I don't understand how RuneScape managed to get the traction it did. 2004 was the same year World of Warcraft came out!
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2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
51–60 of 94 posts
Re: 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
#52I don't understand how RuneScape managed to get the traction it did. 2004 was the same year World of Warcraft came out!
WoW needed a purchase, an expensive subscription, and a good PC. Runescape ran on a potato, was F2P, the P2P was 5$ a month, and you could get started in 2 minutes from Miniclip.
Re: 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
#53I 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, 1.1…
I think the argument here is that cheating in runescape DOES meet the first requirement
MMOs, especially runescape are inherently multiplayer experiences and cheating in them hurts the game community. Your examples are all from games that are single player (though with multiplayer options, Diablo and Minecraft in particular)
Re: 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
#54> 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…
Interesting, when I was a WoW GM our special “GM WoW Client” contained a lot of features that QA would use.
One of these was showing NPC pathing in the form of dots with lines in between. At any time the WoW client would know next 5 or so waypoints of a mob that was idle patrolling.
I guess it’s more efficient to send a batch of waypoints occasionally than one at a time more regularly.
It was a interesting watching boss fights where the pathing would update quite regularly, especially if the tank had just died and it was systematically clobbering everyone else.
Re: 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
#55I 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 was enough to just write your own scripts instead of using freely available ones to avoid detection for an extremely long time.
Re: 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
#56Oh man. The gamer cult around RuneScape was so hardcore and evangelical in 2004 that it is when it acquired the nickname "Run! Escape!"
I never fell in with the cult and I am glad I didn't. The Dofus cult in the next few years was small and hilarious and luckily the economics of that game made it a bit less fun beyond a certain level, like the real world, so you could get out before you lost your mind.
Re: 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
#57I 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…
I farmed tens of thousands of us dollars in modern RuneScape by unhooking the mousehook. It worked for decades. Find call to `SetWindowsHookEx` -> Find dword (`HHOOK`) it returns -> Inject module that calls `UnhookWindowsHookEx((HHOOK)(module_base + hhook_rva));` -> profit. Jagex has done some interesting things, but without fail, there is a blunder accompanying each.
Short of hardware-enforced secure boot chain TPM anticheat there will always be a way around it. It's cat-and-mouse, not a single permanent solution.
Re: 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
#58I 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.
Only if you're talking about the Gemstone Crab.
Which was added because people were already doing that on the normal crabs, but fighting over the spots. So they made a crab that any number of people can fight at the same time (combat is ordinarily one to one), and it always lives for ten minutes no matter how many people are fighting it or how hard.
Re: 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
#59> 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…
I was wondering how tileman gimmick accounts seemed to be forcing their pathfinding to unlocked tiles. That would explain it.
Re: 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
#60Lineage 2 was launched in 2003 with a stunning 3d graphics. Sphera is even older. MMORPGs are super old.
MUD1 is from 1978