Just to keep you updated as we try to do before every update to Minecraft this is a short post to let you know about our plans regarding the impending release of Minecraft 1.9 and how it will work with Noobstown. This isn't a post about any specific changes, just about our plan for 1.9!
Mojang announced earlier today that 1.9 will likely be released next week on Thursday the 25th of February. We obviously will not be upgrading the server to 1.9 at this time so please
DO NOT UPDATE YOUR MINECRAFT CLIENT(S) or select specifically to continue playing in 1.8.9 if you want to continue playing on Noobstown. We will eventually be working to open in 1.9 but this isn't likely to be happening immediately so please if you want to continue playing on Noobstown don't update until we announce it is possible to do so.
(You updating and not connecting to Noobstown because of this will not be an excuse for your land to not be cleared.)Minecraft 1.9 contains an enormous number of changes which are likely to dramatically effect how things function (even if to you it might not look like anything has changed, how the server deals with some of these changes is going to involve a lot of work). As a result a large number of the plugins we use will likely need some drastic updates to continue to work with the updated interactions, transportation, items and world locations 1.9 has to offer. We obviously don't want to update only for it to be extremely buggy and for issues to arise.
Our plan is to wait until we have a stable version of our server software and all of the important plugins we use have been updated. Previously this has on occasion taken multiple months; it will however become our primary focus once 1.9 is released. I'm going to be honest here; this change is likely to break
a lot of the existing code we use and therefore this update is probably going to take just as long and possibly longer than ones have previously.
In regards to updating to Minecraft 1.9 some of the specific points we need to sort out before releasing include (not necessarily in this order, it depends how things work out):
- Waiting to see if there is an update which is safe/stable enough allowing you to connect to Noobstown using a 1.9 client but without any of the features of 1.9 (just like we did with 1.8 ).
- Waiting until a suitable development version of our server software is released to the point where we can work on upgrading our own custom plugins.
- Upgrading all of our critical custom plugins, including: the current Wilderness system, several chat features, the entity/mob limiting system, account management systems, etc.
- Waiting for stable updates to the third party plugins (ones we don't develop ourselves) we currently use, including Towny (unless it takes ages in which case we might just jump to the new Town system but no promises on that), mcMMO, LWC, etc. and then safely testing that these updates haven't broken things for Noobstown and if they have work to on a custom fix.
- Producing any extra plugins/protections for things which have been added in 1.9 but which we don't want to allow until we can protect against griefing/theft etc. A list with more details about this is likely to be released in the future.
- Updating the non-critical custom plugins we use, such as: the items gained from events, the drop party system, Snowball, etc.
- Waiting until there is then a stable version of the server software which is suitable to be played on, and then testing this with all of the plugins we normally use.
Please be aware as explained previously in the post this update is likely to take sometime, and therfore don't update your Minecraft clients until we've said it's suitable to do so if you want to continue playing on Noobstown!
I hope you're excited about what is to come for Noobstown though.