5 years ago

We've Been Incognito

It's been awhile since you've heard from us, but we haven't been idle! We've been working hard on a lot of fronts to make 2015 the Summer of Technic! You're going to be hearing from us a lot more often over the next 3 months, but let's round up all the great things we've been up to!

Welcome To Florida

Over the past 6 months, CanVox and Technic's artist, TheHave, have been undertaking the cross-country move necessary to put them in Florida, home of KakerMix and sct. This has taken up a lot of our time, but we're now closer than ever, and getting more done than we thought possible. This move has been really stressful, but you're going to start to see some real benefits!

Welcome, Zehn!

No, he's not yet another Pack Welder. Zehn is a new Technic guy who's going to help us out with your support questions and also work Modpack reports so we can respond more consistently to problem modpacks, and restore modpacks when they've been fixed. We know that this has been a problem area for us, so it's Zehn to the rescue!

Are You Ready for New Packs?

This is going to be the summer of brand new 1.7.10 packs for Technic! We've been working hard on packing, testing, and providing exclusive Technic content for all of our packs! The first one will be released by the end of June and we think you're going to be pretty impressed. This summer, you can look forward to a new and improved Official Technic version of Blightfall, Tekkit, and Hexxit. And by the end of the year, a new, super-secret pack that we can't even talk about!

In the meantime, enjoy these teasers for some of the great new stuff coming in Hexxit II!

Boots of Ultimate Parkour:

A brand new mod allowing magical abilities to be added to the game!

Platform, Platform, Platform!

Some important improvements have been made to the Platform lately to really improve the speed and scalability of the website. You may have noticed that in-launcher stats display and the website's personal Feed have been shut off. This is a temporary measure- soon, both features will be back up and faster than ever, allowing for great performance on the weekends once again. Let's go over what we've done so far:

First, stats tracking. Stats have been a major scaling problem with the platform for some months. We wanted to store the stats in a way that would allow pack authors to produce reporting and see trends. While the initial data structure supported that, it was too granular, and the database bloomed out of control.

We've fixed this problem for new data and old data is being processed to be less granular. Unfortunately, the processing is taking much longer than we anticipated. We're currently working on a solution to allow the website's Redis-based stats display to be used on the API, so that stats display can return to the launcher before the database table is ready to be used.

Secondly, new Solder linkages with the Platform. It used to be really easy for a badly-configured Solder server, when linked to the Platform, to break your pack's platform page with very little information. We've fixed this issue, but it's kind of squirrely so please let us know if you're bitten by this in IRC.

Next, database load. Most site slowness is caused by load on the database from lots of people using the site. We've re-examined the way we're retrieving certain types of data (mainly, ratings and whether you've +1'd an item you're looking at). We'll be reorganizing the queries for these over the coming weeks to reduce load and allow us to bring back the dashboard feed and even expand functionality without hurting performance. If we need to, we're not unable to or opposed to upsizing the database, but we'd like to try optimization first. Please bear with us while we explore solutions.

Lastly, we had to add a throttle to the launcher API. We didn't want to, but unfortunately someone chose to execute a DOS attack against us in April that targetted us by fishing for cache misses to place load on the database. We were only able to defeat the attack by placing an API command limit with a cooldown. We're very sensitive to legitimate users being bitten by this limit, so please make us aware if it's a problem for you.

We're also tracking an issue with the platform currently where sometimes when a pack owner or contributor saves the pack, it fails to hand off the new data to the API. If you've saved your pack, restarted the launcher, and the new data isn't visible in the launcher. Try resaving the pack on the platform and restarting the launcher again. This generally fixes the issue, and we will be implementing a possible fix this week.

Launcher Updates: v4.301

4.301 was released some time ago, but here are the release notes for that version.

v4.301:

Updated Czech translation

Updated French translation

The library seek & download method has changed. It now uses the Maven library "Aether" to build a real dependency list for select libraries in version.json instead of merely building a URL from the artifact data and downloading it. This allows version.json to support things such as SNAPSHOT builds, which is vital for experimental libraries such as Mixin.

When the modpack's version.json overrides a dependency library version in minecraft's version.json, we will no longer preference minecraft's version during the launcher problem. This fixes an issue which was occurring with newer version of forge in which packs were crashing on launch because forge wanted a newer version of a library and we were not correctly providing it.

And Much, Much More!

When we say this is going to be the Summer of Technic, we mean it! More great stuff for players, more great stuff for pack authors, server owners, this is going to be nuts! Keep checking back here and keep playing!

Visit us on IRC, reddit, and our official forums and tell us what the Summer of Technic means to you!