I built an application to address some of the same friction issues Linus discuessed about Whale LAN

pathartl · April 18

Hey all!

I've been co-running a 20ish person LAN for about 8 years with a local group of friends and we ran into the same friction issues that Linus talked about in the last WAN show. We decided to roll out essentially identical e-cycled all-in-one desktops to try to mitigate hardware differences. Then we moved to a single OS image that gets loaded onto each machine with games preinstalled. This helped a ton for sure, but anytime we wanted to add a game or needed to patch a game, it became a pretty large ordeal.

My first attempt was a simple launcher written for nodejs/Electron that would pull the games from a simple HTTP server. That worked fairly well, but it was limited in scope. Games that needed an allocated CD key or a more advanced setup with files in %APPDATA% or registry entries were pretty much out of the question.

About three years ago I started working on a project called LANCommander. The idea is to have the ability to run your own digital gaming distribution platform. The project consists of two applications, a server and a launcher. Both are built on top of .NET 9 and target Windows, Linux, macOS for both x86_64 and ARM (though be warned, launcher support for Linux and macOS is still WIP). The server can be self-hosted either just by running the executable, or using a Docker container.

Here's just some features that exist in the latest version:

Game installation
Rich metadata and media support
Redistributable management and installation/configuration
"Cloud" saves
Basic game server support (with Docker container management coming soon)
Game key management and allocation
Multi-user and multi-role security
SSO authentication
CLI interface

I made a video to directly address some things mentioned on the show:

https://youtu.be/6kK7VKwRayw

I've been working on LANCommander in my free time, so parts of it are still pretty scrappy. However, the userbase has slowly been growing with some larger groups like [DadLAN](https://dadlan.au/) utilizing the application to unify the setup of their games during events. If you were able to make it out to Open Sauce, or VCF Midwest in 2024 I had a small 6 player LAN setup where we were able to play some games while totally disconnected from the internet:

Feel free to ask any questions about the project! You can also check out the following resources: