Greetings! Today’s update features an improved image loader, fixed game mounting, fixed Steam store game spawning, and more!
Improved Image Loader
In the past, the image loader had trouble working on certain sites which meant you had to try multiple image URLs before finding one that’d work. Today’s update resolves this by implementing SteamHTTPRequests as a fallback for loading images less-than 10MB. This means that pretty much any image URL you throw at it will be able to successfully load the images as textures in-game! (The UI menus may still have trouble displaying images from certain sites, but they’ll work on the in-game objects regardless.)
Fixed Game Mounting
It turns out the old way that AArcade detected mountable game’s install paths relied on the user having taken the Steam survey at least once, which resulted in many people needing a custom gameinfo.txt in order to mount their other games. Today’s update resolves this by improving the way AArcade asks Steam for the install paths of other Source engine games. Now it’ll be able to find & mount your other Source engine games automatically, even for 1st-time users who’ve never ran a Steam Survey before.
Steam Store Wizard Fixed
Steam’s recent website upgrade broke the way AArcade detects that you are looking at a spawnable Steam game when using the wizard. Today’s AArcade update fixes this so that you’ll be able to spawn not only individual games from the Steam Store wizard, but also fixes the batch-import of all your Steam games (or just of your recent Steam games.) Just note that when batch-importing Steam games from your profile, you’ll have to scroll to the bottom of the games list BEFORE hitting Import Steam Games to make sure it detects them all.
As usual, the batch-import options can be found in Main Menu > Settings Menu > Import tab > Steam Games button.
Other Wizard Improvements
Wizards are what let you easily spawn items from the in-game browser from specific sites. Sometimes the sites associated with Wizards become obsolete or the JavaScript used to spawn items from the sites becomes outdated. Today’s update hides some of the known obsolete wizards to tidy up the list some. The following wizards have been auto-hidden from the lists in today’s update: DC Universe, Giant Bomb, Oculus Store, and Origin.
The only wizards considered vital & always kept in working order are the Steam Store and The Movie DB wizards. Several of the other wizards still work, but aren’t routinely tested so your milage may vary. You can expect more tweaks to the Wizards system (as well as improvements to the drag & drop features of AArcade) in future updates.
You can CTRL + V paste URLs in to spawn them while in walking around mode, and you can always customize your items in the Edit Item menu or with the drag & drop features. Wizards are mostly being phased out, other than the ones considered vital.
Moon Jump
Do you want to jump high, man? Does Pinocchio have wooden knees? Now you can adjust how much air you get in your jumps with the new convar “jump_power”, default set to 1.0 Set it to 2.0 to get twice as much air! Or even higher if you’re feeling froggy.
Under-The-Hood
There were various other tweaks & additions (listed in the full change log) that mostly just apply to advanced users who write their own UI mods or dig deep with their key binds. “Full Media Library” exports of an arcade now properly include prop data. The “petattach” command now accepts “-1” as a target to indicate the play-as-pet. The Quests feature can be toggled between map loads with “quests_enabled 1/0”, and some tweaks to some internal methods UI mods use such as getNearestObjectToPlayerLook being able to include item types in its response.
Looking Towards the Future
It’s been another stable year for AArcade without any major game-breaking bugs. AArcade: Source will remain on the 32-bit engine branch of the Source engine (as the 64bit branch doesn’t inherently provide it with many improvements.)
2026 will be a year of QoL & first-time-user experience improvements and likely lead to AArcade coming out of Early Access. Many of us have been using AArcade: Source as our 3D desktop for the past decade, and it’s looking like it’ll remain functioning for decades going forward. (Which was always the plan - to float forever.) It’s open source & built on top of a classic vanilla game engine that has a very stable future.
Beyond AArcade: Source, the Anarchy Arcade line of apps & experiments continues to grow with projects like The Anarchy Archives, AArcade: PlayCanvas, AnarchyTV, and many of the community characters appearing in virtual TV shows on Shmotime and LurkMode, including prototype integrations within AArcade: Source itself through UI mods.
There is also the Arcade Core project that aims to modularize AArcade’s core personal media library, UI, and some Libretro features into an easily embeddable framework for use in future engines, such as an AArcade: Source 64 (a 64-bit engine branch remake), and potentially other AArcade clients built on top of other sandboxes such as S&Box or Minecraft. Each game engine / ecosystem offers unique pros & cons, and there’s no reason users wouldn’t be able to move freely between different frontends - bringing their personal media libraries with them - to find what suits them best.
Wrap-Up
That’s all the news for now! If you’d like to connect with the AArcade community, check out the Community section of the Anarchy Arcade website. Otherwise, have a great end-of-2025 and I’ll see you on the flip side!
Change Log
Hid the following obsolete wizards by default: DC Universe, Giant Bomb, Oculus Store, Origin.
Adjusted the Pet Context Menu to auto-close when setting a behavior.
Fixed bug of Always Animated Image task clustering up the Main Menu.
Improved exporting arcades w/ full media library to also include prop model definitions.
Adjusted the "petattach" command to accept "-1" as the 2nd parameter to indicate "just use the play-as pet entity."
Added jump_power (default 1.0) that is a multiplyer to the jump force applied.
Added convar quests_enabled 1/0 (enabled by default.)
Fixed Steam Store wizard for spawning individual games from the Steam Store.
Fixed bulk import of Steam games through Main Menu > Settings Menu > Import tab > Steam Games button. (You have to scroll to the end of the page before pressing the Import Games button now.)
Added optional variable for "include type" to the getNearestObjectToPlayerLook and getNextNearestObjectToPlayerLook internal UI methods.
Improved Awesomium data source handling to properly return a failed request response in all cases where IO failed.
Improved the image loader to have the ability to use SteamHTTPRequests as a fallback to direct image loading. (Only for images < 10MB.)
Added options for image loader to use http variant on fields. (But disabled by default because SteamHTTPRequests handles this case more robustly.)
Fixed auto-detection of mount paths of other installed Source engine games.
Added global define of AA_USE_GENERATED_CODE 0/1 to the C++ to exclude AI-generated code blocks from being compiled into the Steam version. (There is currently no way to enable these experimental code blocks other than compiling from the GitHub source code yourself.)
