MHF IELess Launcher

MHF default launcher requires IE to login. IE sucks.

This project reverse engineered the MHF launcher in order to make it possible to boot the game directly, without going through mhf.exe and mhl.dll.

If you're wondering 'Why use this instead of the original launcher?', here are some of the issues that are are solved by using a custom launcher:

• Not being locked to IE.
  • Should open a sea of possibilities on how to design the launcher.
  • Won't take 10 seconds for each request.
  • Game might boot under Linux/Steam deck when using Proton/Wine, since IE was the main reason those weren't even options.
• Not being locked to the weird way MHF connects to the server.
  • Allows launcher operations to be implemented using with HTTP(S), JSON, custom ports, etc.
• Not being locked to the operations and data model the original launcher uses.
  • Allows implementing new operations, such as adding separate buttons for 'Sign Up' and 'Login'.
  • Allows storing and displaying extra information. For example, it would be possible to get character portraits on the launcher window.
  • Removes the need to modify the launcher (since we're replacing it) and mhfo-hd.dll to remove GameGuard, since mhfo-hd.dll calls a function provided by the launcher to run GameGuard checks.

Usage

If calling from another Rust project, make sure it itself is targeting nightly-i686-pc-windows-msvc, and just call run with the correct parameters. The idea at the moment is that most of these parameters will be returned from the signv2server endpoints, but this might change in the future.

You can also use the CLI interface to run this project from any other program, and without the i686 limitation.

Feel free to create a ticket if you need another way to integrate this lib into your app (.dll, bindings for static linking, etc).

Compiling

Before running cargo build, make sure you have the nightly toolchain and the i686-pc-windows-msvc target intalled:

rustup toolchain install nightly
rustup target add i686-pc-windows-msvc