The Heroic Games Launcher is growing with the 2.5.0 Beta version out now, putting it in competition with the likes of Lutris and Bottles a little more with the new features.
One of the major new additions is the ability to add applications from basically anywhere. Heroic is no longer limited to GOG and Epic Games, as you can just add anything in from Native Linux game installs to Windows games / launchers to then run through Wine. This is great since it's such a popular application on both desktop and Steam Deck and should perhaps even make certain launchers easier.
On top of that there's now support for custom user themes, a Download Manager so you can queue up a ton of games to download and a "more robust online checking system". They also upgraded the version of Legendary they use, which is the magic behind the Epic Games support along with performance improvements and bug fixes.
I'll probably take a proper look in a video likely when 2.5.0 is out stable.
!Heroic with Amazon Prime Games!
https://github.com/imLinguin/nile
Last edited by nebadon2025 on 31 October 2022 at 5:28 pm UTC
Do we have more info on the robust online checking? I'm quite interested in thatHeroic now detects when you lose connectivity to a network and shows a message at the top stating that. When you re-connect to the network, heroic will start checking if there's actual connectivity to the internet too. When you are back online, the message disappears.
There are still improvements to add and tweaks to better detect when you are offline. We can't yet detect that the network you are connected to lost connection to the internet since the events we get from electron don fire in that case, but we have some idea planned to address that too.
With this in place we can provide better feedback to the users when things won't work because of lack of internet (like running some games, updating, downloading, repairing, etc)
Which is fine I guess. Besides, you can always just use BoilR to centralize everything on Steam anyways.
I want another games launcher for my Steam Deck but all of them are either terrible GTK or Electron applications.Using Electron for Heroic is actually a good choice because a built-in browser is needed and Electron supplies that.
I want another games launcher for my Steam Deck but all of them are either terrible GTK or Electron applications.Using Electron for Heroic is actually a good choice because a built-in browser is needed and Electron supplies that.
There’s been a thing called WebView that’s existed for quite some time that these applications could use to render a web store.
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