A week where nearly everything learned to talk to everything else
One sign-in, friends everywhere, a Play button for anybody's website — and two releases that turned up an update nobody on Windows or Linux had ever been offered.
Seven days, five products, and one thread running through all of them: the things we make have stopped being strangers to each other. You sign in once. Your friends are wherever you are. A server owner can put a button on their own page and somebody lands in their world without ever meeting a settings screen.
Signing in is one button now
Connecting the launcher used to mean a code you read off one screen and typed into another. It does not any more. You press Connect, your browser opens on a page that already knows which launcher is asking, and one button finishes it. The readable code is still there for the one case that needs it — a machine whose browser will not open — and nothing else.
The panel got the same treatment from the other end: it is licensed to your STYGION ID, and linking it is the same one-button motion.
Friends and chat came back, and they came back everywhere
The whole account layer in the launcher had been talking to a service that stopped existing when we rewrote the backend, and it was failing the way software fails at its worst: silently, as an empty list. It is rebuilt — ask, accept, write to each other, see who is online and what they are playing.
And it is not only in the launcher. Friends and chat are on the website too, in the same corner as the feedback panel, so you can carry on a conversation without opening anything.
A Play button anybody can put on their own website
This is the one we are most pleased with. If you run a Minecraft server, the hardest part of getting somebody in is everything that happens before the game: find the modpack, find the right version, install it, add the address, connect. Five chances to lose somebody who wanted to play.
Now there is a button. A player clicks it on your page, the launcher opens and asks exactly one question — join this server? it will install this pack — and after they say yes, they touch nothing until they are standing in the world. The pack downloads, your address saves itself into their server list, the game starts, and they arrive.
You make yours in your STYGION account, under Developers. And because the button is a picture served from us rather than a lump of code with your server's name baked into it, renaming your server or changing modpack updates every page that carries it. You paste the snippet once, and then you are done with it forever.
Both of them are out, and updating actually works now
STYGION Launcher a0.8.0 and STYGION Panel a0.4.0 went out today, and cutting them turned up something worth telling you about: nobody on Windows or Linux has ever been offered an update from inside the launcher. Not once since we rewrote the backend. The check answered "you are up to date" to every one of them, forever, because of a signing detail that quietly changed underneath us and that only macOS was unaffected by.
It is fixed, and we checked the fix the only way that counts — by asking as a Windows launcher on the old version and watching the right answer come back. If you are on 0.7.0, your launcher will offer you 0.8.0 the next time it looks.
The launcher, mostly in the details
Installing a pack asks which version, with the newest already picked — so the ordinary case costs one extra click and the awkward case became possible at all. You can move between versions in either direction, and going back is exactly as easy as going forward: your worlds are never touched. An install can be cancelled at any point, background ones included, and it leaves nothing behind.
Then the small things, which are the ones you feel. Every button and every card answers when you press it. Things that finish say so. Pack art fades in over the colour it was going to be, instead of flashing grey rectangles at you on the way down the catalog. Numbers hold still while they change. And a screen that could not load something now says so and offers to try again, rather than telling you that you own nothing — which was, honestly, the worst thing about it.
On Linux it now just runs. The launcher carries everything it needs inside the download, so there is nothing to install first and no white window to work around.
The panel became a product
STYGION Panel has a page, a price and a free week. The console holds its connection and survives a restart of the panel itself. The file manager uploads, downloads and unpacks. A server can be shared with somebody, and sharing it means something rather than being a screen with nothing behind it. Stop stops a server that is refusing to listen. And writing to us from inside the panel reaches us again — it had been posting into a void since the rewrite, which nobody noticed because the screen blamed a missing setting.
And on the servers themselves
STYGION Keystone reached 1.0: one mod that carries sign-in, names and settings you can see rather than settings you have to remember — and a player with a plain, unmodded client can join a server running it.
Meanwhile the home page of this website was running at two and a half frames a second on some machines, because of one animated mark. It is not any more. Worlds say who is actually inside them rather than a sample. And stygion.eu/discord finally goes somewhere.
Everything above is live except where it says otherwise. If something here is broken for you, the feedback panel is in the bottom-right corner of every page — it goes to the same place everything else does, and somebody reads it.