Run from source

[LevFendi]

The overall aim of this group of PRs is to add the option for Windows users to run from source with relatively low hassle. This is meant as a decisive workaround to launcher exe files being flagged by antivirus software.

Changes

• ADD install-and-run.bat as a one-click script to handle most of install and run work. It does the following:
  • Install Py 3.11 standalone using uv
  • Create the venv using build_main.py
  • Use git to setup ao2 and playsound (unless they are already present)
  • Download the prebuilt version of launcher-audio (explained below)
  • Use pip to setup other packages
  • Install everything
  • Run the the launcher
• ADD a CI workflow to the launcher audio repo to publish pre-built Windows wheels so that build from source can download the pre-built wheel from the repo instead of having to install MSVC to compile it.
• ADD Build from source instructions to the main repo readme: Users need to install git and clone the launcher repo to the correct place. Then they run the bat script.
• WIP: Remove git dependency by switching to publishing zip releases of the launcher repo that include ao2 and playsound vendored as part of the download. This way, the entire user setup will be Download, Unzip, Run.

Related PRs

• Improve Linux build steps clarity, add Windows build from source option FactorioAccess#346
• Add release workflow to publish pre-built Windows wheel launcher-audio#1

Testing history

Windows 11, no MSVC installed, fresh copy of repo (not a git clone)

requirements.txt was temporarily modified to point fa_launcher_audio at the v0.1.0-rc1 pre-release wheel URL
directly (since releases/latest/download does not resolve to pre-releases). The final PR uses
releases/latest/download which will resolve once the launcher-audio PR is merged and a release is tagged.

install-and-run.bat was run from a copy of the repo placed inside a Factorio zip install directory. The script
downloaded Python 3.11 via uv, installed all dependencies including fa_launcher_audio from the pre-built GitHub
Release wheel (no C compiler required), and launched the launcher successfully to the main menu, which then successfully runs the game.

[LevFendi]

The bat script calls build_main.py to set up the environment but then using this added flag it exits early before attempting the python freeze.

[LevFendi]

Tested bat script on Windows 11, no MSVC installed, fresh copy of launcher repo (not a git clone). Output summary:

  ============================================================
   Factorio Access Launcher
  ============================================================

  First-time setup - this only runs once.

  Python 3.11+ not found on PATH.
  Installing Python 3.11 via uv...
  Python 3.11 is already installed
  Setting up environment...

  [...dependency collection and install...]

  Downloading fa_launcher_audio-0.1.0-cp311-cp311-win_amd64.whl (1.2 MB)
     ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 1.2/1.2 MB 2.9 MB/s

  Successfully installed [...] fa_launcher_audio-0.1.0 [...]

  Setup complete.

  Updating FactorioAccess to v0.16.57
  Main menu
  1: Launch last played
  2: Single player
  ...