Obsidian Launcher

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🌱 The Origin Story: From C++ to C#

This project, Obsidian Launcher, is a custom 'cracked' Minecraft launcher.

It didn't start its life in C#, though. My first attempt was in C++. 👉 Click here to browse the last C++ commit

Why the switch? Let’s just say C++ development, while powerful, presented a series of... character-building experiences that eventually led me to the more streamlined environment of C# and .NET.

🔍 A few highlights from the C++ trenches:

• ⚔️ The Great Library Hunt & CMake Wars: Simply getting a reliable compression and archive library integrated felt like a quest. I wrestled with CMake for days just to get a clean build across setups. Hours spent debugging build scripts could've built actual features!

• 🔐 The SSL Certificate Fiasco: Remember OpenSSL’s lovely inability to easily read system certs on some platforms? I do. I embedded cacert.pem manually. It mostly worked—except for one URL that always failed outside of tests. The kicker? Tests passed every single time. Eventually, I gave up and disabled SSL verification altogether.

It was clear that for this project, the everything-is-manual nature of C++ was a roadblock. So, I ditched it and started fresh with C#

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🎯 What Obsidian Launcher Aims To Do

This project aims to replicate the key features of a modern Minecraft launcher:

• 🧩 Fetching and managing official Minecraft versions.
• ☕ Handling Java runtimes (discovery, download, extraction).
• 🧱 Downloading & verifying all required game assets.
• 📚 Managing libraries, including native ones for LWJGL.
• 🧵 Building classpaths and JVM/game arguments.
• ▶️ Launching the game!

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🔧 Current Status & Features

Actively in development 🔄 Here's what's working or in progress:

• 📜 Version Manifests: Fetches and parses Mojang's data.
• ☕ Java Management: Finds Java, downloads, extracts archives (.zip ✅, .tar.gz 🔜).
• 🎨 Asset Management: Downloads and verifies game assets.
• 📦 Library Management: Handles downloads, verification, extraction + native rules.
• 🧠 Argument & Classpath Builder: Fully functional with placeholder support.
• 🎮 Game Launch: Successfully launches Minecraft with output capture.
• 📋 Logging: Serilog-based console and file logging.

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💻 Why C#

• 📚 Rich Standard Library – HttpClient, System.IO.Compression.ZipFile, and more.
• 📦 NuGet Ecosystem – Easy, fast package management.
• ⚡ Productivity – Less boilerplate, more logic.
• 🧼 Modern Features – Async/await, LINQ, clean syntax.
• 🧘 Sanity Preservation – No more build system nightmares.

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🗂️ Project Structure

ObsidianLauncher/
├── ObsidianLauncher.sln
└── ObsidianLauncher/
    ├── ObsidianLauncher.csproj
    ├── Program.cs
    ├── LauncherConfig.cs
    ├── Models/
    │   └── (e.g., MinecraftVersion.cs, Library.cs)
    ├── Enums/
    │   └── (e.g., OperatingSystemType.cs)
    ├── Services/
    │   └── (e.g., HttpManagerService.cs, JavaManager.cs)
    └── Utils/
        └── (e.g., CryptoUtils.cs, LoggerSetup.cs)

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📦 Prerequisites

• .NET 9.0 SDK (or newer) ✅

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🛠️ Building and Running

1. 🧬 Clone the repository.

2. 🔄 Restore packages:

   dotnet restore "Obsidian Launcher.csproj"

3. 🏗️ Build it:

   dotnet build "Obsidian Launcher.csproj" -c Release

4. 🚀 Run it: bin/Release/net9.0/Obsidian Launcher.exe (Data will be stored in .ObsidianLauncher)

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🔮 TODO / Future Enhancements

• 🔐 Authentication: Add Microsoft login (only offline mode supported currently).
• 🖼️ UI: Build a GUI! (Console ≠ user-friendly 😅)
• 📁 Profile Management
• 🧩 Mod Management
• 🧰 TAR.GZ Support for Linux/macOS Java runtimes
• 🧠 Placeholder Replacements: Finish ‘em all.
• 🧪 Unit Tests
• 💡 And lots more!

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🤝 Contributing

Found a 🐞bug or have an 💡idea? Open an issue or PR — all help is appreciated!

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📜 License

This project is licensed under the GPL v3 License 📄

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