JKG Launcher Testing Begins

[Futuza]

Hey everybody, Darth Futuza here with some good news: after many long w̶e̶e̶k̶s̶ months of procrastination I’ve finally finished fixing the Jedi Knight Galaxies Launcher.  This represents a pretty cool milestone for JKG, as we now have a way to continually push new content to users and have a way of getting it updated automatically whenever we release a new patch.  It was a lot of fun learning more about the Qt C++ library, and a bit frustrating, but the result is very much worth it.

 

Here's a preview:

 

 

This week we’ll be starting alpha testing of the launcher and next week we’ll beta test it.  If you’d like to participate in the alpha test, just hang out in our IRC channel ( http://jkgalaxies.com/irc/ ) and we’ll be passing out links.  Then just download and install JKG using the launcher, and try everything you can to make it break.  If you find a bug, report it and I’ll try to fix it before the beta test.  The following week we’ll begin open beta test and I’ll put a link up on the main site.  We hope especially to stress test our update server during this time, and ensure that everything will work as expected.  Once again everyone, thanks for your continued support of JKGalaxies and I look forward to seeing you in game.

[Boothand]

YAY!!!!!!!!!!

[Omicron]

YUS. I'll get on irc tonight when more are on, as noone seem to be on atm >.>

[Futuza]

YUS. I'll get on irc tonight when more are on, as noone seem to be on atm >.>

Sorry I just woke up

[SecretApprentice]

Yes Finally!!

[Didz]

Curious why the launcher had to be re-done. It was completed over 3 years ago!

[Futuza]

Released a hotfix for the launcher today, after some of you caught some problems yesterday.  Should work for everyone now, not just 64bit systems.  I'm working on the next version to correct some more issues that were caught as well, and maybe add a few more things before we do the beta (like a pause button for when you are downloading).

 

 

Curious why the launcher had to be re-done. It was completed over 3 years ago!

Added a lot of features mostly, also had to change it to work with new server host once we moved to jkgalaxies.com (instead of terrangaming).  There were also a few bad problems with bad error handling and some bugs that'd cause lots of problems.  One example would be when a patch is released for the launcher, if you cancel the the update while it is downloading it would choke and die, instead of canceling.  Also eezstreet did a few updates to it about 3 2? years ago, that caused a lot of problems and broke things that never got fixed properly.

 

Some features that got added:

-settings menu (adjust how you launch the game (start in fullscreen/adjust resolution/etc, easy access to screenshots, fix install problems)

-bug report link

-retry button if download is interrupted (lose wifi signal for example)

-changed how the install process works since we now use openjk as the base engine instead of jamp

-uses ini to store information instead of the windows registry (which means I could probably also get it to work on linux/mac/etc...)

[Onysfx]

About damn time . Am willing to test with you guys.

[eezstreet]

Also eezstreet did a few updates to it about 3 years ago, that caused a lot of problems and broke things

 

 

 

Also eezstreet did a few updates to it about 1-2 years ago that added PK3 protection and cut down significantly on the bandwidth, but PK3 protection was dropped so yeah I had to get rid of it

fixed

[Futuza]

fixed

I was referring to you adding the PTR zip extract thing, not that.  But yes that was helpful.

 

Just to clarify, I wasn't saying eezstreet "ruined everything" or anything like that, simply that the project has changed directions a few times (especially in light of going open-source), and that some of those experiments in trying to improve things with the launcher came to naught simply because we found better ways of doing it/changed our minds.  This is common in any source code project, in which aspects of the design change.  Old ideas have to be scrapped, and sometimes things get broken as a result.  Such is the nature of software development.  I apologize if you took it the wrong way eezstreet, that was poorly worded of me.

[Futuza]

Just a quick update: I'm going to open the launcher up for beta testing this week, we've gone through about 4 revisions thanks to our thorough alpha testers, and I'm also working on the next update which I hope to have time to finish soon; however, at the present it works great.  Download located here: http://jkgalaxies.com/downloads/  (File is currently waiting approval here on jkhub File has been approved!)