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Open RuneScape Classic

rsc.vet

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Re: Open RuneScape Classic

#61

Post by rcme »

gurchik wrote: post #48
londgine wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've wondered as a kid how those scripts work. Do you know of a good explanation? Would they move your mouse based on the GUI, or directly send packets? Also, while we're on hacker news, is it known how the party hat duplication bug happened? I like reading hacking white papers, but I assume nothing was published regarding that.

> Would they move your mouse based on the GUI, or directly send packets? Depends on the client that was used. AutoRune was a popular client that sent direct packets. The game client gathered metrics on mouse movement though, so if you used direct packet injection you still had to fake the mouse movement to some extent so you could escape this rudimentary detection. Or your bot could just control the mouse in a somewh…

An interesting bit of trivia: the first bot (that I'm aware of) to use deobfuscation of the game client was called Aryan. It was quite revolutionary for the cheating community because using the true game state worked so much better than the screen state. I don't know the specifics, but apparently the developers were threatened with legal action from Jagex. As part of their agreement with Jagex, the develoeprs released a new version of the client that sent a -1 up to the server for some field on the user that was always supposed to be positive. Jagex used this to mass-ban everyone who was using the bot.

Re: Open RuneScape Classic

#62

Post by nojs »

Haha, Runescape story time. I made a sizeable sum of GP in the early RS2 days by writing a bot that automatically bought items from underpriced general stores. To find the store operator NPC, the script would move the mouse randomly over the game window and detect the yellow text in the top left. I wrote a cool function to count the number of letters in the text, as a kind of rudimentary OCR. This defeated a lot of the randomisation that Jagex applied to stop bots, since the text was always in the same place, a consistent colour, etc whereas everything else was pretty well randomised.

From there, it could "read" enough to find the right places to click to buy things. The bot basically world hopped constantly, 24 hours a day, and bought cheap items until the general store was depleted. I'd then sell them in bulk for several times more. I never got hit with random events (in-game captchas), because I never stayed logged in for more than a minute or so. I was also not hit by any of the big banning waves, since I didn't rely on reflection in Java or use any of the popular "frameworks" for macroing.

Joke's on me though, because that game consumed several years of my life and I spent a lot of money buying several years worth of "members".

Later on there was also a gambling culture of "dicing" where you'd join an IRC channel, type a command to a bot like '/roll', and get paid in-game if the 'dice roll' came out in a certain way. I took an educated guess that the channel operators were running bots with mIRC, and reverse engineered the random number generator in the mIRC client (which was fun, because it was written in C++). Turns out it was a linear congruential generator which was in principle brute forceable given a few consecutive rolls. I wrote some OpenCL code for my GPU in the very early days when "GPGPU" was a new idea, but was never able to get it fully working because mIRC used 64-bit floating point arithmetic and the least significant digits were relevant to the outcome of the RNG, and my GPU was only 32 bit.

Link to my SE question at the time: https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/2086/predicting-v...

Re: Open RuneScape Classic

#65

Post by clepto »

I used to be really involved in RuneScape private server development in the early to mid 2010’s. It is to this day some of the most enjoyable programming I’ve done. The challenge presented by reverse engineering an obfuscated client and building a server framework off of that works almost like a puzzle game.

There were a lot of really talented developers in the space, but unfortunately the predatory donation systems and toxic culture between different servers/projects generally caused the good developers to move away from the community(or be just outright banned from community forums for no sane reason). It’s really nice to see a project in this space building a strong community with good open source culture.

I didn’t see on the website anywhere, but I’m curious if Jagex has given them any kind of permission for distributing the copyrighted assets/client? They may not care since it is focused on very old versions that Jagex themselves don’t even have or intend to profit from ever, but it would be cool to see them actually endorse a community project like this.

Re: Open RuneScape Classic

#66

Post by herodoturtle »

cookmeplox wrote: post #39
trynewideas wrote: post #29

Not related to Open RSC, but the https://runescape.wiki/ family (linked to from the Open OSC home page) is one of my favorite MediaWiki sites of all time. Jagex helped the Weird Gloop team split them from Fandom in 2020 and they've built up one of the best-looking and -working independent MW installs. The tutorials are great: https://runescape.wiki/w/Help:Editing They have an active and friendly community, including…

Cool to see our site show up on HN! Thanks for the kind words :)

I concur this site is very well designed!

Might I make a suggestion? I am completely new to Runescape (as in, this HN post is the first time I’m engaging with it), and I was hopping around your lovely wiki trying to find some kind of intro / “about the game” section with a bit of backstory.

Perhaps I missed it? (I’m on mobile)

Either way, looks like a project of love! Well done ^_^

Re: Open RuneScape Classic

#67

Post by ThatPlayer »

londgine wrote: post #44
rcme wrote: post #5

Cheating in RuneScape is what got me into programming. There was a program called SCAR (I believe) that let you write automation scripts in Pascal. That was a lot of fun.

I've wondered as a kid how those scripts work. Do you know of a good explanation? Would they move your mouse based on the GUI, or directly send packets? Also, while we're on hacker news, is it known how the party hat duplication bug happened? I like reading hacking white papers, but I assume nothing was published regarding that.

It wasn't a complicated bug. The trade interface accepted item quantities for stackable items: gold, bank notes, runes. A modified client allowed you to send a packet of offering into the trade a non-stackable item with zero quantity. Then at some point during the transfer, the quantity for non-stackable items gets ignored, because it should always be one, turning a zero into a one!

https://archive.fo/DafO7 is an archive (of an archive) since I can't find the original page.

Re: Open RuneScape Classic

#68

Post by londgine »

ThatPlayer wrote: post #67
londgine wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've wondered as a kid how those scripts work. Do you know of a good explanation? Would they move your mouse based on the GUI, or directly send packets? Also, while we're on hacker news, is it known how the party hat duplication bug happened? I like reading hacking white papers, but I assume nothing was published regarding that.

It wasn't a complicated bug. The trade interface accepted item quantities for stackable items: gold, bank notes, runes. A modified client allowed you to send a packet of offering into the trade a non-stackable item with zero quantity. Then at some point during the transfer, the quantity for non-stackable items gets ignored, because it should always be one, turning a zero into a one! https://archive.fo/DafO7 is an arc…

that is great. Thanks

Re: Open RuneScape Classic

#69

Post by davis »

ryanar wrote: post #47
DiggyJohnson wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing! I’m writing a book about RuneScape, Why We Play , and this project is the most exciting thing I’ve seen toward this end in awhile. I can’t believe I didn’t know about it!

Any way I can find out about this book when its done? Sounds interesting!

Oh man, I also need to buy this book when it drops

Re: Open RuneScape Classic

#70

Post by iamricks »

clepto wrote: post #65

I used to be really involved in RuneScape private server development in the early to mid 2010’s. It is to this day some of the most enjoyable programming I’ve done. The challenge presented by reverse engineering an obfuscated client and building a server framework off of that works almost like a puzzle game. There were a lot of really talented developers in the space, but unfortunately the predatory donation systems…

My favorite RSPS was 2speced. It was probably one of the most famous 317 servers. I still remember the forum names of the developers, Tyler and Blurr. I sometimes wonder what they do now. The RSPS scene was awesome.
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