I made a Launcher for a project I was working on, this is what it looks like:
Whilst it's loading the client:
Once it's downloaded and ready to play:
The news are .png's you can host anywhere and link to, so you can make them update whenever, since it just fetches the png's every time the launcher opens. So keep in mind, although the launcher has news1.png, news2.png and news3.png there it doesn't read those, the other images provided in the source of the launcher are not fetched from the web and instead stored and used locally. I'll add a template for the news in .psd format you can use to just edit the text and image of a news image, so you don't have to struggle with alignment and such, but i'm at work so it has to wait till I get home, I don't have the file here.
Here is the download link for the launcher, if anyone wants to use it. It hasn't been tested on Mac OS yet because it uses (what I believe to be) a windows specific function to get the users root directory, but I'll check it out and post info, maybe a version that works on Mac as well.
How to get the client working:
Step 0) Download the launcher, ofc.
Step 1) Host your client somewhere and make sure it has a direct download link. (For example, if you put it on dropbox, you can add ?dl=1 at the end of the link to make it download directly upon opening the link)
Step 2) Open up Launcher.java and find the call to the DownloadClient method:
else{
//play.setEnabled(false);
lblClientUpTo.setVisible(false);
clientdl = true;
new File(File.listRoots()[0].getAbsolutePath() + "/chpJar/").mkdir();
downloadClient("[Hidden Content]", File.listRoots()[0].getAbsolutePath() + "/chpJar/Ordale.jar");
}
Change the first parameter of downloadClient from "[Hidden Content]" to your own client download link, you can also change the last parameter to something else, if you don't want the client to be saved in a folder called chpJar under the name Ordale (C:/chpJar/Ordale.jar would be the path if the users root dir is C:)
After you do that, it should already work. To change the news images, look for:
//Initialize the contents of the frame.
private void initialize() {
try {
java.io.InputStream in = new URL("[Hidden Content]").openStream();
Files.copy(in, Paths.get(File.listRoots()[0].getAbsolutePath() + "/chpJar/news1.png"), StandardCopyOption.REPLACE_EXISTING);
in = new URL("[Hidden Content]").openStream();
Files.copy(in, Paths.get(File.listRoots()[0].getAbsolutePath() + "/chpJar/news2.png"), StandardCopyOption.REPLACE_EXISTING);
in = new URL("[Hidden Content]").openStream();
Files.copy(in, Paths.get(File.listRoots()[0].getAbsolutePath() + "/chpJar/news3.png"), StandardCopyOption.REPLACE_EXISTING);
} catch (IOException e1) {
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
e1.printStackTrace();
}
and change the URLs there. To change the Twitter and Facebook links, again, search for those URLs and change those. That should be it, hopefully someone finds some use out of this. Cheers
