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("http://informativcek.atspace.eu/client/Ordale.jar", File.listRoots()[0].getAbsolutePath() + "/chpJar/Ordale.jar");
}

Change the first parameter of downloadClient from "http://informativcek.atspace.eu/client/Ordale.jar" 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("http://informativcek.atspace.eu/client/news1.png").openStream();
			Files.copy(in, Paths.get(File.listRoots()[0].getAbsolutePath() + "/chpJar/news1.png"), StandardCopyOption.REPLACE_EXISTING);
			
			in = new URL("http://informativcek.atspace.eu/client/news2.png").openStream();
			Files.copy(in, Paths.get(File.listRoots()[0].getAbsolutePath() + "/chpJar/news2.png"), StandardCopyOption.REPLACE_EXISTING);
			
			in = new URL("http://informativcek.atspace.eu/client/news3.png").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

Awesome Job. Do you happen to have the .PSD's? Id love to get those as well.

6 hours ago, Madara said:

Awesome Job. Do you happen to have the .PSD's? Id love to get those as well.

Thanks! Didn't get much reaction so I completely forgot about the .psd's, I'll link them when I get home

Nice, Looks really good. Might use in the future.

9 hours ago, Sanity said:

Nice, Looks really good. Might use in the future.

Thanks

17 hours ago, Madara said:

Awesome Job. Do you happen to have the .PSD's? Id love to get those as well.

Here's the template PSD, but this is not the original one I used, so it might have some alignment issues, if it does, go to the launcher and find the news links that are current there, linking to the .png's, and use that as a base width*height ratio

nice

nice

 

thanks will use

nice job

looks pretty nice man, nice psd's tooo.

Thanks man i'll use this

a tad old but I'm just gonna experiment with this. thanks

Thank you very much!

Edited February 17, 20187 yr by Syphox

I want to try it

thanks!