Lineage 2 was launched in 2003 with a stunning 3d graphics.
Sphera is even older.
MMORPGs are super old.
2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
41–50 of 94 posts
Re: 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
#42I love how when Runescape gets posted on here, there’s always a few proud stories of how people cheated. Today one is even admitting to RWT (real world trading) for tens of thousands of $, when elsewhere one shuts up about it because cheaters in multiplayer gaming are regarded as the antisocial scum that make the game worse for everybody else. It’s not really something to brag about. I guess one thing antisocial peop…
I think this is both a fair cultural observation and one that's a bit excessive. I think people regard it as a point of pride because it didn't necessarily harm anyone, and because that experience was one of their pivotal early programming challenges that has a tangible return and that they had relatively high agency over. I look back on my time as a player of WoW during the Glider days as one where I was largely pissed that botters were ruining the economy for actual players, but I look back on my time in RuneScape as one where I was completely fixated on running my little factory and not wanting to actually play what was kind of a boring tedious game. I'm not proud today of having scammed people when I did, but I was proud of having a modicum of ingenuity and figured out how to exploit various things in the system. Real world trading, like many rules, isn't inherently immoral, but deliberately stealing money or items from people is.
I highly doubt I'd have ever given a damn about programming if I hadn't tried my hand at Scar scripting as a kid for both RuneScape and Neopets. Simultaneously, I also scammed people and ripped off friends in various games, but that the two activities were mutually exclusive and I was just an asshole. I'm glad I got to explore the worst part of myself in a sandboxed environment rather than taking it to any serious level.
Re: 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
#43I 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…
A large amount of work has been done this year alone to reduce botting to levels i didn't think was possible.
Obviously we only get the details JMods are willing to give away but some of their techniques can be seen in various reddit Smackdown posts like this one from six days ago - https://preview.redd.it/prx0s0qp2hlh1.png?width=355&format=p...
Re: 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
#44Re: 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
#45> 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…
The algorithm is very cheap to run for a client (linear first, then diagonal to target, stitch together as many of these as it takes in the fewest number of hops), as they have full map data downloaded. For 2k concurrent players on mid range 2004 hardware (you have to remember they had kind of old school tech even for the time, though I'd love to be proven wrong on this), and with all the other interactions that need…
Good point. I wonder how many articles discuss old games and over-analyze choices that may actually be labelled as
//TODO: good enough, fix later
In the actual source code
Re: 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
#46[dead]
Re: 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
#47I 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…
The evolution for Old School RuneScape was to just make cheating a built-in feature. It only takes a couple clicks every ten minutes to "play" the game.
Re: 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
#48I love how when Runescape gets posted on here, there’s always a few proud stories of how people cheated. Today one is even admitting to RWT (real world trading) for tens of thousands of $, when elsewhere one shuts up about it because cheaters in multiplayer gaming are regarded as the antisocial scum that make the game worse for everybody else. It’s not really something to brag about. I guess one thing antisocial peop…
I was going to say a comment about “back in my day”; but your account is from 2011, so you should know what video gaming was like in ye olden era. Did you mod in a Mew, or 256 Masterballs in Pokemon Red with a Game Genie? Why not? How about doing some weird stuff with Missing No?
What about loading in some rare items in Diablo 1 on your local save and them importing them into Battlnet? especially before Diablo 2, 1.10?
How about Early Minecraft - we’re talking Beta days. Did you test out those X-Ray block packs that helped you see diamonds?
Cheating literally only matters when there’s a PvP or leaderboard or whatever glory-theft that comes from it. It’s only really shamed on when it hurts other people’s gameplay experience - like screwing with a leaderboard at the “low pain” end and ruining a multiplayer experience in the middle end. For everything else, it’s an experience modifier or a difficulty slider for your own private game experience. Lots of games nowadays add in those difficulty sliders directly or add sandbox modes where there used to be “cheating” that stuff in.
Re: 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
#49Ultima online released in 1997 and required only a 28k modem. I also would argue it was a more complex game.
Publish 124 released last week. Quite incredible that the game is still undergoing development and new content. Admittedly it has changed hands several times, and the Richard Garriot days are a distant memory now, but still!
I used to operate one of the more popular player run shards, after the peak of the mainstream game, and even that feels like a distant memory.
Edit: latest notes https://uo.com/wiki/ultima-online-wiki/publish-notes/publish...
Re: 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
#50Ultima online released in 1997 and required only a 28k modem. I also would argue it was a more complex game.
Ultima Online is one of very few games (probably Star Wars Galaxies and that's it) that actually merit the label MMORPG. It's kind of insane when you think about it, that the MMO that most closely came to fulfilling the promise of a "shared, persistent, virtual world" was also the ~first one.