Back in 2019, when the City of Heroes community was still squabbling over who got to be in charge of what once a copy of the game’s code was leaked from a secret server to the world, there were a few groups that buckled down and started doing the hard work of securing the game and its tech for the future. One of them was SCOTS, and among its projects was Sunrise, which was intended as an entirely new and neutral game launcher to replace those outdated that had been in use for things like Paragon Chat (i.e., Tequila and its spin-offs) and were being repurposed left and right.
Yesterday, the current Sunrise team announced Sunrise is finally available as a public release and has gone fully open source too. Notably, this version should allow players to play multiple rogue servers for the game without much fuss or multiple installs, and it’s a more secure tool now to boot.
“Sunrise is an open-source 64-bit client launcher built with .NET Core and uses Avalonia for the UI. Initial prototypes and concepts were made by a team assembled across several communities. The final initial build released to the public was developed by RedArcaneArcher. Compared to Tequila, Sunrise can:
• View, update and launch all of your servers from a single screen.
• Maintain separate directories for different servers.
• Provides security check functionality on manifests.
• Can run on any modern 64-bit OS supported by .NET Core, including macOS and Linux.
• And most importantly: can download manifests using either the existing XML method while also offering the functionality to cooperate with an API Server storing its manifest in a database.”
We spoke to Sylph Knight from the Sunrise team last night, and he helpfully clarified for us that while all known player-run City of Heroes are compatible with Sunrise, players will still need to add the manifest links into the launcher.
“We hope that Sunrise will convenience players who play across multiple servers,” Sylph Knight told us. “However, from a general user standpoint, Sunrise offers additional back-end security and stability functions missing from some existing launchers. Your user experience itself should remain somewhat identical to what you are used to. The goal of Sunrise is to ultimately replace Tequila as a standard, in particular to the existing reliance on XML for file handling. We are hopeful that other launchers in development will adopt similar opportunities for server administrators. But as things stand, Sunrise is compatible with both XML and API file handling methods.”
We also asked the Sunrise devs specifically about its compatibility with the future Homecoming launcher, which that team teased earlier this summer; apparently, Homecoming is not currently cooperating with the Sunrise team on future compatibility, though of course Sunrise will work just fine with the current Homecoming setup.
Curious about what servers are even out there? We updated our guide just a few months ago. The Sunrise team is also working on an updated website that’ll eventually play host to a list of the entire current batch of servers, something sorely needed by the community.
