Tip for Steam users: Launch from Visual Studio

[Mithril]

Hello Guys,

I have been using Articy:Draft for a while now and It is so great for fleshing out ideas. Top job

Now, during one of my programming adventures it became necessary to quickly open up the Articy:Draft project from
within Visual Studio. I quickly found out that trying to launch from the articydraft.exe doesn't work as it goes into some
mode trying to talk to a server (which is odd, frankly) but I also found (because I haven't looked in all this time )
that steam uses the launcher 'SteamStarter.exe' and so I tried that, and again this server mode... (not helpful guys)

Then I remembered an old trick from having modded using HL.exe it simply involved the following:

Steam.exe -applaunch <appID> (etc.. parameters if needed)

So I looked at the ID for ArticyDraft when looking at the shortcut: steam://rungameid/230780 <- ID number
(Don't click on what may appear as a link guys Or you'll probably launch Articy:Draft (if you have it))

So I tried this from the main steam folder in commandline:

Steam.exe -applaunch 230780

Yes... that worked.. now we're rolling

Then In Visual Studio I added the project file, right clicked on it and selected 'Open with'
In the new window I clicked 'Add...'; clicked on '...' and added 'steam.exe'
In the 'Arguments' section I added '-applaunch 230780' and when clicking on 'OK' it should immediately open Articy:Draft.

But it doesn't open the project file. However the project should be listed in the main menu if you're working with it.
Otherwise simply open it once, then it should be there next time. Maybe the Nevigo guys know what should be written
on commandline, in order to open a specific file? But for me, this was close enough.

Tip: In Visual Studio when double clicking and it opens the project file as a text file do this:
Select 'Open With' and and then in the list select the Artice:Draft loader you just created, and select 'Set as default'.
Then next time you double click on the project file, Articy:Draft should launch immediately instead.

Hope it helps someone.

Best regards, and thanks for having created a great product guys:)

[Kai Rosenkranz]

Hi Mithril,

Thank you for your kind words about our tool, and for sharing your solution.

When you right-click the articy:draft desktop icon and look at the properties, you can see that it uses the following commandline:

Code: Select all

"C:\...\ArticyDraft.exe" -singleuser -loglevel 3

The -singleuser argument lets the server connection screen go away, just as you desired. The articy:draft client is always a hybrid and can be used both for multi-user environments and single-user. The command line switch tells articy:draft which mode to start in.

But ... the way through Steam is also very smart .

-Kai

[kurzonmorris]

Kai the line of code you gave works great and means i can get articy draft to work outside of steam (kinda), however the steam cd key i used isn't recognised by the lisencing managment bit. Can i confirm that as a steam user I have to use it under steam? or is there a way to get the CD key to work outside of the steam environment?

many thanks

kurzon

p.s. I'm not hugly fussed about it being under steam just sometimes want to turn it off to save on cpu usage as my tablet has to work a little bit harder to have steam working and it becomes very hot so any cpu/ram usaged saved is a blessing.