1.8 at last! This has been a highly anticipated release! and it has been a long wait and a lot of work to get it working.
I'll write up a more comprehensive post about this later but for now keep the following in mind:
#1, this is still pretty early to be moving to 1.8, many of the mods are in dev versions, and the spigot server software itself is also still very bleeding edge. There will likely be bugs and issues. please report any bugs and issues you find right away, on this thread or at least on the forum so i can fix them. please don't quietly exploit exploitable issues you find. Its a tough call between waiting for stability or moving forward with newer mods and software, but since the anticipation was so high, our population is so low
and so many people are waiting on the repair changes, i went ahead and moved forward. I did as much testing as 1 person can do within the timeframe and from what i could tell all of the mods work well enough.
#2, 1.8 made drastic changes to graphics and AI. supposedly it results in a drastic framerate boost for most players, unfortunately for me it results in a massive performance LOSS. If you have terrible terrible frame rates and chunk load times like i do, i highly recommend getting the mod optifine:
http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/mapping-and-modding/minecraft-mods/1272953it has always improved performance for me in the past, i haven't installed it for 1.8 yet so i am crossing my fingers it solves all of my performance issues..
If it doesn't, you can also improve performance by lowering your render distance, the server only sends upto 8, but anything lower should improve your performance, especially while walking around. you can also change other graphics settings in there, major ones include the Graphics setting, and Smooth lighting, even lowering the framerate seemed to help a ton
#3, like i said, AI has also been drastically changed (by mojang) some monsters are way faster, some hit faster, some pathfind differently.. they are all different.. be careful, behavior your your used to from monsters will not be the same, they might find new ways into your bases, they may be more dangerous than before, especially pigmen are lightning fast.. i don't think you can outrun them, and they almost seem to warp to you once they get close enough to hit you and beat you into a corner and murder you and revel in your blood while they try on your prot4 armor.. it is terrifying, i have removed the auto aggressive pigman setting from AF because they are dangerous enough as is.. i have also removed the AI nerf from spawners to see if the AI impact of spawned mobs is still high or not, also the nerfed AI mobs did even less than they did before the AI changes
#4, i listed some new recipies on the section here on the website, it will tell you how to access some of the new items required for new block recipes, i also added a way of practically doubling the amount of quartz we can produce since quartz is required for most of the new recipes
#5, armor stands are technically entities, citadel will not protect them, (same as item frames, and pictures..), use them at your own risk, im actually not sure if its even logged by snitches yet since they are so new. I recommend not putting valuable armor on them at all yet
KNOWN ISSUES:
* Prison pearls appear as big checkered glowing boxes, they still actually work though, they just look silly..
* player skinned npcs sometimes disappear on the spaceport
* the tab list sometimes flickers npc heads on it..
* portaling sometimes puts you too low for a second or show you falling, it seems to always correct your position within a couple seconds.
* head still sometimes show the wrong texture for a while, but mysteriously it seems to correct it after a matter of minutes.. (usually..)
* animals seem to get out of their pens when i first logged in, it doesn't seem to KEEP happening, but they may have changed collision boxes on fences and iron bars causing tons of my chickens to escape. i don't think it will continue after the initial chunk loading
* alot of the portals on VE look rotated randomly.. you may need to break and relight them
* some maps mysteriously popped off of walls for no apparent reason, i fixed some, if you lose maps let me know and i can restore them
* some levers mysteriously pop off of floors.. it seems to be caused by being on halfslabs, this is a vanilla bug that i can't fix, you'll have to change the slabs to full blocks to place the lever there..
* custom tab list has issues, but it still looks cooler than default
Hope everyone has fun!
