Do not download any assets if the metadata does not have an assetIndex

[Solitudocultor]

Role

I run vanilla, custom and modded Minecraft versions for the purposes of playing, testing and development.

Suggestion

If custom net.minecraft.json (custom metadata of the main jar) does not contain assetIndex, do not download any assets: neither indexes nor objects.

Benefit

so I am able to save traffic and disk space when running older versions that have an internal thread for downloading resources.

This suggestion is unique

• I have searched the issue tracker and did not find an issue describing my suggestion, especially not one that has been rejected.

You may use the editor below to elaborate further.

At the moment, if you remove the assetIndex block from the metadata, the default index (legacy) will be used. But what if I don’t need any assets? Minecraft versions 1.5.2 and older have an internal downloading thread that downloads resources already while the client is working. Its vanilla URL is the official Mojang mirror of pre-1.6 asset index in XML format, but what if my client uses a custom resources URL? In short, I don’t want to have such garbage as sound3 folder and so on in the resources folder, and I also want MultiMC not to waste any time or traffic on downloading assets, which I don’t need at all.

At the moment I’m using a temporary solution: I’m pointing the assetIndex URL to an empty JSON. But I would like to be able to disable the use of any indexes by the MMC at all.