Cross-platform game launcher and installer for Neocron 2, built with Go and Wails. Designed for use with Neocron2 official Community servers.
I fell in love with Neocron during the open beta in the early 2000s and have followed the project ever since. As the game transitioned to community-run servers, I found myself in a cycle of "returning to the city" every few months, only to be met with the same technical hurdles:
- The Wine Struggle: Getting the original .NET launcher to play nice with Wine/Proton required constant manual overrides and prefix tweaking.
- The "Context Switch" Tax: Every time life or work forced me to take a break, returning to the game meant hours of re-learning how to fix my broken installation.
- Fragmentation: Managing patches, high-resolution texture packs, and server-specific configurations was a tedious, manual process. I built this launcher to solve these problems once and for all. It provides a single-binary, zero-config solution that handles the heavy lifting—from Proton prefix management to delta updates and custom patching—so we can spend less time in the terminal and more time in Neocron.
- Game installer & updater — Downloads the full game from the Neocron CDN, verifies files via MD5 hashes, and performs delta updates (only changed files). Supports concurrent downloads, automatic retry, and resume after interruption.
- Server manager — Add, remove, and select game server endpoints. Supports importing servers from the Neocron SOAP API.
- Proton runtime — Auto-detects Steam Proton installations, downloads GE-Proton from GitHub, and manages Wine prefixes. Linux and macOS launch the game through Proton; Windows launches natively.
- SOAP API client — Connects to Neocron's management APIs (SessionManagement, LauncherInterface, PublicInterface) for authentication, application discovery, and server endpoint retrieval.
- PAK archive support — Reads and writes the Neocron PAK archive format (single-file and multi-file variants).
- Runtime toggles — DXVK, GameMode (Linux), MangoHud overlay.
- Addons — GitHub-hosted file packs (texture upgrades, audio mods, graphics wrappers) installed by repo URL. Wrapper addons can declare DLL overrides that the launcher composes into
WINEDLLOVERRIDESautomatically. - Game log viewer — Streams stdout/stderr from the running game process.
| General | Runtime |
|---|---|
 |
 |
| Add Server | API Login |
|---|---|
 |
 |
Screenshots are auto-generated with Playwright. Run
cd frontend && npm run screenshotswithwails devrunning.
- Wiki — Full user manual
- Installation Guide
- Configuration
- Wine/Proton Setup
- Server Setup
- Troubleshooting
Linux (additional):
sudo pacman -S gtk3 webkit2gtk # Arch/Manjaro
sudo apt install libgtk-3-dev libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev # Debian/UbuntumacOS (additional):
xcode-select --installgo install github.com/wailsapp/wails/v2/cmd/wails@latestwails buildThe binary is output to build/bin/launcher.
wails devThis starts a live-reloading development server with hot reload for frontend changes.
├── app.go # Wails app bindings (config, update, launch, API)
├── main.go # Entry point
├── wails.json # Wails project config
├── pkg/
│ ├── config/config.go # JSON config (~/.config/neocron-launcher/)
│ ├── updater/updater.go # CDN updater (hashdata, delta downloads, resume)
│ ├── pak/pak.go # PAK archive format reader/writer
│ ├── neocronapi/client.go # SOAP API client (session, launcher, public)
│ ├── proton/
│ │ ├── manager.go # Proton build detection & GE-Proton downloader
│ │ └── prefix.go # Wine/Proton prefix management + WINEDLLOVERRIDES composer
│ ├── addon/
│ │ ├── manager.go # GitHub-tarball addon installer + WINEDLLOVERRIDES contributor
│ │ └── state.go # addon.json manifest schema + persisted state
│ └── launcher/launcher.go # Platform-aware game process launcher
├── frontend/
│ ├── index.html # UI shell
│ └── src/
│ ├── main.js # Frontend logic
│ └── style.css # Dark cyberpunk theme
└── .github/
└── workflows/
└── release.yml # CI/CD: builds for 6 platforms on tag push
Config is stored at ~/.config/neocron-launcher/config.json and includes:
| Setting | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
installDir |
~/Neocron2 |
Game installation directory |
cdnBaseUrl |
http://cdn.neocron-game.com/... |
CDN for game files |
apiBaseUrl |
http://api.neocron-game.com:8100 |
Neocron management API |
runtimeMode |
proton (Linux/macOS), native (Windows) |
How to run the game |
enableDxvk |
true |
Use DXVK for DirectX translation |
enableGameMode |
true (Linux) |
Use Feral GameMode |
enableMangoHud |
false |
Show MangoHud overlay |
Addons are GitHub repos containing an addon.json manifest plus the files to drop into the game install directory. Install one by pasting its repo URL into the Addons tab.
addon.json schema:
{
"id": "neocron-graphics-pack",
"name": "Enhanced Graphics (dgVoodoo2 + ReShade)",
"version": "0.1.0",
"category": "graphics",
"files": [
{ "src": "D3D8.dll", "dst": "D3D8.dll" },
{ "src": "dxgi.dll", "dst": "dxgi.dll" }
],
"wineDllOverrides": ["d3d8", "dxgi"],
"requires": ["some-other-addon-id"],
"conflicts": ["incompatible-addon-id"]
}Priority and load order. When two addons declare the same destination path, the higher-priority addon wins. Newly installed addons go to the top of the stack; reorder with the up/down arrows in the Addons tab. The launcher uses a shared pristine-snapshot pool, so disabling the top of a stack restores the next layer down rather than the original game file — the same way Skyrim mod managers handle layered overrides.
Dependencies and conflicts. requires is enforced at install + enable time (transitively, with cycle detection — auto-enables missing deps). conflicts refuses enable when a conflicting addon is already enabled. Disabling or uninstalling an addon that other enabled addons require is refused.
Wine DLL overrides. When enabled, wineDllOverrides entries are composed into a single WINEDLLOVERRIDES=quartz=n,b;d3d8=n,b;dxgi=n,b... env var at game launch — pulled from the union across enabled addons.
CDN-update safety. Update flow is two-phase: pre-update unstamps all addon files (install dir = pristine), CDN updater runs, post-update refreshes the pristine pool from the now-updated install dir, then re-stamps the enabled stack in priority order. Wrapper DLLs survive game patches.
The first-party Enhanced Graphics pack (dgVoodoo2 DX8→D3D11 wrapper + ReShade post-processing) lives at https://github.com/igwtech/neocron-graphics-pack. Paste that URL into the Addons tab to install — once the upstream binaries are bundled, this is the recommended graphics setup for Linux/Proton.
Pre-built binaries are available on the Releases page for:
| Platform | Architecture |
|---|---|
| Linux | amd64, arm64 |
| Windows | amd64, arm64 |
| macOS | amd64 (Intel), arm64 (Apple Silicon) |
To trigger a release, push a version tag:
git tag v0.1.0
git push --tags- Version check — Fetches
_version._from the CDN and compares with the localpak__version._(PAK-compressed). - Hash verification — Downloads
hashdata.dat(gzip-compressed XML), parses file paths and base64-encoded MD5 hashes. - Delta download — Only fetches files whose local hash doesn't match. Uses 3 concurrent download workers with retry and exponential backoff.
- Resume — Saves download state to
.update-state.jsonso interrupted installs continue where they left off. - Launch — On Linux/macOS, wraps the game executable with Proton (
proton run nc2.exe). On Windows, launches directly.
This project is open source. See individual components for their respective licenses.
- Wails — Go + Web frontend desktop apps
- GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom — Custom Proton builds
- The Neocron community — for keeping the game alive
- TinNS and Irata — Neocron server emulator projects