To start, here are some of the minor changes:
General changes
The rules page has now been migrated to the forum itself: https://forum.empirewar.org/pages/rules/
Bugs must now be reported on the forums. Bugs that have significant gameplay impact may be reported confidentially to an admin on the Discord.
"Double-clicking is not allowed" has been changed to "Double-clicking (or more) is not allowed".
Forge
Forge is now permitted on 1.19.4+ clients as they appear to have fixed the reach bug.
Optifine
Fast math is no longer permitted. This change was not taken lightly and I myself have been debating this for a few months now. However, it has become clear that it is impossible to accurately detect fast math and the Optifine developer is refusing to co-operate to allow servers to forcefully disable or check whether it is enabled. (See issue: https://github.com/sp614x/optifine/issues/5578 and https://github.com/sp614x/optifine/issues/5583). A 1e-4 difference is massive; we are able to, in most cases, predict client movement with 0 offset. This offset can also add up to blocks of advantage over time and on a gamemode like Empire War, movement speed is very important.
Most players don't actually have fast math on and it is disabled by default. Using fast math is now done at your own risk. You may be "false" banned. The plugin will attempt to kick players who use fast math, however this detection is slow but will not kick vanilla users.
A staff member may ask you to disable fast math if you are using it. Continued use after such warning (however a warning is not guaranteed) will likely result in a ban.
Fast math can be disabled in Options -> Video Settings -> Performance.
As an alternative to Optifine in general, we recommend using Sodium (https://github.com/CaffeineMC/sodium-fabric) a well-known performance mod for Fabric that has a fast math implementation bit-for-bit identical with vanilla (if you really care about fast math that much...), is open source and will likely improve your performance more than Optifine.
General changes
The rules page has now been migrated to the forum itself: https://forum.empirewar.org/pages/rules/
Bugs must now be reported on the forums. Bugs that have significant gameplay impact may be reported confidentially to an admin on the Discord.
"Double-clicking is not allowed" has been changed to "Double-clicking (or more) is not allowed".
Forge
Forge is now permitted on 1.19.4+ clients as they appear to have fixed the reach bug.
Optifine
Fast math is no longer permitted. This change was not taken lightly and I myself have been debating this for a few months now. However, it has become clear that it is impossible to accurately detect fast math and the Optifine developer is refusing to co-operate to allow servers to forcefully disable or check whether it is enabled. (See issue: https://github.com/sp614x/optifine/issues/5578 and https://github.com/sp614x/optifine/issues/5583). A 1e-4 difference is massive; we are able to, in most cases, predict client movement with 0 offset. This offset can also add up to blocks of advantage over time and on a gamemode like Empire War, movement speed is very important.
Most players don't actually have fast math on and it is disabled by default. Using fast math is now done at your own risk. You may be "false" banned. The plugin will attempt to kick players who use fast math, however this detection is slow but will not kick vanilla users.
A staff member may ask you to disable fast math if you are using it. Continued use after such warning (however a warning is not guaranteed) will likely result in a ban.
Fast math can be disabled in Options -> Video Settings -> Performance.
As an alternative to Optifine in general, we recommend using Sodium (https://github.com/CaffeineMC/sodium-fabric) a well-known performance mod for Fabric that has a fast math implementation bit-for-bit identical with vanilla (if you really care about fast math that much...), is open source and will likely improve your performance more than Optifine.