RiftLauncherWebsite

The website for RiftLauncher, which doubles as its rendered documentation. Published at stratumserver.github.io/RiftLauncherWebsite.

Where the content comes from

Nothing in this repository is a copy of the launcher's documentation. build.mjs reads the docs/ tree and PRIVACY.md from the launcher's dev branch, and the background scenes from its backgrounds branch, both fetched fresh on every run. docs/SUMMARY.md alone decides the sidebar, so adding a page there is all it takes to see it here. The site builds on a push to this repository, on a manual run of the Pages workflow (Actions, Run workflow), which is what a documentation merge in the launcher repository needs to reach the published pages, and every six hours on a schedule, which is how a new release and its notes reach the landing page with nobody touching this repository. Until that run, the reader's browser already sees the newer release and links its notes on GitHub.

The landing page's releases section is built from the GitHub API, and assets/live.js makes that same call again from the reader's browser to refresh the download counts on the page. What the build renders is the whole section for a reader with scripting off, for a crawler and for anyone GitHub rate-limits, so the script only ever replaces numbers that are already there. That call is the one third party this site reaches on its own. Either end can fail without consequence: the build skips the section with a warning and finishes, and the script leaves the page exactly as it found it and says nothing to the reader. When GitHub has a release newer than the built one, the script updates the header and puts a line above the notes linking the new ones on GitHub, since it renders no markdown of its own.

The API reports how many downloads a release has had, never when they happened, so the workflow keeps one total a day in data/downloads-history.json and commits it back. The bar chart is drawn from today's snapshot; the curve above it appears on its own once that file holds a week of points.

The only other things this repository holds are the build script, the stylesheet, the script that refreshes the counts, the landing page copy, the launcher screenshots in assets/shots, the animated clips recorded for the ModDB page in assets/moddb (the landing reuses them), and a 320px copy of the emblem in assets/emblem.webp, since the branding PNG is over a megabyte and only serves as the preview card image.

Languages

The landing page is translated; the documentation, the privacy policy and the release notes are not. Every string the landing shows lives in locales/<code>.json, one file per language. English is the default and is served from the root, and each other language gets a folder of its own, so French is at /fr/. The pages point at each other with hreflang links and with the globe in the header, which lists every language by its own name and grows as files are added.

Adding one

1. Copy locales/en.json to locales/<code>.json, where <code> is the language's ISO code.
2. Translate every value. name is the language's name in that language, since that is what the header lists it as, and short is the code shown on the button. dateLocale is the tag release dates are formatted with, fr-FR style. A few strings carry {name} holes that are filled with numbers and dates at build time; they have to survive the translation. Strings written like {privacy:privacy policy} are links: keep the key before the colon as it is and translate the label after it. Say in docsNote, in the language you are adding, that the documentation is in English.
3. Add the code to the LOCALES list at the top of build.mjs, then npm run build and open a pull request. The build writes the new landing, adds it to every other language's hreflang list and to the header, and fails if anything it points at does not resolve.

A translation should come from somebody who speaks the language, not from a machine: this is the first thing a player reads about the launcher, and a translation that is merely understandable reads worse than English does. The documentation stays English for now, which every translated landing says under the docs link rather than letting a reader find out by clicking.

Building

npm ci
npm run build

The result lands in dist/, ready for any static host. The first build clones two shallow copies of the launcher repository into .cache/; delete that folder to force a fresh fetch. To build against checkouts you already have, point the build at them:

RIFT_SOURCE=../RiftLauncher RIFT_BACKGROUNDS=../RiftLauncher-backgrounds npm run build

To look at the result, serve dist/ with any static file server. Every link and asset reference in the output is relative, so the site works under the repository path GitHub Pages serves a project site from, under a custom domain, or opened straight from disk. The one absolute address is the OpenGraph image, which a preview card cannot resolve relatively; the workflow passes the real base URL in SITE_URL.

The link check

The build resolves every internal link, image and heading anchor in the generated site, and exits non-zero listing anything that does not resolve. A page renamed or moved in the launcher's docs therefore fails the build here rather than quietly publishing a dead link. Links pointing at repository files that are not documentation, such as the source files the privacy policy references, are rewritten to GitHub so they keep working.

Translated pages go through the same check, which is what catches a locale folder reaching for an asset at the wrong depth: their links, their stylesheet, icon and background paths, and the hreflang addresses they point at each other with all have to resolve to a file the build produced.

Design notes

The landing follows the ModDB page: a hero with the launcher beside the copy, then numbered sections (the VS Launcher story, the animated clips, the features, screenshots, privacy and trust, install per system, releases, help), each a dark translucent panel with the amber rule on top. The download button points at the newest release page and, on Windows or a Linux desktop, straight at that system's installer; the install section lists every file of that release with its size. Motion is CSS only (embers, the floating emblem, scroll reveals, the progress line under the bar) and all of it stops under prefers-reduced-motion, where the animated clips are also swapped for still screenshots. First visits open on the Lava Springs scene, the one the ModDB page uses.

The site borrows the launcher's own surface: a background scene from the shared catalog, near-black scrims over it, and the same #7e501e / #d49754 / #4f3110 brand ramp. Text never sits on the background scrim alone, because the scenes are photographs and the worst case has to be treated as a white image. The scrim opacities and the ratios they produce are worked through at the top of assets/site.css. Links are always underlined; colour on its own does not distinguish them from the prose around them.