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As the title says. I severely dislike having to make accounts for every game publisher that wants to send me advertisements, collect data or whatever.
It's usually an instant dealbreaker for me at this point
Publishers needing their own launcher already puts them on shaky grounds with me.
But I really liked the original BG 1 & 2, so I'm willing to not just refund it immediately and actually ask around first for solutions.
If you're using Steam (or any kind of shortcut I suppose), add --skip-launcher to the launch options. Here's how to do so with Steam:
Thank you for the step-by-step. Steam can be a bit of a maze when you don't fiddle with these things so often. :)
Edit: Apparently it's " --skip-launcher" the extra dash matters XD
In future, drop by the PC Gaming Wiki first - it's a great resource for exactly this kind of question.
Skip Larian launcher on startup
The Launcher bit was a helpful add-in by a another kind user. I didn't ask about that specifically, just mentioned that I dislike extra launchers.
My question was far more stupid than that. However, people came through for me regardless. And very fast at that. And for that, I am thankful.
I wish all these games had skippable launchers, i refuse to touch any game that needs a launcher beyond Steam
Thank you for the info on this, will be using it going forward.
Not sure if you did this on purpose, or if something else did it as part of editing, but your bulleted steps included an en dash (–) instead of two short dashes (--).
Have had issues in the past with that, generally with WYSIWYG type editors combining your -- into either – or —.
Ugh word does this. I didn't realize until I wrote some documentation for a cli tool I made for a client and I wrote the documentation in word because they are fairly non technical so I wrote in the documentation sample arguments they can copy and paste and shipped it feeling good that it would work flawlessly because I tested the crap out of it. Or so I thought because they immediately hit back with it doesn't work. I spent hours recreating their environment and watching it work no matter what I tried to get it to not work. Then I hopped on a call and had the client step by step show me what they did and they opened the word doc and copied the example commands, changed the arguments to be correct and run it. I followed along on my own machine and then I fucking saw what had happened. Fucking Microsoft Word replaced my " " with “ ” (straight quotes for smart quotes for those who cant see the difference). A quick patch of the cli to properly parse those and things were working again.
Copying out of MS products always seems to leave junk behind. The worst one is the zero-width space (unicode U+200B or hex e2808b) . Sharepoint loves to scatter these all over so any copy from a sharepoint source has to be put in a plain text editor and have a run through with a regex to find any invisible formatting characters.
I typed them directly into my comment from an Android phone, and it continues to display as two hyphens/minuses for me. Are you it's not your client trying to be clever?
Does it launch with directx or Vulcan when you do this?
You can also make it launch the Vulkan version with skipping the launcher. Seehttps://gamepretty.com/baldurs-gate-3-how-to-skip-launcher-and-use-desired-graphical-api-vulkan-dx11/
If anyone happens to be playing on Steam Deck (or any Linux desktop), the launch options are slightly different:
DX11 no launcher: --skip-launcher
Vulkan no launcher: bash -c 'exec "${@/bin/bg3.exe}"' -- %command% --skip-launcher
Though for this particular title, the Vulkan one is really crashy on my system rn, which is ironic since the DX11 shaders are converted to Vulkan on Linux.
On my system dx11 crashes right away, so vk it is..
Larian themselves warn that Vulkan should be the least stable of the two options at the moment. That said, I've heard tons of conflicting reports, so it may be super dependent on specific hardware.
Ironically, with the final (not the pre-purchase) release it's the other way around. Vulcan crashes after the airship cinematic.. (I'm also on Linux)
directx is the default and you must apply another switch to start with vulkan https://gamepretty.com/baldurs-gate-3-how-to-skip-launcher-and-use-desired-graphical-api-vulkan-dx11/
For me it chose direct x so I had to use the launcher. Vulcan is much better for me (just be sure to not use triple buffer for nvidia cards). Just choose skip and check the box that says 'do not ask again' and the launcher is less aggravating.
What differences do you see when you use Vulcan? And what's the deal with triple buffering?
Triple buffering basically means that the GPU can temporarily store frames in three different locations in VRAM. This has implications for smoothness and frame time, so it should in theory always be the best option for v-sync and avoiding tearing.
Vulcan should be more efficient so you should get somewhat better performance, though my understanding is it depends on card (AMD cards are kind of designed for Vulkan, but not so much nvidia cards).
When Vulcan worked for me it used less Vram, then dx11 does now on linux.
My experience is that the directx reflections and post processing look worse. Triple buffering on was causing screen tears.
vulkan is more efficient on AMD than directx, as I understand it.
It looks like the following should work (from one of the links above)
You can start the exe you want directly from the directory, there's one for each renderer: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Baldur%27s_Gate_3#Skip_Larian_launcher_on_startup