Minecraft 1.3 Not Going to Happen Soon | Server News | Forum

Well, I just feel like we wasted 4-6 hours rushing to get an update out. HannahBrian and Mudwog had been busy triaging our plugins to see what needed updating and what could wait. I was busy prepping our technical wiki and revision control system to document and accept configuration documents, only to come find out that this small innocuous release note:

1.3 Clients are not disconnected with 'outdated server'

didn't mean what I thought it meant. Since enough flames have been raging on the Bukkit forums about this, I'll make this short. That little note meant 1.3 clients will get an "Outdated server" message rather than disconnecting with a Java error. Obviously, almost every server admin read this to mean that 1.3 clients would be able to connect to a 1.2.5 server.

So, as it stands, we have yet to wait for CraftBukkit to push out a 1.3 server version, before 1.3 clients can be used. Certainly, this doesn't prevent you from upgrading to give 1.3 a whirl on your own machine. Just make sure you keep a backup copy of your 1.2.5 client around when you want to get online. You might want to look at this thread or wiki page on how to maintain multiple versions of your client.

How long will it take? My gut feeling says it will be two or more weeks, given the numerous changes brought about by 1.3. I hope Bukkit proves me wrong. But with my luck, they'll probably release something useable right in the middle of our server migration at the end of this month.

We are still going to move forward with updating some of our plugins, but it won't be tonight. I apologize to everyone for giving you false hopes that we'd all be running 1.3 clients soon. I'm going to grab a bottle of something and silently curse programmers that write ambiguous release notes.