What is Evolve Launcher?

Evolve Launcher is a system application made with Tauri, made to run both on Linux and Windows, with the purpose of simplifying the installation process to get Evolve Legacy running.

Motivation¶

Evolve, despite being "dead" for near a decade, it still has people joining on a daily basis, inquiring about instructions and asking for support on the steps needed to download the necessary files, patches and configurations.

You need to obtain the legacy files, need to obtain a patch, correct the patch's output directory, merge them, then add a config file — Add the fact that there are two major versions of Evolve being played (Legacy Evolve Vanilla, and Legacy Evolve Modded) it might become easy to make mistakes when applying patches atop of patches, reverting patches, and so on.

Vision¶

It shouldn't need technical expertise and it shouldn't need cognitive effort to install, patch and run Evolve.

Users should be able to simple install the Launcher, select where they want to have it installed, select if they want to play Legacy, Modded or both, and then just let the launcher do it's thing.

After it is done, it should ask them for the Name they would like to use, and instruct on how to get a Local Network working.

From there, it should be very easy and quick to switch between versions. If you have a group playing Modded and asking for more people to join, it should be a no-brainer to simply switch the version and hit Play.

It should be easy for inexperienced users to use, and be transparent in its actions for people with coding experience.

Out of Scope¶

Evolve Launcher aims to one thing only, and do it well.

That is why the following tasks are not planned, at least not as part of this initial setup.

radmin / zerotier / $TOOL Integration¶

Setting up tooling to facilitate a local network will be out of Evolve Launcher's featureset, at least for now.