Show HN: Sarge Launcher – A Quake 3 Arena Utility (github.com)

As an avid quake 3 defrag player, this project started out for me as a tool for Quake 3 and Q3 mods that would solve some of the issues that the in-game UI has. It is essentially an external launcher for the game built with Tauri v2.

Where this launcher shines is it lets you toggle your Quake 3 client exe and with 1 click the launcher is now targeted to that mod (servers / demos / levels refresh). Note there is a nice GIF of the app in the readme of the repo

The project uses Tauri (webview) which some people scoff at - and I get it. Although I think most of the webview stigma is due to electron apps bloating everyone's PC. In any case - I tried my damndest on the UI :).

So try it out - this is for all the Q3 old heads!

Benefits over in-game UI below:

Faster server browser, Ability to favorite servers, Ability to trash servers (this is useful as many servers advertise using fake players which pollutes the in-game browsing experience - trashing these resolves this), Ability to add custom servers that are not advertised on the Q3 master servers, Unlimited number of demos/levels can be displayed (Q3 client exes have hard limits on the amount of demos / levels that can be displayed in the in-game UI), Ability to play demos on a loop (a feature inspired by the old Demo Show Creator tool https://alt.3dcenter.org/dsc/index_english.php), Ability to auto-close the client at demo end, Managing the EXE (basically closing and re-opening the client on subsequent launches), More data is parsed from demos, levels, and servers and is displayed in a nice fashion, You can read back the console activity in demos (chat history etc) without having to play the demo. I don't think this has been done before in any other tool