I'm super excited.
Why? Because I found out not only that Craftbukkit plugins are compatible with Spigot, and that many of the plugins SuikaCraft used are being developed with 1.8, including the very essential TerrainControl.
This means that our former Bukkit (now Spigot) server will return! It is also the anniversary of the initial opening, so it is suiting to do so.
The map will be new though, but for several good reasons:
In the old server, the oceans had sponges in their depths. Now, sponges absorb water, so you can imagine what that has done...
One annoying thing for many players was the decaying of leaves, or more so that it did not happen. This is all because of the custom trees, so this time there will be new custom trees that work with the 4-block distance rule so that we can have decaying leaves.
1.8 has new stones (and more blocks), and who wants to travel years to find them?
TerrainControl has added a new BiomeGroups feature that will make it easier to group different biomes together in a way to separate their humidities and temperatures to a realistic setting. This will probably have the biggest advantage in creating different mountain types (some with dry boreal settings, some very alpine and cold, etc), and also raises my interest in adding desert type areas. Of course I won't be making silly biomes like jungle or savannah, but making something more akin to Southern Europe type chaparral and sage scrub, with sand dunes. It will probably be more of a coastal thing, but it will allow the usage of cactus and make dry scrubby leave shrubs that dot the landscape.
A new start allows me to be much more creative and add in the ideas that I've had since the initial 6 month period between finding TerrainControl and having the opening of the server. Besides, you get bored of one map after a while and when you can remake it much better, starting over is justified.
Also, I had been maintaining the resource pack I always use in those screenshots, and I've been working with custom models, so mods like BetterFoliage are no longer necessary to achieve the same looks of the grass and leaves and whatnot. It'll be the server resource pack, although you can use it right now from here: https://github.com/yurisuika/SuikaCraft
As far as time goes, I mostly just have time on the weekends to work on this, but it most likely will be live and playable by two weeks at most, mid-March. Right now I am working on getting updated and working plugins, and this weekend will focus on fixing the TerrainControl configs (all of the custom biomes had been overwritten when porting them to the new world folder) and add in the new block types. Of course, it will take time to work on the new biomes I want to add, and I'd rather have them look amazing then have them done by a certain date, but as of this past evening it has captured my full attention so pretty much all of my leisure time will be devoted to this!
