LaunchLord

LaunchLord automatically identifies PC games installed from any shop and and provides a clutter-free dashboard to launch them. Navigation and launching can be accomplished using only gamepad input, providing a smooth gaming experience on entertainment-center PCs.

Games can be quickly re-sorted by name, installation date, or play history, making it easy to pick new games to play or continue games in progress.

The LaunchLord game database service is no longer active, but old users may still get the application below:

Download

Implementation

The front-end of LaunchLord is straightforward: a grid of detected games that can be browsed, reordered, or selected to launch. The back-end is a shared database of game definitions.

Automatically detecting every current and future game is not possible, so LaunchLord aims only for consistency: if all games on the system are contained in the LaunchLord database, they will all be identified correctly and unambiguously. New game definitions may be added by any user, so this is an achievable situation. With a sufficient database of popular games, most users will not need to add any definitions.

Application settings — including game defnitions — are accessed via the user's default web browser pointed to a webserver exposed from the LaunchLord executable.

Each game is assigned three mandatory properties:

• Game name - to display in the back-end
• Executable file name - to help identify the game, and to launch when selected
• Icon URL - to display in the front-end, sourced from a user-specified URL to avoid having to distribute copyrighted game art

File names tend to be more stable than the content within the executable, as updates regularly modify the executable. If another game in the database uses the same executable name, a fourth property must be specified to disambiguate the two. The fourth property specifies the name of another file in the game, and the combination of the executable name and “other” file name must be unique within the LaunchLord database.

LaunchLord includes a snapshot of the most recent database, and the application can update the database by fetching the latest copy from a known URL. User-created entries may be submitted to the URL, and are manually approved for the database after moderation.