RWCRP Launcher 0.1.0 - the county gets a front door

For the first season, getting into RedWood County meant keeping a browser tab open, remembering a connect string, and trusting that FiveM would find its way. That worked. It was never good.

The RWCRP Launcher is our answer to that: a small Windows application that signs you in with your county account, checks your whitelist stamp, and puts you on the server with one button. It is version 0.1.0, which is an honest number. This is the first build we have put in front of members, and there are rough edges we already know about and list further down.

This notice is the long version. If you only want the short one: download it from your member portal, sign in, press Play.

What the launcher actually is:

It is not a mod, not a client, and not a replacement for FiveM. FiveM still runs the game. The launcher is the part that stands in front of it the porch, not the house.

When you press Play, four things happen in order. It confirms your session is still valid with the website. It checks that your whitelist stamp is on file. It asks the game server whether it is answering. Then it hands FiveM a direct connect to our host and gets out of the way.

That order matters. Most failed connections in the first season were not connection problems at all they were people who were not whitelisted yet, or whose session had quietly expired, discovering it after a two-minute game load. The launcher tells you in about three seconds instead.

Getting it:

The download lives in your member portal, behind sign-in. It is not on the public site and it will not be. The launcher is for members of this community, and a whitelisted server has no reason to hand its front door to the open internet.

It is Windows only. It needs the Microsoft Edge WebView2 runtime, which ships with Windows 10 and 11 by default if yours is missing for some reason, the installer will point you at it.

When you run the installer, Windows will show you a blue SmartScreen warning that says the publisher is unknown. That is expected, and we would rather explain it than have you wonder. Code signing certificates cost several hundred dollars a year, and for a first build going out to a few dozen people we chose to spend that money elsewhere. Click More info, then Run anyway. If that does not sit right with you, that is a reasonable position to hold, and you can keep connecting the old way nothing about the launcher is mandatory.

The installer puts the application in your own user folder, not Program Files, so it never asks for administrator rights. Nothing about the launcher needs them.

Signing in:

The launcher does not ask for your password. It cannot it never sees one.

Pressing sign-in opens your normal browser on the county website, where you log in the way you always do: Discord, Steam, Cfx.re, or email and password. The website then hands the launcher a one-time code through a link, and the launcher trades that code for its own session token. Your password never touches the application.

That session lasts ninety days and slides forward every time you use it, so in practice you sign in once and forget about it. If you ever want to cut a device loose you sold a PC, or you signed in somewhere you should not have every launcher session is listed on your website security page and can be revoked from there. Revoke it and that install is signed out immediately.

The Play button, and what it is doing:

The first thing you will notice is that the county's status is already on screen before you press anything. Online or offline, how many people are in, how long ago we checked.

Press Play and the launcher walks the checks described above, showing you which one it is on. If something is wrong it says so in plain words rather than a code. Not signed in. Whitelist still pending. County is not answering.

Two details here came out of real failures in testing, and they are worth knowing about because they explain behaviour you might otherwise find strange.

The launcher keeps your PC awake while a launch is in progress. FiveM's first load can take a long time on a cold cache, and Windows was helpfully going to sleep in the middle of it on at least one machine. The launcher now tells Windows to hold off until you are actually in the game, then releases it.

It also waits longer for the Rockstar Games Launcher than it used to. GTA V requires Rockstar's launcher to hand over a session, and that handshake can take upwards of twenty seconds on a slow morning. An earlier build gave up at twelve seconds and reported a failure for a launch that was going to succeed. It now waits thirty.

If you would rather the launcher got out of your way once you are in, it can. There is a setting to minimise it when the game window appears, and another to close it entirely. Minimise is the default, and it goes to your system tray rather than your taskbar click the tray icon to bring it back.

The County page:

This is the page we expect people to actually leave open.

It shows whether the server is answering, how many people are in and out of how many slots, and a live roster of who is connected with their ping. That roster comes from the game server itself every eight seconds, not from a cached number on the website. When the server does not answer, the launcher falls back to what the website last knew and tells you that is what it is doing.

Underneath is the direct connect address and a button that copies the full F8 console command. If the Play button ever lets you down, that is your way in open FiveM, press F8, paste, enter. The join code is there too for the same reason. We would rather you have three ways in than one.

The page also carries whatever is happening at county level: whether applications are open, on waitlist, or closed, and any maintenance window we have announced with the time we expect to be back.

The newswire, in the launcher:

Every notice we publish on the website this one included appears in the launcher, and you can read the whole thing without leaving it. The launcher checks for new posts every couple of minutes, so a notice posted while you have it open turns up on its own.

You can filter by category and search the wire. There is a link on every article to open it on the website if you would rather read it there or send it to someone.

This is deliberately a read-only view. Comments, reactions, and discussion live in Discord, where they belong.

Settings worth knowing about:

Most of these you can leave alone. A few are worth a look.

Hide FiveM's loading window is on by default. FiveM shows its own bootstrap splash while it starts, which is fine on its own and ugly when something else has already told you what is happening. This moves it off-screen.

Skip FiveM's own homepage is also on by default. Without it, FiveM briefly shows its server browser and its own news before our loading screen takes over. It is a flash of somewhere else in the middle of arriving here.

Show the game as RedWood County RP changes the game window's title and icon, so your taskbar and Alt-Tab say where you are rather than showing a generic FiveM entry. Cosmetic, on by default, harmless to turn off.

Hide the Rockstar Games Launcher window is off by default, and we recommend leaving it off. Rockstar's launcher sometimes genuinely needs to be visible to finish signing you in, and hiding it can make FiveM fail to connect in a way that is hard to diagnose. Only turn it on if you know your Rockstar session stays signed in.

Launch on startup does what it says. Notifications controls the small toasts for sign-in, county status, and update prompts.

Release channels:

There are four: Official, Beta, Test, and Experimental.

Official is the stable build. Unless you have a reason, this is the one you want, and it is what you get by default.

Beta runs a step ahead of Official. Mostly stable, occasionally rough, and the most useful place to be if you want to help us find problems before they reach everyone.

Test is where new launcher features go before they go wider. Experimental is whatever is newest, and you should assume it will break.

Switching channels is not an in-place update, because to Windows each channel is a separate application with its own install. Picking a different channel downloads that channel's real installer and opens it you will see the normal Windows install screen, and nothing runs silently. Afterwards the launcher points you at Windows' own Apps and Features page to remove the one you left behind, if you want it gone. Two ordinary Windows dialogs instead of one silent swap.

Updates:

The launcher can update itself. When a new build is published to your channel, it downloads it, verifies it, installs it, and restarts.

The verification part is the piece we care about. Every published build is signed with a private key that never leaves our hands, and each launcher carries the matching public key built into it. A build that is not signed with our key is refused. That means a compromised download link, or a mirror someone sets up claiming to be us, cannot push code onto your machine through the updater.

If self-update is ever unavailable, the launcher falls back to sending you to the member portal to download the installer manually, and running it over your existing install is safe your sign-in and settings survive it.

What we fixed getting here:

This build is 0.1.0, but it is not the first thing we built. Several problems were found by running it rather than by reading it, and they are worth listing because they are the sort of thing that erodes trust quietly.

The launch spinner appeared frozen for some people. It turned out that Windows' "play animations" accessibility setting which a fair number of people turn off was being read by the launcher's stylesheet as a blanket instruction to stop all motion, including the one spinner whose entire job is to say "still working". Progress indicators are now exempt from that. Motion you can turn off is decoration; a spinner is information.

Opening a news article could turn the whole window black. Any error while drawing a page took the entire application down with it, because nothing was there to catch it. There is now a boundary around each page: if one fails, you get a message and a way back to Home instead of a dead window.

Text overflowed its box when the window was not maximised, badly enough to push article titles off the edge of the card. That was a layout bug that only appeared at certain widths, which is exactly the kind that survives testing on one monitor.

The application icon was wrong in a way that was oddly hard to pin down. It looked correct in some places, generic in others, and stale in the rest. Two separate causes: the icon file was saved in a format Windows' shell will not read for small sizes, and the artwork itself was a wide logo squeezed into a square, which turned to mush below about forty-eight pixels. It has been redrawn as a proper square mark.

Uninstalling did not fully uninstall. It removed the application and left roughly twenty-four megabytes of cached data behind. Removing the launcher now removes everything it put on your machine the program, its cache, its shortcuts, and its registration.

Known rough edges:

We would rather tell you these than have you find them.

The installer is unsigned, so SmartScreen will warn you. Covered above.

There is no upload or download progress bar on some operations they show a busy state and then finish. It works, but it is less reassuring than it should be while it is happening.

The player roster on the County page shows names as the server reports them, which is not always the name you know someone by.

Self-update has not yet been exercised in the wild, for the simple reason that 0.1.0 is the first published build and there is nothing to update from. The next release is the real test of it.

Linux and macOS are not supported and are not planned. FiveM is a Windows product.

What comes next:

Desktop notifications are the obvious gap. The launcher already knows when the county comes up, goes down, or a new build lands, and right now it only tells you if you happen to be looking at it. Notifications that reach you while it is sitting in your tray are the next thing we want to add.

Beyond that we are listening. This build exists because it solves problems we had; the next one should solve problems you have.

When something goes wrong:

Most launch problems fall into a handful of shapes. Here is what each one usually means.

It says you are not signed in, but you signed in last week. Sessions last ninety days, but they end early if you revoked the device from your security page, changed your password, or signed out on purpose. Sign in again and it will be fine. If it happens repeatedly within a few days, tell us, because that is not normal.

It says your whitelist is still pending. That is the truth and the launcher cannot help you with it. Staff read every file by hand. Check the whitelist page on the website for where yours sits.

It gets to "starting the county" and nothing happens. Nine times in ten this is the Rockstar Games Launcher waiting for you. Alt-Tab and look for it it may be asking you to sign in, accept something, or finish an update. The launcher now waits thirty seconds for that handshake, but it cannot click Rockstar's buttons for you.

FiveM opens and immediately closes. That is usually FiveM itself, not us. Run FiveM on its own once and let it finish whatever update it wants. If it will not run alone, it will not run from the launcher either.

Your antivirus objects to the installer or the launcher. This is a consequence of shipping unsigned software, and it is the strongest practical argument for buying a certificate. The installer and the application are both clean; if your antivirus quarantines them and you would rather not create an exception, connecting the old way remains perfectly valid.

The county shows as offline but your friends are playing. The launcher asks the game server directly, so if it says offline while others are in, the most likely cause is something between you and the server rather than the server itself. Try the direct connect from the County page. If that works, tell us, because that is a useful signal.

The window is blank or a page looks broken. Right-click and choose Refresh. If it persists, close it from the tray and open it again. If it survives that, the log will have something in it.

What the launcher knows about you:

Worth stating plainly, because a program that signs you in and watches a game process deserves the question.

It stores one thing on your machine that matters: the session token the website issued it, kept in Windows' own credential store rather than a file. Your settings sit in a small configuration file next to the log.

It talks to two places. The county website, for sign-in, your whitelist status, the newswire, the server manifest, and update checks. And the game server itself, to ask whether it is answering and who is on it the same query any server browser makes.

It does not read your other games, your files, your browsing, or anything else on your machine. It watches exactly one process, FiveM, and only while a launch is in progress, so it knows when you have actually arrived rather than guessing.

The log it keeps is local. It is never uploaded anywhere. If you send it to us for support, that is you choosing to, and it is worth a glance first it contains the hostnames it talked to and what happened, which is the point.

Questions we expect:

Do I have to use it?

No. Direct connect works exactly as it always did, and the County page in the launcher will hand you that address if you want it.

Does it make the game run better?

No. It changes nothing about how GTA V or FiveM perform. It removes friction before the game starts, and that is all it claims.

Will it run on Linux or macOS?

No, and it is not planned. FiveM is Windows software.

Does it need administrator rights?

No. It installs to your user folder and never asks for elevation.

Can I install more than one channel at once?

Yes. Each channel is a separate application to Windows, so Official and Beta can sit side by side. They keep separate sign-ins.

What happens to my settings when it updates? They survive. Updating, or running the installer over an existing install, keeps your sign-in and your configuration.

Reporting problems:

The launcher keeps a log. You can find the exact path in Settings, under About it is in your local application data folder. When something goes wrong, that file usually says why in plain language.

Post in the Discord support channel with what you were doing and what it said. If the log has something relevant in it, include it. A screenshot of an error is helpful; the log line behind it is better.

Credits and the legal bit:

The launcher is built and published by Vexoris Development, who build and run the county's software. It is proprietary software licensed to members of RedWood County RP the full licence is in the installer and in Settings, under About.

RedWood County RP and Vexoris Development are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Cfx.re, Rockstar Games, or Take-Two Interactive. FiveM and the Rockstar Games Launcher belong to their respective owners and are governed by their own terms.

Download it from your member portal. We will see you on the ridge.