Penguin on the Rocks

Current version: v0.9.1

A City of Heroes installer/patcher/launcher for the command line, written in Perl. (Aka it works on Linux, so hallelujah.)

This script was passed along to me by a third party, after checking it over and amending it for the public servers I've released it here.

Recent changes (v0.9.1)

• Fixed --manifest argument that I broke while cleaning things
• Added --profile argument to choose what profile to launch

System requirements

• Perl 5 (I have no clue if it'll run with Perl 6 or not)
• Perl modules:
  • Digest::MD5
  • File::Copy and File::Path
  • Getopt::Long
  • XML::Simple
• wget or curl

While this tool is primarily for Linux & other UNIX-likes, it should also work on the Windows command line with Perl installed (e.g. via Strawberry Perl).

Installation and usage

Put the launcher into the same folder as a City of Heroes (issue 24) install - if you don't have one, the launcher will download it for you in the current directory. Run the script from there.

The launcher runs similarly to Tequila - it downloads a manifest (currently defaulting to the one used for Paragon Chat/Titan Icon), patches everything in it, and then launches CoH with Wine if you're on Linux, or natively on Windows.

Further instructions on setting up Wine can be found on the community document.

Usage: penguinrocks.pl [--patchonly|--launchonly] [--verify] [--silentlaunch] [--silent] [--manifest=<URL of update manifest>] [City of Heroes options].

--silentlaunch: Suppress all console output from City of Heroes.
        This may improve stability or give a slight increase in framerate.
        For most people, I expect it will do nothing.
--silent: Suppress all output except error messages.
--patchonly: Only patch the City of Heroes client, do not launch it.
--launchonly: Only launch the City of Heroes client, do not patch it.
--verify: Verify the checksums of the client files.
--manifest: Specify an alternate manifest location.