Viper is a launcher and updater designed specifically for Northstar, the community-driven open-source project for TitanFall 2. It streamlines the process of updating, installing, launching, and managing mods for both Vanilla TF2 and Northstar.
Key Features:
Automatic updates for Northstar and Viper itself
Mod management with support for easy installation and removal
Launcher capabilities for both Vanilla TF2 and Northstar
Cross-platform compatibility with options for Windows, Linux (AppImage, Flatpak), and other systems
Audience & Benefit:
Ideal for TitanFall 2 players who use Northstar and want a simplified way to manage their game installations. Viper provides a user-friendly interface to keep games up-to-date and mods organized, ensuring a hassle-free experience for both casual and dedicated players.
Please note that some versions will update themselves automatically when a new release is available (just like Origin or Steam) and some will NOT, so choose it accordingly. Only the AppImage, Flatpak and Windows Setup/Installer can auto-update.
There are of course many other things that it can do, but summed up very simply, that is what Viper is capable of doing. With every update Viper gets more features and alike, often many optional features are also available in the settings menu.
All settings take place in the settings page, found in the top right corner of the app, where you can change all kinds of settings. You can also manually go in and edit your config file (viper.json), if you feel so inclined.
Your configuration file will be found in %APPDATA%\viper.json on Windows, and inside either ~/.config or through your environment variables ($XDG_CONFIG_HOME) on Linux, the latter has priority.
Support
To get support please open a GitHub issue, and clearly describe the problem with as many details as possible.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Many of the questions and problems you may have might be able to be answered by reading the FAQ page. So before opening an issue or asking for support please read through it first!
Sidenote
Given that we already have so many Northstar updaters and launchers I urge people to instead of creating new launchers unless there's a very specific reason, just make a pull request on one of the existing ones, otherwise we'll continue to have new ones.
Relevant xkcd:
Some of the existing launchers are listed below:
Viper - A launcher, updater and mod manager with an easy to use GUI
FlightCore - A more minimal GUI manager and updater, with similar features to Viper
ViperSH - A Bourne Shell, CLI only, Northstar updater and mod manager
VTOL - an updater and manager for mods, very feature rich
r2modman - General purpose mod manager, which has support for Northstar
Papa - a CLI only installer, updater, and mod manager
If you wanna edit Viper's code, run it, and so on, you can simply do something along the lines of the below:
$ git clone https://github.com/0neGal/viper
$ cd viper
$ npm i
$ npm run start
This'll launch it with the Electron build installed by npm.
Additionally, if you're creating your own fork you easily publish builds and or make builds with either npm run publish or npm run build respectively, the prior requiring a $GH_TOKEN to be set, as it creates the release itself so it needs a token with access to your repo. So you'd do something along the lines of:
$ GH_TOKEN="" npm run publish
Keep in mind building all Linux builds may take a while on some systems, as packaging the tar.gz release can take a while on many CPUs, at least from my testing. All other builds should be done quickly. When using the publish command it also automatically uploads the needed files to deploy auto-updates, keep in mind you'd need to have the repository setting changed to your new fork's location, otherwise it'll fetch from the original.
