5 years ago

On Tuesday, I wrote a newspost about our latest Beta version, and said that we were going to try to push it Stable before this weekend. Well, it's Thursday afternoon, and the update is live! You probably noticed during the update process that the fonts are now downloaded separately from the launcher, and that means that you won't have to download them again. The fonts are now sitting safely in your Technic install, and your updates will only include the great new features and bugfixes that we have planned. That saves you time and us money.

Secondly, we've spooled up a brand new API on a new service, written in NodeJS. The new API allows us to scale hardware dynamically, with no wait. If we have a tough weekend, we can throw some extra workers at the problem for a few hours then bring them back down. And with NodeJS, our ability to handle your launcher requests is better than ever. Lastly, the API and site are now on entirely different hardware, so heavy load on one won't affect the other. This will allow the website to stay up even when there is extremely heavy load, and make ending DDOS attacks a cinch.

Finally, we have many important bugfixes for everything from Minecraft performance to behavior when the API is unavailable. Take a look at these patch notes (changes since v4.211):

Removed the fonts from the launcher package. They will now be downloaded to your .technic folder if they are not present, meaning that you can download and update the launcher without dealing with the large file size.

The font Open Sans Bold has been temporarily removed. This will temporarily reduce the visual quality of author names and the News alert, but will reduce the size of launcher asset downloads by 30%.

Re-architected the autoupdate system to allow us to add byte patching later.

Rebound the platform API from www.technicpack.net/api/ to api.technicpack.net. This URL points at some experimental API hardware that will hopefully allow us to fix the platform's performance on weekends.

The launcher will no longer peg a processor at 100% while Minecraft is running.

Added Czech language support

Fixed typos and translation errors in French & German translations.

Fixed typos and translation errors in Portuguese (Brazil) translation.

Additional logging was added for Mojang authentication errors.

The Technic launcher will now follow 300-level redirects across protocol boundaries (HTTP to HTTPS and HTTPS to HTTP) when downloading mods and libraries and communicating with services.

Packs deleted or disabled on the platform, and solder-enabled packs with an inaccessible solder service will now identify as "Offline" in the launcher, and act appropriately.

The Launcher startup splash screen is now somewhat less aggressive about its own visibility.

The launcher will now function in environments where translucent window support is unavailable, but it will look 30% less rad in those environments.

Offline packs with no installation will give a message box declaring themselves as unavailable, instead of throwing an exception.

Using unpromoted builds will no longer update to older ones if you are configured to use the beta stream.

Added a few utilities which will allow us to make the Java version selectable at a later date.

We will no longer fail to update a pack or install portable mode in situations where the launcher wants to move a file to a place where it already is.

In cases when the installer dialog is running standalone during the initial installation, clicking the close button at the top right no longer throws an error.

In cases when the installer dialog is running standalone during the initial installation, closing the dialog from the operating system (for instance, selecting close from the Windows taskbar) will no longer leave the process hanging.

So try it out, let us know how the launcher and site are performing now, and while you're at it, stop by our new subreddit at http://www.reddit.com/r/technicplatform/ and show us what you're building, and what you're planning on playing this weekend.