GameFront(GF) is a cross platform launcher designed specifically for games based on the Cube2 engine. The idea is to provide an graphical front end to integrate the games and mission launching along with multimedia content. GF is written in PureBasic(PB)

First code due in June 2010

I did mange to get cross platform launching happening (at least for W32 and nix), though the path names with linux will be difficult. Also tried out some cross platform video playing code from the PB achieve and it worked OK, so a couple of the biggest technical issues had been dealt with.

My greatest concern has been with the issues of process monitoring and interprocess communication. The player needs to have a seemless experience when launching his game and when finished the game mission or level is returned seemlessly to GF, with appropriate game status data returned also to GF. This requires GF to monitor the status of the Game/level process (running, paused, end) and outcome (success, failure, possibly a score or items/achievements)

Years ago I did a little bit of work with interprocess communication on Windows, writing an app that monitored the status of a DOS app and if certain things happened it did a quick and dirty 'screen scrape' of some of the data. That was a pain, so the thought of doing something vaguely to do with interprocess communication that worked on different platforms filled me with dread. Maybe I would get lucky and find a sample in the PB Archives? No such luck. My next step was the ask why?

Why? 1. The Cube engine lacks a few of those niceties such as video cut scenes, that most top rung FPS have. Much easier for me to do this stuff in PB than for me to try to do in C

2. The launcher may be able to help manage other areas like verification, security, configuration, updating, help and other documentation.

Next Try to find out if someone has done it! Maybe I could use GameLauncher