We’ve toyed with this in the past, but had bad luck at the time – so players have been always been forced to deal with an executable Jarfile to launch MCU. This is fine for the most part, but it is suboptimal.
Because the bootstrap is so stable these days, we are now revisiting the project to provide native executables to handle the bootstrap for you. This means that instead of downloading and running a jarfile, you will now be able to download an EXE for Windows and an App for Mac users.
NB: The Windows executable isn’t actually available yet – we’ll take care of that out soon.
These files are simply wrappers that launch the standard build jar file for you, but they make it a bit easier to integrate with other systems that don’t want to treat jars like programs.
To download a standard generic MCU bundled native executable, you can find links at our download site, or in the sidebar of this page.
Note, the exe/app are unsigned, so it is entirely possible that it will warn players about it (or possibly even prevent them from running the binary, depending on their local security settings). There isn’t really anything we can do about this, and those players unable to work around such a restriction are best off sticking with the traditional jar distribution.
Custom Bundles
We also acknowledge those community members who have been building custom bootstrap jars for their players and would like to continue supporting them. So the scripts we are using to package the bundles and any instructions on their use are available on github at https://github.com/MCUpdater/MCU-Bundler.