Ok the new map is finally online! It is pretty fantastic in my opinion, its full of really incredible looking new custom biomes, the layout of the biomes is more natural and its HUGE. the map is over 30,000 x 30,000, larger than we could ever even explore i'd guess.
as i posted below there are many other new features and updates coming soon to stay tuned, for now i am dead exhausted (ive been working on this map until 4-6am for weeks now..) and i am going to crash.
The terrain is still generating, it will probably take over 24 hours to generate (probably closer to 3 days) and in that time everyone will probably be extremely laggy and face frequent disconnections, it will be lame but after its finished we will be able to explore anywhere, even high speed travel by rail or boat without any additional chunk generation lag, which will be very nice and last us for the rest of the server
we probably won't ever start another new map again, with this terrain it has more variety than anything vanilla minecraft will give us ever again is my guess. and im also working on a mod that will be able to cycle thru chunks even after they are generated to add any new random structures they might add in the future.