Now that Dreadnought is officially on Steam, this tool is no longer needed nor will it still work.

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This is a tool that allows launching Dreadnought via Steam with full support for the Steam Overlay and Steam Controller. It bypasses the official launcher as well as the requirement for elevated/administrative privileges to run the game. You can also use it without Steam.

Download Snib's Dreadnought Steam Launcher v3.1.0.0 and extract it into your Dreadnought installation folder (the same folder the game's own DreadnoughtLauncher.exe is in, by default that's C:\Program Files (x86)\Dreadnought).

Chances are that you already have the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2017 installed, otherwise you will need to download and install that as well.

Now go to Steam and select to "Add a Non-Steam Game to My Library" from the Games menu. Browse to your Dreadnought folder and select Snib's Dreadnought Steam Launcher.exe that you just put there, click to Add Selected Programs and you're done.

You'll probably want to right click it in your library now, select Properties and change the name to Dreadnought.

Just click on it directly or create a shortcut to it.

The launcher's default operating mode stopped working with the latest game patch. Please see this post for now.

The launcher will automatically try to launch the game in the language matching your Windows regional setting (if available), but you can override that choice by clicking on SET LAUNCH OPTIONS in the Steam properties and adding the -culture= parameter followed by the desired country code, so e.g. -culture=en to use the English client.

If not using Steam, then you can set the parameter by creating a shortcut to the launcher (you probably did, anyway), and in the properties of that shortcut you just add the parameter at the end of the target field, so it reads something like "C:\Progam Files (x86)\Dreadnought\Snib's Dreadnought Steam Launcher.exe" -culture=en.

At the time of writing this, the available languages are en, de, es, fr, and pl.

The launcher is completely transparent, unless something goes wrong you will never see it's even there. It does not modify the actual game client in any way, in fact its only interaction with it is to pass certain parameters to it as if it was the official launcher, but in a way that is compatible with Steam. It stops running immediately once it launched the game client, it will not be running in the background.

There is intentionally no way for it to store your password or to pass it to the game client in another way. This is for security reasons. I do not want anything to do with your password. If you rely on the official launcher's feature to store your login information for 30 days then please keep using that launcher.

My launcher will try to connect to api.greybox.com and from there usually to uscloud.6ft.com to check whether your Dreadnought client needs updating. These are the same servers used by the official launcher, so make sure you allow these connections through your firewall or the update check will fail - you will be offered to launch the game regardless but that is not recommended since the game itself will not tell you when it's out of date, your match-making will simply fail in that case.

If the game is up-to-date then my launcher will launch the game client directly, bypassing the official launcher. However, if the game needs updating, my launcher will start the official launcher instead to let it update your game files.

• This launcher does not support accounts that log in via Facebook OpenID authentication, nor will it ever.

• Unlike the official launcher, my launcher does not use elevated/administrative privileges to run the game. In case that your local administrator account is a different user account than the one you are using to play the game, this means the game will no longer be able to access its previous settings. You can however copy them over manually. They are located in %LOCALAPPDATA%\DreadGame on the respective user accounts.

Free for non-commercial use, and use at your own risk.

What people do just to get an overlay...
Using modified software doesn't sound like a good idea, though. But well, as the disclaimer says, "use it at your own risk".
Having a developer approve of this may be better.

Yeah, this idea sprung from another thread, personally I don't mind much, either.

Just to clarify that it does not modify anything, it's just launching the (unmodified) game client with the correct parameters in a way that Steam recognizes it. The official launcher could do the same thing but for some reason it doesn't - it's not a Steam game so I suppose nobody even thought about it.

Reported (for praise ) GJ!

It would be nice if the dev's gave us an option (like this) to load the game through steam, and let users know that this is 100% unsupported, and if they have any issue to please contact snib. ;P

As another point of data, borderless fullscreen is about 4% (on average) slower than fullscreen with steam overlay on my rig (Intel I7 4790K, GeForce 780 SC, SSD). In my testing (using the Benchmark function in the game) Borderless was 98.35 FPS, and 102.493 fullscreen with steam.

Snib#1627 posted (#post-34694)

Yeah, this idea sprung from another thread, personally I don't mind much, either.

Just to clarify that it does not modify anything, it's just launching the (unmodified) game client with the correct parameters in a way that Steam recognizes it. The official launcher could do the same thing but for some reason it doesn't - it's not a Steam game so I suppose nobody even thought about it.

So it's nothing but a change for the parameters? Guess that's fine then.

Wyvyrias#8434 posted (#post-34830)

So it's nothing but a change for the parameters? Guess that's fine then.

Actually it's even simpler. The official launcher launches a batch file which then launches the game with certain parameters. All my launcher does is read those parameters from the batch file and uses them to launch the game directly as a child process, skipping the batch file.

Because it's a child process Steam understands that it's part of the same application that it originally loaded (my launcher), that's all there is to it.

I noticed that the game client does not actually complain if it's out of date. Since that was somewhat inconvenient I added a version check to my launcher now (simply download it again if you already had it).

The launcher will try to connect to uscloud.6ft.com (the same server the official launcher connects to, too) to check whether your client needs updating. If your client is out of date (or if the connection could not be established, make sure you allow it through your firewall) my launcher will start the official launcher instead (once it's done updating, close the official launcher and start the game again via Steam). Otherwise the game will launch directly, bypassing the official launcher.

Thanks for your work on this! Unfortunately I am unable to report having success with your launcher. It seems to try to launch as Steam will say "Playing Dreadnought" but then it goes away and nothing happens. I tested the regular launcher and launched the game, so I know my Dreadnought install is working. Any ideas?

beardman#7212 posted (#post-35216)

Thanks for your work on this! Unfortunately I am unable to report having success with your launcher. It seems to try to launch as Steam will say "Playing Dreadnought" but then it goes away and nothing happens. I tested the regular launcher and launched the game, so I know my Dreadnought install is working. Any ideas?

It would fail if it cannot find the files it's looking for. Possible reasons are that you've got it in the wrong folder (see first post), that you've changed the "Start In" folder in the Steam shortcut (needs to be the same folder where you put it), or I just thought that if a 32bit version of the game exists it currently won't try to launch that, either.

Sorry this was originally a quick 10 lines of code hack, even though it's grown a bit when I added the version check I didn't add any user interaction so far, i.e. no visible error messages for now.

edit: updated to v2.1 which will tell you the reason it failed. download and try with that.

Snib#1627 posted (#post-35246)

beardman#7212 posted (#post-35216)

Thanks for your work on this! Unfortunately I am unable to report having success with your launcher. It seems to try to launch as Steam will say "Playing Dreadnought" but then it goes away and nothing happens. I tested the regular launcher and launched the game, so I know my Dreadnought install is working. Any ideas?

It would fail if it cannot find the files it's looking for. Possible reasons are that you've got it in the wrong folder (see first post), that you've changed the "Start In" folder in the Steam shortcut (needs to be the same folder where you put it), or I just thought that if a 32bit version of the game exists it currently won't try to launch that, either.

Sorry this was originally a quick 10 lines of code hack, even though it's grown a bit when I added the version check I didn't add any user interaction so far, i.e. no visible error messages for now.

edit: updated to v2.1 which will tell you the reason it failed. download and try with that.

Thanks I will try the new version. Definitely not the wrong folder. I put your launcher in the same folder as the game launcher like your directions said. Copy pasta'ed the full directory into the Steam shortcut. My directory is really simple:

Target: "D:\Games\Dreadnought\Snibs Dreadnought Steam Launcher.exe"

Start in: "D:\Games\Dreadnought\"

As for the 32bit, I'm not sure how it would try and start that. I haven't run anything 32 bit in almost a decade

I'll get the new launcher and see what error I get. Thanks again.