Command line options no longer pass through on DRM relaunch; breaking change
Product: EA Desktop
Platform:PC
Error Report ID (learn how to create an Error Report ID in the sticky post) 0593564c-0333-4e43-9596-30533e9c30d6
Which client functionality are you experiencing this bug with? Launch Game
When did this happen? (dd.mm.yy hh:mm) 02.14.22 09:53
Summarize your bug An EA DRM-launched executable from outside of EA Desktop (such as a shortcut to the executable, or called from a script), does not pass the arguments through on game relaunch, which is different behavior from Origin
How often does the bug occur? Every time (100%)
Steps: How can we find the bug ourselves? My example is using Mass Effect Legendary Edition. This game has 4 executables. I will be using MassEffectLauncher.exe. I am also using the application 'ProcMon' by SysInternals (Microsoft) with a filter of 'Process Create'. 1. Open a command prompt. 2. Open ProcMon with the listed filter. 2. Navigate to the launcher directory in cmd: \Game\Launcher 3. Use the following command: MassEffectLauncher.exe -game 1 -autoterminate 4. Observe in procmon how the process did not get relaunched with these command line options. 5. Do the same, but with Origin running instead. Note how the options _do_ get passed through. Note that without a mod, these options do nothing; however note how the behavior has changed.
What happens when the bug occurs? Shortcuts with command line options for example no longer work if EA Desktop is open. See my attached screenshot from Procmon.
What do you expect to see? I expect to see the initial arguments that I passed from the Windows shell (or other program) to the initial DRM launched executable to be passed through to the relaunched executable that EA Desktop decrypts and runs, which is how Origin behaved.
This seems rather small in terms of importance, but it has a very big impact on the modding scene for Mass Effect Legendary Edition. For example, I'm building a mod that enables other languages in Mass Effect 1 Legendary Edition, such as Czech and the second polish translation, which is already in the game, but requires launching MassEffect1.exe with specific arguments. Calling any of these executables directly relaunches the MassEffectLauncher.exe process as that's how the entrypoint for the DRM stub works, which is fine. The arguments we pass to MassEffect1.exe would normally:
-game 1: Tell the launcher to automatically launch MassEffect1.exe (this requires a mod that our scene heavily uses to make games launch faster)
-autoterminate: Automatically terminates the launcher on game launch. This effectively bypasses the launcher, but does not bypass DRM in any way
This is what we call our 'autoboot' feature. I am adding the ability to specify language overrides, for example there are languages CZ and PL that are in the game files but cannot be used by the default launcher options. The CZ language is fully included (EA localized it back in 2009) and PL is a second polish translation that fixed most of issues in the first localization (PLPC), which is what the game unfortunately uses.
I know this is related to 'mods', which EA has a very anti-acknowledgement policy about. However, this isn't really related to modding, it's just impacting things that my userbase does. Autoboot saves developers a _ton_ of time. Being able to play the game in your unofficial-but-kind-of-official-but-still-usable localization means the game is more accessible to players who can't read the other languages. Having shortcuts so I can launch a game with certain options is great, something that the singular command line options window in EA Desktop (and Origin too) is very limiting to have. We could just bypass that by leaving it blank in Origin and just launching it from a shortcut or a script.
I'm the developer for ME3Tweaks Mod Manager, ALOT Installer, and Legendary Explorer. I hope you will reinstate this, as it's pretty crippling to our work. We could technically work around this (such as putting a file on disk that is read) but that's a significantly worse workaround than how we could just use command line arguments.
