YET ANOTHER LAUNCHER? GREAT...

I've noticed a common problem with all other launchers: clutter. Dozens of buttons, text fields, drop-down lists, options, and so on, to the point where the software in question begins to resemble a jet cockpit. ACL does away with all of that and instead offers extensive functionality via shortcuts and commands, leaving the source port-specific stuff to the user.

Number of UI elements added since the program's inception: -3.

You can download the latest version from GitLab. The launcher requires .NET Desktop Runtime 8.0 (x64) to run! Highly recommended to read the (very short) readme.

FEATURING MORE FEATURES

• Bulk updating mods if they're from a Git repository. Note that this needs Git for Windows to work.
• Context menu for mods with options such as opening to location or directly with SLADE, along with Git-specific actions.
• Themes. You can make them yourself or add premade themes to a "Themes" folder in the same directory as the launcher. There's support for sounds such as button clicks, hovers and more!
• Launcher update notification capability. It'll alert you if there's a new version available which takes you to the download page if you confirm you want to update. On by default. Can be permanently turned off by setting CheckForLauncherUpdates to false in the config or clicking "No" on the update prompt.
• Console with commands for more minor/situational features.
• Notifies you if there are missing mods when the launcher initializes, a mod preset gets loaded, refreshed, or when an engine is started.
• Mod presets and launch presets are saved separately. This is useful for demo-recording and multiplayer sessions.
• Launching multiple instances of an engine with different parameters. Great for testing multiplayer stuff.
• Automatic config loading so different mod setups can use different engine configuration files.

And now for some protips:

• F1 brings up a help dialogue box that mentions controls and other miscellaneous features.
• .DEH files are automatically loaded if they're in the same directory and share the same name as a wad. They can still be loaded separately too.

Y THO?

Gather around, I'm gonna tell you the story of how ZDL kept nuking a friend's configs. For a while now, ZDL has had this bug where you'd launch it and everything would inconveniently get yeeted into the void. Load orders, settings, all of it. So when he posted about it for the zillionth time in the group chat (the dude is extremely cursed with regards to software), I got the genius idea of making my own launcher. Now, I'd been brainstorming the idea of a custom launcher for some time, and that was just the right motivation for it.

At the time, we all played a mod with lots of (read: roughly fifty) addons for it, most of which were on Git. Keeping things in sync was an absolute logistical nightmare. Scripts solved some of those issues, but they were still inconvenient. So that necessity was the bedrock for in-launcher mod updating.

Another reason was that ZDL is no longer updated from what I can tell. There are plenty of forks, but all of them are dead in the water. Granted, the launcher is fairly feature-complete, much like ACL, but it was also a little too simple. For starters, I like having retinas. ZDL's light (and only) theme is like a flashbang. I cannot stand light themes in software.