Some of you who follow me on Twitter may know that I've recently been working on a new project called Synctron. Synctron is a website that synchronizes YouTube videos, allowing you to watch videos online with other people at the same time. Synctron allows you to create rooms and give people links to your room so that they can join and watch videos with you. Each room also has its own chat area too where you can discuss the video with others who are watching.

Currently, Synctron is still in the early stages of development, but I've decided to put up a "testing" version of it while I work on it. If you'd like to give it a try, just head on over to synctron.tv and join any room you'd like. If you'd like to create your own room, simply type http://synctron.tv/room/<your room name> into your browser's address bar (yes, there will be an easier way to create rooms in the future). Please keep in mind that this is still a testing version, not an official release, so don't stare directly at the bugs.

Now, for some MultiMC ...

I woke up this morning and decided to check Twitter to see if anything interesting was happening, when a certain unfortunate situation came to my attention. Cloudy, one of the developers of the Computer Craft mod needs funds in order to get to America so he can try to claim custody of his daughter. His daughter "has reportedly been sexually abused and has been neglected by her mother." He wrote a blog post about it and I strongly encourage you to go and read it here.

I am writing this blog post to ask that you at least spread the word about this. You don't necessarily have to donate, but at least spread the word so that Cloudy's daughter can be given the home that she deserves.

Thank you for your time and your consideration.

Some of you may have noticed that MCNostalgia in MultiMC has stopped working recently. Unfortunately, the developer who maintains MCNostalgia has recently disappeared from the Internet and the server that hosted MCNostalgia was taken down. I'm still not completely sure on what the situation is, but from the looks of things, MCNostalgia isn't coming back (at least not any time soon). Unforunately, this means that MultiMC will no longer be able to use MCNostalgia to downgrade to versions of Minecraft prior to 1.2.

There is a solution, though. I'm looking into possibly making my own downgrading service, similar to MCNostalgia. I just need copies of all the old jars. Shouldn't be too difficult, right?

Right?

Update May 8: Just to clarify, we probably aren't going to be getting jar files from people we don't already know and trust. We need to be sure that they haven't been tampered with first.

Update May 10: Turns out Orochimarufan, one of the guys helping out with MultiMC 5, happened to have copies of all the jars from MCNostalgia. I've written a system of Python scripts for generating patches and put it up on the ...

For a while now, we've been building MultiMC 5 around a plugin system that will allow for different "instance types" to be used. These instance types would be extensible via the plugin system, thus allowing people to write their own plugins to possibly add instance types for things such as mod packs. Unfortunately, these plugins would have to be written in C++ and compiled separately for each OS. The problem with this is that not everyone has the ability to compile for each OS, since setting up the build environments is a long and tedious process. The other problem with the way we've been implementing our plugin system is that it makes the code unnecessariy complicated. Because the code is more complex, it's more difficult to work with and, therefore, will make development take more time.

After going over several options, we've decided to get rid of the current plugin system and instead implement a scripting API. At the moment, the language that we're planning on using is QtScript, which is essentially just JavaScript embedded in Qt. You can read more about QtScript here. By using QtScript instead of C++ plugins, we solve quite a ...

Currently, MultiMC doesn't have a real official FAQ. Unfortunately, this means we get asked the same questions multiple times. To resolve this, we've decided to write an FAQ. If you have any questions you'd like to ask relating to MultiMC, please submit them at the Google Docs form below. After a while, TakSuyu and I will go through the submissions and write up an official MultiMC FAQ. Feel free to post anything such as issues you're having, general questions, etc.

You can submit your questions here. Please provide additional information if it is relevant. Thanks!

Update 4-22: A lot of people have been posting their questions in the comments section. This is perfectly fine, but please remember that only questions submitted to the actual Google Docs question form here will be used in the FAQ. So, if you decide to post your question in the comments section, please remember to also submit it to the question form. Thanks. :)

Today, we finally released a new development build for Mac OS X. Unfortunately, in the process of getting the build environment set up, I was unable to get the Mac OS 10.6 SDK to work. As a result of this, MultiMC 4 no longer supports 10.6. You can continue using MultiMC 4 on 10.6 as long as you don't update to the newest version. It is possible that we will be able to support 10.6 again some time in the future, but for now, it's probably not going to happen. We're sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Yesterday I released an update to MultiMC that caused some of the fonts in the program to change to bold Comic Sans on April 1st as an April Fools' Day joke. This joke actually brought about quite a few requests for the ability to customize the font in MultiMC. Since there were so many of such requests in so many different places, I felt that the Dev Blog would be the best place to respond to them.

Font customization is a cool idea and it's certainly not one that hasn't been considered. There are a few technical problems with it, however. Most of those issues lie with the GUI toolkit that MultiMC 4 uses, wxWidgets. In wxWidgets, there is no simple way (at least not one that I could find) to change the default font for everything in the entire application. You may have noticed yesterday that not everything had its font changed, but rather just some of the primary windows and dialogs. This was because it wasn't really feasible for me to change everything, as it would require sticking a lot of repetitive code in a bunch of different places and would likely bring about some ...

For a while now, people have been telling me that MultiMC looks very bland and needs something to distinguish itself. Well today, I'm proud to announce that we've fixed that problem. As of today, MultiMC will now be using Comic Sans MS as its main font. This font was chosen after careful consideration to be the most good looking, readable, and universally loved font on the internet. Not only does it look great, but Comic Sans drastically improves readability of everything it touches. This font change should increase productivity and coolness by 20%, allowing you to do more in a smaller amount of time and look good doing it. We hope you enjoy our new font choice. Oh, and happy April Fools' Day.

We are aware of the issues with downloading Minecraft 1.5 in MultiMC. We are currently working on a fix for the problem and will have it out ASAP. For now, you can just use the "Current" version at the bottom of the version list. We're sorry for the inconvenience.

Update: This problem has been fixed in the new build 71 for Windows and Linux users. Unfortunately Mac OS X users will have to wait a bit longer for an update since the OS X build system is currently not working.

If you try to create an instance for this snapshot, you will run into an error like this:

> Failed to download http://assets.minecraft.net/13w09c/minecraft.jar

This has happened with an earlier snapshot before. You can find the workaround here.