TD_Launcher

A standalone launcher application for automatically opening TouchDesigner projects (.toe files) with the correct version.

Toe autolaunch

Download TD and Install from Launcher

Older Builds not yet supported

What's this for

If you work on a lot of TD projects, or support many older projects you know the pain of having to manage / guess / remember which version something was built in. A real pain if you accidentally upgrade your projects build and lose work when trying to downgrade back again!

How this works

This tool scans your computer when launched for TouchDesigner entries, and builds a list of available TD executable paths that can potentially be used. It then analyzes the .toe file and loads the GUI with the appropriate option selected, and starts a 5 second timer.

If you interupt it by clicking anywhere, you can choose a different version or cancel. If you leave it undisturbed, it will launch after 5 sec in the detected version.

If the required version of Touch is not found, the launcher will not launch anything automatically, and will wait for your input with the required build highlighted in red.

How to use

Download the installer from the releases page on the right, and set windows to open your toe files with that by default. Doubleclicking on toes from that point onwards will launch them with the Launcher.

You can also drag and drop toe files onto the launcher.

How to build

This was built with Python 3.10. Pyinstaller, and the wonderful DearPyGui for UI amongst other things.

By default, Pyinstaller compiled programs when downloaded directly from the internet as an exe or zipped exe tend to get flagged as false positive viruses, for this one it showed up as Trojan:Win32/Wacatac.B!ml, which is of course nonsense.

To get around this for those downloading releases, I bundled the executable into a windows installer using inno setup which conveniently compresses the contents into a format chrome, windows etc can't read at download time.

If you want to build from this repo, there's a few steps, but they are mostly automated.

1. download this repo
2. unzip the py directory from inside py.zip into the root of the repo. This is a full python install, with Pyinstaller DearPyGui, etc installed.
3. make your changes to td_launcher.py, the main script.
4. test td_launcher.py easily by just double clicking td_launcher.bat. (NOTE: when doubleclicking to run, it uses a bundled test.toe as a test file for simplicity.)
5. when ready to rebuild the single file exe with pyinstaller, run BUILD.bat. This will create the executable in dist\td_launcher.exe.
6. optionally if you also wish to bundle the exe into an installer, you can open the iss file inno\TD_Launcher_Inno_Compiler.iss, with inno setup, and build from there. separate installer.exe will show up in the inno\Output\ directory.

If you have any issues, please post a bug issue here.