I wish the author got more into the weeds of anitcheat and how it evolved over time. Jagex was banning bots based on mouse movement heuristics in like 2005. 20 years later and there's some JS framework on the front page here heralding that same kind of analysis as some revolutionary new approach. I can only imagine what the modern anticheat engine entails, especially in the era of LLMs that can reliably emulate a human player. (Some of them can even write quite technical blog posts that almost escape detection ;)
2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
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Re: 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
#22I don't understand how RuneScape managed to get the traction it did. 2004 was the same year World of Warcraft came out!
Besides what everyone else said, it was a pre-WoW style sandbox MMO with a lot of freedom at the time. Those have their own appeal.
Re: 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
#23Ultima online released in 1997 and required only a 28k modem.
I also would argue it was a more complex game.
Re: 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
#24not to take away from the article, but some did with similar fidelity on 14.4k https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_massively_multiplay... i think the author would find ultima online emulators interesting
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The comment you're replying to links to a wiki article that explicitly mentions both Tibia and UO.
Re: 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
#25I wish the author got more into the weeds of anitcheat and how it evolved over time. Jagex was banning bots based on mouse movement heuristics in like 2005. 20 years later and there's some JS framework on the front page here heralding that same kind of analysis as some revolutionary new approach. I can only imagine what the modern anticheat engine entails, especially in the era of LLMs that can reliably emulate a hum…
It's gotten pretty good (finally good enough that you can observe it in the game's macroeconomics), but if you're any good as a programmer then it's no work whatsoever to build something which can bypass it indefinitely.
Re: 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
#26Re: 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
#27> Before any networking occurs, the client runs a breadth-first search using the local collision map to build a path from where you are to where you clicked, and then writes the packet for the server to read. [...] The packet contains the absolute position of the first waypoint in the path, followed by the delta of each waypoint in the path against the first one How come the client sends waypoints rather than just th…
It's a trade-off, especially for longer paths, especially when you count the cost of server RAM cache misses.
Re: 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
#28I don't understand how RuneScape managed to get the traction it did. 2004 was the same year World of Warcraft came out!
The other comments hit the big ones (didn't have to download, had a free tier, didn't have significant irreversible character choices, had meaningful solo or quasi-social activities, etc), but I think a major contributing factor was it appearing on miniclip.
Re: 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
#29Phantasy Star Online on the Sega Dreamcast worked great on dial up