Basic Customisable Packager

[Scenic_Drive]

Hello people,

 

I have spent the last few days configuring a test server for myself and a few friends.  The server is an Intel I3 with 8GB of ram, and a 16GB flash drive. The OS is Ubuntu 14x Ltr.  The Minecraft Server operates out of a 2GB RAM partition.

 

I taught myself forge pretty quickly - after watching it work in various launchers.

 

I currently have a 1.7.2 server with 34 mods running pretty smoothly - sans the Nether.

 

With my friends, they are all adults with various levels of computer backgrounds.

 

For the initial installs, I uploaded a zip file onto Team Speak, then walked each person through the set up.  This took varying amounts of time, depending on how computer literate the people were and the temperaments of the various anti-virus programs.  My longest person was about a half hour, and the quickest was about five minutes.

 

Looking back at this, I realized today that if forge installer could be customized to make a distributable package that would probably allow the less savvy computer and minecraft people would play the modded versions more often.

 

How I would see this is as an option where forge installs mods that are contained in a folder that comes along with the forge installer.  It would be configured as a .cfg file that is automatically generated that includes a command to search and install all mods from the directory, and also set additional minecraft options (1G of ram is not enough for my version of packages).

 

On their side they would get a .zip file with a  folder.  Inside the folder they would see the forge.exe, another folder labeled Packaged_Mods (or something like that) and a .cfg file.  They would run the executable and it would give a very basic menu that only installs forge client, for specific minecraftxx version.  The installer would then install the version of minecraft that is necessary, by running minecraft.exe, and after the vanilla version is downloaded and extracted, shuts down minecraft.  Then FML would preform the mod install from the folder, and set any of the extra flags in the minecraft forge profile.  FML installer would then give the user an "attaboy" and exit.

 

I do not know if this is in programming terms a mailbox or a school bus. 

 

Opinions?

[LexManos]

No we are not a mod pack installer.

Yes, you can use our installer to install whatever you want.

It's open source fo look at it.

But, no we have NO intention of developing anything to install modpacks like because its quite literally 'put these files in the mods folder' you can accomplish that with a zip file.

[Syntaxial]

SKMC's launcher can do this, but it required you to host the files on a public server.

 

You could always modify it, though...

 

...Now I want to fork his launcher and make improvements. There goes the rest of the weekend instead of waiting for a server to be assembled