Internally it can already be on rc4, but with hours away from the regular release, it makes no sense in my opinion to also go through the paces for rc4 when we can just be patient and wait a tad longer. Best of luck with 1.18 everybody.
Hey, I put spigot 1.18 on my server which runs 1.17 wonderfully and it was very laggy. Is this because of an unstable new version?
It usually takes Mojang one or two updates before everything is really ready for live servers. They will likely make a 1.18.1 and possibly 1.18.2 soon, which will fix issues like that. At least, that's how past history has gone.
Along those lines, what's the best way to setup the Maven dependency. Should i be doing something like this... <dependency> <groupId>org.spigotmc</groupId> <artifactId>spigot-api</artifactId> <version>1.18-R0.1-SNAPSHOT</version> </dependency> an then manually updating the POM file when the version changes, or doing something like this instead... <dependency> <groupId>org.spigotmc</groupId> <artifactId>spigot-api</artifactId> <version>LATEST</version> </dependency> I've read that "LATEST" is deprecated, but still works fine in most cases. Not sure if it's supported/recommended for spigot? Would certainly make things easier with 30 or so plugins, if it is OK to use.
LATEST is deprecated because if a breaking change is made, then all of a sudden your previously OK code won't compile. But given Spigot uses snapshots and doesn't really break things, it's not terrible if you're ok with the warning.
You have existing chunks and they need to convert to 1.18 and they need to generate the missing stuff below Y:0 and convert the bedrock to deepslate, and apply the chunk blending. Yes, it will be laggy because of that. And yes, these early 1.18 builds are experimental, for all we know there are massive data corruption and data loss bugs that we haven't found during smaller pre-release access, and we just dont know. It's therefore always recommended to test and not use it on a live production until you know what you're doing, and what the software does. Properly upgrading the plugins and keeping an eye on latest.log for example can help you figure out why things don't go well. I know a lot of ppl just drag/drop a jar and assume magic happens. But server owners have to manage and configure their servers. Not to mention backing it up in case something goes wrong.
Why are there a bunch of files now, and not, as before, everything in one jar file? Do I now have to manually add each jar file as a library to my development environment?
