)
Copy and rename MinEdLauncher.Bootstrap.exe to EDLaunch.exe. This step is required because Epic doesn't allow changing the game's startup application. If someone knows how to modify the game's manifest file (EliteDangerous/.egstore/*.manifest), this could be avoided. Please open a new issue if you can help with this. This also means any time the game updates or you verify your game files, you'll have to replace EDLaunch.exe with MinEdLauncher.Bootstrap.exe.
Update your launch options to auto start your preferred product
1. Click Settings in the Epic Games Launcher
2. Scroll down to the Manage Games section and click Elite Dangerous
3. Check Additional Command Line Arguments
4. Set the value to /autorun /autoquit /EDH
Launch your game as you normally would in Epic

Flags

Flags are strings that are sent to the launcher via command line arguments. The following flags are understood by the default launcher and their meaning is the same for the minimal launcher. Note that specifying a product flag will override whatever option you select when Steam prompts you to select a version of the game.

Flag	Effect
/autoquit	Automatically close the launcher when the game closes
/autorun	Automatically start selected product when launcher starts
/ed	Select Elite Dangerous as the startup product
/edh	Select Elite Dangerous Horizons as the startup product
/eda	Select Elite Dangerous Arena as the startup product
/vr	Tell the game that you want to play in VR mode
-auth_password	Epic exchange code. Used for authenticating with Epic

Settings

The settings file controls additional settings for the launcher that go beyond what the default launcher supports. The location of this file is in the standard config location for your operating system.

Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\min-ed-launcher\settings.json

Linux: $XDG_CONFIG_DIR/min-ed-launcher/settings.json (~/.config if $XDG_CONFIG_DIR isn't set)

Settings	Effect
apiUri	FDev API base URI. Should only be changed if you are doing local development
watchForCrashes	Determines if the game should be launched by `WatchDog64.exe` or not
gameLocation	Path to game's install folder. Specify this if the launcher can't figure it out by itself
language	Sets the game's language. Supported values are en and the names of the language folders in Elite's install directory
restart	Restart the game after it has closed
processes	Additional applications to launch before launching the game

When specifying a path for either gameLocation or processes.fileName on Windows, it's required to escape backslashes. Make sure to use a double backslash (\\) instead of a single backslash (\).

{
    "apiUri": "https://api.zaonce.net",
    "watchForCrashes": false,
    "gameLocation": null,
    "language": "en",
    "restart": {
        "enabled": false,
        "shutdownTimeout": 3
    },
    "processes": [
        {
            "fileName": "C:\\path\\to\\app",
            "arguments": "--arg1 --arg2"
        },
        {
            "fileName": "C:\\path\\to\\app2",
            "arguments": "--arg1 --arg2"
        }
    ]
}

Multi-Account

There is rudimentary support for running your Epic account via Steam. Running a Steam account without Steam installed and running is not supported.

In order to authenticate with an Epic account:

You will first need to make sure two files are in your Steam installation directory. You'll likely have to start installing via Epic and then when EosSdk.dll and EosIF.dll are downloaded, you can stop the install (and delete the rest of the files). Once you have those two files, copy them to your Steam install directory (so that they are in the same folder as MinEdLauncher. It's possible this step will become obsolete if FDev updates their Steam depot to include these files.
Get an Epic exchange code. This part is really clunky and will need to be done for every launch as the exchange code expires after one use.

Within the Epic launcher, click your username and select manage account. This will open a browser. The URL will contain an exchangeCode=code parameter. Copy the code before the page is redirected (can just hit the stop button in your browser).
Add the -auth_password=code argument to your launch options. cmd /c "MinEdLauncher.exe %command% /autoquit /EDH -auth_password=code"

You can also create a separate shortcut. Right click game in your Steam library and create desktop shortcut. Edit the properties of the shortcut to include the -auth_password=code argument. steam://rungameid/359320// -auth_password=code The two trailing slashes are important. Then just edit this shortcut with the new exchange code each time instead of changing your Steam launch options.

Logs

Debug logging is placed in the file logs/min-ed-launcher.log

Build

Install the .Net 5 SDK
Run dotnet build

Release Artifacts

Run either publish.sh or publish.ps1 depending on your OS. These scripts make use of dotnet publish. Artifacts will end up in the artifactsfolder.

Note that the bootstrap project uses NativeAOT to link and compile the app and the .net 5 runtime into a single native executable. It specifically targets Windows and won't publish on a non-Windows machine.

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