Maxima

A free and open-source replacement for the EA Desktop Launcher

Warning

Maxima is pre-pre-pre-alpha-quality software, and is being made open source prematurely for KYBER, which depends on it. We cannot yet provide any support for attempting to use it standalone, although bug-fixes and contributions are welcome.

Maxima is an open-source replacement for the EA Desktop/Origin game launcher, running natively on Linux and Windows, with macOS support in progress.

Maxima itself is a library (maxima-lib), with provided CLI (maxima-cli), TUI (maxima-tui), and GUI (maxima-ui) frontends. Other launchers compatible with Maxima's license may implement it as a backend. It's used by our sister project, KYBER.

Features:

• EA Authentication
• Downloading/Updating games
• Download & Play any build of a game
• DRM & Licensing support
• Multiplayer game support
• Syncing EA cloud saves
• Launch EA games owned on Epic/Steam through Maxima directly
• Playing games installed with EA Desktop on Maxima + vice versa
• Displaying your in-game status to your friends, and viewing your friends' status'
• Locating games (aka. game importing)
• Running games under proton on Linux/SteamDeck
  • proton-ge is automatically installed together with umu.

In-Dev:

• macOS support
• Support for launching Maxima through Epic/Steam

Planned:

• Library documentation/examples
• Support for installing DLCs
• Full EA Desktop interoperability. Games installed with EA Desktop already appear on Maxima, but to take it a step further we'd like the ability to, for example, start a download on EA Desktop and continue it on Maxima.
• Cleaner/Stabler downloader implementation
• Progressive/Selective installs
  • Some games are able to start without being fully installed, and some games contain language-specific files.
• Support for the store (buying games)
• Friend Adding/Removing/Inviting
• Status setting; locked to "online" at the moment
• Refactoring Maxima to new architecture allowing multiple frontends to co-exist

Unsupported:

• Battlefield 3/4 are currently unsupported due to how battlelog does game launching. This is on our radar, but isn't a huge priority at the moment.
  • Please file an issue if you find more games that don't work
• Old games like Dead Space 2 and BFBC2 are unsupported due to being pre-"Download-In-Place" era games. They have a different manifest format which we need to make a parser for.

CLI Usage

maxima-cli standalone will launch an interactive CLI mode to install and launch games.

maxima-cli help will bring up the subcommand list, with things like locate-game, cloud-sync, create-auth-code, list-friends, etc.

Why the name 'Maxima'?

It's the farthest you can get from the Origin.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md

Honorable mentions

• Sean Kahler
  • Former Core maintainer
  • Creator of Maxima

Maintainers:

• Nick Whelan (UI)
• Paweł Lidwin (Core)