Is there a way to remove the advertisements from the launcher?
- Thread starter bitmode
- Start date
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That did nothing for me. Empire of sin is still there, trying to convince me it's a great game. Appalling stuff.
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Not that I know of. Other than brute-force denying network connections with an application firewall:
You can't just block specific IP addresses because the Launcher talks to CDNs which IP addresses will vary depending on your location and whatever network magic the CDN is performing. So all outgoing network traffic has to be blocked as a whole.
This also blocks Launcher update checks (not necessarily a bad thing), and downloading mod thumbnails. Other than that it seems to work ok.
I just did a quick test, not thorough enough to confirm there are no functional issues with regards to mod handling.
I had to clean the contents of the .launcher-cache folder (within the Documents > Paradox Interactive > Hearts of Iron IV folder) to completely get rid of the news/advertisements.
YMMV.
You can't just block specific IP addresses because the Launcher talks to CDNs which IP addresses will vary depending on your location and whatever network magic the CDN is performing. So all outgoing network traffic has to be blocked as a whole.
This also blocks Launcher update checks (not necessarily a bad thing), and downloading mod thumbnails. Other than that it seems to work ok.
I just did a quick test, not thorough enough to confirm there are no functional issues with regards to mod handling.
I had to clean the contents of the .launcher-cache folder (within the Documents > Paradox Interactive > Hearts of Iron IV folder) to completely get rid of the news/advertisements.
YMMV.
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Thanks, blocking services.paradoxplaza.com seems to have done the trick.
Btw, is there a launch option to skip the launcher entirely when launching the game through steam? I virtually never change anything there. The old one used to have
-nolauncher but that doesn't work anymore.- 1
Not sure if you're on Linux or Windows. But on Windows the executable that is started from Steam is dowser.exe in the HOI 4 game directory.
If you move dowser.exe out of the way and rename (or copy) hoi4.exe to dowser.exe, Steam launches the game directly. I just tried it and it works fine. No more horrid Launcher getting in the way - yeah!
Alternatively you can make a Windows shortcut (or a Linux symlink) to hoi4.exe and start it directly from your desktop instead of from Steam. If the Steam client is running in the background before running hoi4.exe, all Steam in-game features (overlay, achievements, multiplayer etc.) will still be available, at least on Windows but I'd expect the same on Linux.
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This is what I usually do.
I have noticed a couple of times that Steam installations aren't always really completed even though the Steam client says everything's been downloaded and installed. Sometimes you have to launch the game via Steam to get a patch to really, truly, be finalized correctly. But it's a nice timesaver most of the time.
You could try what's hinted here, in a wrapper script:When I run it like this on Linux, I don't get the steam overlay
Taken from Developing for SteamOS and Linux.
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Yes
Neat! The library path seems to be outdated though; I ended up with
Exec=env LD_PRELOAD=/home/USER/.steam/ubuntu12_64/gameoverlayrenderer.so /home/USER/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Hearts\ of\ Iron\ IV/hoi4 in my .desktop file.Also dug around a bit in the launcher code but found no additional launch options or config settings beyond the minimal stuff present in the default configuration. No way to inject CSS either as far as I can tell. In my opinion this thing is still strictly worse than the old launcher.
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The new launcher is just bad, takes ages to load the mods compared to before.
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it's not outdated, it's just written for a different launching method (specifically, it's a short fragment of a shell script, rather than a .desktop file).
in most modern shells, ~ gets expanded to the home directory of the current user.
I think making a shortcut directly to HOI4. EXE works. It should skip the launcher. The game should use the mods used last time.
~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu* does not exist on my system, it is not just the tilde expansion. The location of steam files seems to depend on the installation method. (I'm using Ubuntu)
Yep, I just like to start games through the Steam interface. Oh well.
Why don't you try the hack I described earlier for Windows, but transposed to Linux.
Something like:
- locate dowser.exe in HOI 4 game directory (I don't know how it's named exactly on Linux, might be 'dowser' without the .exe)
- rename it to something else (e.g. dowser.orig)
- create a symbolic link named dowser[.exe] in the HOI 4 game directory that points to the hoi4 executable (e.g.
ln -s hoi4 dowser)This should work.
Is there a way to remove the launcher and back to previous one? It's pure shit.
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Yep, the files lack the .exe extension. I'm just worried that an update or verifying local files undoes this solution. After realizing the game starts dowser without any further arguments, I've now set the launch "options" to
./hoi4 # %command% and it seems to work fine; maybe something like that works on Windows as well.The old launcher was part of hoi4.exe and it is not there anymore in newer patches. You can only get it by reverting to patch 1.7.1 or older.
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Right, it would.
Wow, I had never heard of the %command% special value for Steam launch options, until now.
So I tried it on Windows, it works fine, except the full path to hoi4.exe has to be specified.
E.g.
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Hearts of Iron IV\hoi4.exe" %command%Very cool trick, and cleaner too.
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