Moving forward

Hello memes,

Moving past RFD may come as a shock to some of you, but, the quest seems to be free of any major flaws so we are moving ahead. I will be working on finishing off all the missing random events in the game, some of which were patched in today. Here's a list of all the randoms left that /v/scape is compatible with:

-Mysterious Old Man
-The Maze
-Strange Boxes (Myst. Old Man)
 Cap'n Hand
-The 'Certers': Miles, Giles and Niles
- Evil Bob
-Frogs :^)
-Highwayman / Rick Turpentine
-Prison Pete
-Quiz Master

Many have asked about the harmful skill randoms such as smoking rocks, Ents that break axes, whirlpools, giant fish, etc. I haven't made up my mind as to when I'll get around to these. I'm working on the NPC encounters / major randoms first. They'll likely come later down the road after all of these are implemented (your axes are safe... for now).

Lastly, in regards to today's update and the moderate downtime: we gutted and cleaned out a major portion of our source code. This means removal of non-functioning / useless pieces and snippets of code and files that were relics of how the original base source used to work. Because of this, the directories for many files, including player files, changed. We had to backup all these files and then manually cut and transfer them into the new format. The end result means literally nothing to you as a player, but for us devs means a cleaner work environment and a tighter, compact source. This is always a plus to us and allows for ease of use and is good practice. We apologize for the hour or so we were down for, but this has been put off for far too long. Our up-time is nearly perfect, so don't go bitching about a single hour :~)

In closing, some pics from recent dev work:

thank you mr skeltal
(Why the strange plant doesn't transform)
Gotta go fast
Mfw working with interfaces
And then there's always the hotfixes :^)

-Pickles

Recipe for Disaster

Well, the quest is finally here. I can finally get off the Culinaromancer's wild ride. I'll be taking a large step back from vscape for the rest of my school semester for finals and such, you'll see me be more involved around the holiday time in December. Remember to PLEASE, PLEASE report any bugs you find with the quest and its related subquests to Mantis first, and if you are too stubborn to sign up... then ::bugreport is fine.

Regarding the patch:
-Barrows Gloves: I don't know how many times I've said this, but I guess if something isn't in writing nobody has a clue as to the official word. No, they weren't un-equipped or forced you into RFD. The quest needs to be bug-free and working before I enforce a hard requirement down the road. For now protection on death has been removed and of course, Barrows no longer drops the gloves.
-Dragon Axe: As I was fixing the special system to allow for faster weapon changes / special attack enables I noticed the daxe special was using the 2014 OSRS effects. This has been corrected to it's proper combat attack special from the period with no woodcutting boost.
-Quest Cape: As promised, the Quest Point Cape can now be gotten from the Wise Old Man. Each new quest put in the game directly affects the cape and you will need to do the new quests in order to continue wearing the cape.

A full list of tiny fixes:
-The feathers you receive from offering bird eggs to the Evil Chicken shrine has been nerfed to the same amount you receive upon killing him.
-Rogues now have gold bars instead of eggs to pickpocket.
-Can use a noted bone for DT mirror materials.
-Steel gauntlets work to pick nettles.
-Bug with crates appearing on pineapple plants fixed
-Typos in some quests fixed.
-Nettle tea no longer turns into burnt potatoes when burning it.
-Skill guides had some missing items added and text for 5 knives per metal bar (Thanks Starlight...)
-Ground items that you own disappearing on re-log was fixed.

Where are we going from here?
Well, like I said, I'll be taking a bit of a break to focus on other things. We'll have some more dev work returning in December as school ends. Personally, I think I'll work on all the missing random events before returning to more quests. Some of the quest lines that are on the forefront beyond this are Wanted!, In Aid of the Myreque / Shade / Splitbark stuff, Roving Elves, Swan Song, Fremennik Trials (No Frem Isles yet, sorry), Tai Bwo Wannai Trio (and the minigame). We'll certainly be working much slower on these though.

Enjoy RFD and thanks for your continued support,
Pickles

I'd just like to interject for a moment

Vscape has always been moving towards one thing, being a recreation of 2006 runescape (the line blurs with dates/patches/revisions but bear with me).  Our server is among the most accurate, unlimited energy and xp rate aside, and that's how it's going to stay.  If a change is made it's going to be to fix something broken or missing, and that's exactly what the runecrafting nerf was.

Sometimes changes take a while and happen randomly, I'm going through some health issues, Pickles has his classes, Bobster, Latent and Saxi all have varying amounts of time to work on vscape as well.  We have a list of about 1000 things that need fixed, some are easier or more interesting than others.  We don't have timelines, assignments or quotas.  If something gets done it's because a staff memeber decided to do it and had the time.

The staff is all pretty united in the direction this server is headed and that's one of the things we really have going for us.  We have a pretty good history of integrity, decent uptime and a lot of content.  Nothing has broken our economy or caused a server wipe (the speculative hammer market is really heating up though).

If vscape is ever shut down, myself and other staff have talked about us releasing the code to our server, and that may or may not happen.  Release it, and change the xp to 1x and turn energy back on, and it is now 2006 runescape "preserved" for the future.  Intrest in runescape will fade, but like the people that work on mame, dosbox, WoW private servers, SWG private servers or any other project of that nature, at the end of the day we'll have saved something from disappearing.

In the mean time, we're running a pretty damn good server for as long you play it.  I'd like to keep trying to make it perfect.

An Update

Hello memes,


Here we are with another update with the banner items being One Small Favour and Tutorial Island. Along with these comes numerous bug fixes and other content fixes, here's a full list including some small things omitted from pnotes:


-Temple of Ikov complete-ability bugs fixed
-Temple of Ikov witch not teleporting after certain stage fixed
-Mage of Zamorak's id changed so usage of the 'teleport' option is enabled
-Eat text on Cabbage fixed
-Can now decant potions properly into empty vials
-Can now equip boner club (Fuck off Hammi)
-Some messages related to clue scrolls now display in filtered
-Ring of Recoil properly gives PC damage points
-Fixed a bug that prevented thieving stalls when the guard had died nearby
-Gnome Stronghold front doors properly fixed
-Banana trees now update appearance and run out of nanners
-Fixed open drawers not working for certain clues
-Fixed various items not being able to slash webs when they should
-Fixed a small bug with DT that got you stuck on the ice path :^)


After this patch goes live I will be able to turn my full focus to RFD, which is currently in the works, and around 10% done. We have multiple devs working on the subquests while I continue to do cutscenes for it as well as the final fight with the Culinaromancer. I'll finish that shit and pick up a few subquests as well most likely. Bitterness is working on Shadow of the Storm while we work on RFD, with release of that planned for a week or two before RFD.

 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Questions I was asked to address

-"How come we don't have x content? X quest WHEN?"
To make it simple, there are 3 main components of the game: the client, the client's cache and the server. The client reads the data from the cache which makes up npcs, items, objects, interfaces and displays these and the rest of the game. The server dictates all content and tells the client how to interact with scripted content added to the game. The client responds to this and makes sure the server knows what each player is doing. Now, the cache extremely limits what you can add to the game. In terms of revisions of Runescape, we are loading 474 items, npcs, animations and graphics. We are loading 377 objects, interfaces and map. 474 equates to the Halloween update of 2007 while 377 was released on May 2nd 2006 for Swan Song. This means we are limited to the lowest denominator date, 05/02/06. Content that exists past that at this point can not, and will not, be added until the team sits down and entirely overhauls the game to update to a newer revision.
-"B-but there's content past that date added already!"
Yes, you're entirely right. There is. That's because it is either entirely item / npc / animation / gfx reliant and doesn't require usage of any objects / interfaces / map. The large exception to this would be the Warriors Guild which I squeezed into the Fight Arena a year ago. While it is possible to make custom changes further to the game to add more future content from the parts of the cache that come from 2007, as stated above we will not be doing any more of that on this version of the game.
-"Hunter and Construction WHEN"
 As stated above, we have the exact same issue with both of these skills. Construction was released on 05/31/06, after a big game engine update on the 16th of May. It is thought that this update started the 400 series of revisions and heavily altered the way interfaces are stored in the cache. Hunter was released later on 11/21/06 somewhere around a 430 revision. Both of these skills are out of range for us to add at the moment. Just because we have the items and npcs for them does not mean we will be adding them in a 'custom' way to the server. This leads to the next question:
-"Custom content? Are we going to see any of it?"
Plain and simple, no. We are striving to recreate the game as it originally existed and to be as accurate and as stable as possible. Custom content has 2 major issues: it uses pre-existing resources and ruins the proper usage of those resources and it just looks bad. However, you will see custom content in terms of events. We have had, I think, 3 events that have been written entirely from our own material using Runescape's existing resources. We have the ability to create and add items to the game for special events for people to enjoy. Such things will only be added on special occasions and the majority of events will distribute original Runescape event items.
-"Revision update? You're thinking of adding GE? REEEEEEEEEEEEE"
When the time comes (which is still a long ways away), the maximum revision we will update the game to will be 474. As said above, this is Halloween of 2007 and pre-dates the GE. The GE will never be added.

Thanks for reading and much love,
Pickles

Staff additions!

I've given two players positions on staff, it's clear we need more quality people helping with things.

The first is Saxi who has been given the position of Admin (gold crown).  He has been writing quests for months and is someone I know I can trust.  For those who don't know, I've known Saxi in real life for years now and this will give him the ability to assist people with quests and other content he writes.  While he won't be the definition of active in the player base, he is now an official "part of the staff" and someone I know I can count on.

Then there's Latent who has been made a Mod.  After coding for a while now and being online *all the time*, I believe it will be a good addition to the staff.  Regardless of words that have been exchanged or who got pk'd by who, the staff and I see nothing wrong with this move.

In personal and development news, I have over a month with no real responsibilities until Fall term starts.  I'm gonna try to get an ton of vscape stuff done, my first little pet project is resurrecting the original Jagex map viewer.  Here's an initial version for testing, lemme know if anyone has problems with it running: https://www.dropbox.com/s/r8m32x7cr844msi/map.jar?dl=0  I'm aware it is the wrong map and it would seem no one has the correct version of a data file it uses out on the internet. I'm sure it's sitting on a hard drive somewhere in a beige box out there, but I'm working on figuring out how to make one myself.  I've also started work on a update script that will pull code from our repository, compile it and update data files quickly.  This will mean quicker and more frequent updates.  There's some other big things I'd like to do, but there's also a good amount of bugs to work on so we'll see. Again, thanks to you guys for reporting bugs @ http://vidyascape.no-ip.org/mantis

Also, that tournament was awesome, it had it's hitches but it was great to see so many people online and participating.  Shout-out to Nijia who kicked tons of ass.

Just weak my shit up

----The Npc Weakness System----

I guess this is long awaited or what have you, although I don't think it really changes the course of things too terribly much. But muh accuracy, so, here we are! The system works pretty much like original Runescape's did, each npc can have 3 weaknesses from each side of the combat triangle. Magic and Melee can be broken down into their sub styles / elements while ranged weakness is just a boolean value (true or false).

So you have:
-MELEE (Rare, used mainly on unique npcs such as Dagannoth Supreme and varies %-wise)
-MAGIC (More common, a global 20% increase in accuracy for this weakness)
-RANGED (More common than melee, but not as much as magic, 15% boost)
-STAB (15%)
-CRUSH (15%)
-SLASH (15%)
-FIRE/WATER/EARTH/AIR (25% accuracy boost for specifics like this)
[Ancient spells do NOT count as elemental spells, per original runescape]

This is pretty much how the original system worked, although finding accurate accuracy percentages (so meta) is nigh impossible unless someone wants to watch some OSRS Q&A videos for hours on end. What can be found is which npc's have which weakness, which is the next section of this post...

I spent a few hours last night scripting some shit to parse through a downloaded copy of the OSRS wiki and pull weaknesses from every NPC I could. Now, the formatting in the source of the wiki is garbage and all over the place from various edits and stuff, so it's very possible the script missed a few NPCs (I noticed fire giants, but those were my test subjects and had weaknesses at that point anyways). So, that's why the update will come with the ::checkweakness / ::checkweak / ::weakness / ::npcweakness command. You use it like ::weakness blue dragon, and get results as such:
http://puu.sh/jucEc/06f49e1ac2.png

While the parsing of the wiki found a huge amount of weaknesses and set them to an equally massive amount of NPCs, like I said, you never know. Have fun with the command, check what you're fighting and use it to your advantage, but also report any npcs that have either an incorrect weakness or no weaknesses at all (If and ONLY IF they should have one). You'll need to cite the OSRS wiki or an archived wiki page from 2006-7 like RuneHQ, tip.it, whatever. DO NOT USE ANY MODERN RUNESCAPE WIKI! Weaknesses changed tremendously on the EOC update on realscape and are entirely inaccurate to this time period.

FoxterGate. 5-11 Never4get etc.

The server is back up. Here's what went down.

Last night I was informed that someone's old account was missing all valuables. I took a look and found all the items were traded to Shiggydiggy on 5-11. Mr Foxter was logged into the account that was looted. Before this, Telescope tried to log in and saw he was banned.

This is around the time Mr Foxter was losing his staff privileges, and Telescope and Mr Foxter were always close. Telescope, presumably in reaction to Mr Foxter being demoted, chose to look through old files he had from running the server way back when. Some of these passwords were still current. They checked out and looted 5 accounts and over 100,000,000 gold worth of wealth.

All persons involved were banned (including accounts items were traded to and stored on) and the affected accounts will be getting their items back.

This was about 4 hours of detective work into the morning.

325 accounts are still using at risk passwords that Telescope still has.  These accounts have been locked and their owners will have to contact staff to unlock them.

If you're getting a banned message please contact staff in game on another account.

!Change your password and pin regularly, PLEASE!


Oh, also we scored a slightly better server package with the same provider.  It's double the ram and a little bit cheaper.  Win-win!