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!

My gear is better than yours pt. 2

Here's more tests following the same method (yes it's in controlled mode)

Player tests:
http://puu.sh/jbDns/979e89ea04.jpg     (The test subject)

http://puu.sh/jbDxJ/8c3b89f183.jpg     (Non-void rune defender)

http://puu.sh/jbDIW/90a217faef.jpg     (Non-void DFS)

http://puu.sh/jbDLk/6f147170fd.jpg     (Void rune defender)

http://puu.sh/jbDPh/53d08cd8b9.jpg    (Void DFS)


High level NPC test:
http://puu.sh/jbE9V/cd6e93e7dc.jpg   (Non-void rune defender)

http://puu.sh/jbEdr/81b05a388b.jpg    (Non-void DFS)

http://puu.sh/jbEhf/76f7ccb40a.jpg    (Void rune defender)

http://puu.sh/jbEjz/87fb7dce4b.jpg    (Void DFS)

AAAAAAAAAAA MY GEAR IS BETTER THAN YOURS AAAAAAAAAA

Hopefully this settles some of the argument over BiS melee BS

http://pastebin.com/1DqAh98C (Max melee hit method for anyone who wants to actually crunch max hit numbers)

http://puu.sh/jbBFq/eb756c0d10.jpg (Non-void rune defender)

http://puu.sh/jbBOH/d917d7d678.jpg (Non-void DFS)

http://puu.sh/jbBXb/fa84f56b52.jpg (Void rune defender)

http://puu.sh/jbC0U/148c4529ee.jpg (Void DFS)

Posted here for hyperlink purposes

Behind the Scenes

Hello again

We recently updated and added 3 more quests to the game:
-Fishing Contest
-Tribal Totem
-Garden of Tranquility
These were interesting and fun quests, although I had no direct part in coding any of them. They were all worked on by various dev members and contributors alike! A good step forward in growing our dev team beyond what it already is. I over-saw polishing and final touches / bug testing on them per usual, taking a break from my Desert Treasure work. I ended up breaking Garden before it went live and we then had to hotfix, and I apologize for that. All in all a fairly smooth update.

Desert Treasure is going swimmingly, with the Smoke and Shadow diamond branches of the quest complete and Blood being ~50%. We are narrowing in on RFD and now can officially say it will be soon (tm). Left to come are the following:
-Shadow of the Storm
-Desert Treasure
-Tourist Trap
-Troll Stronghold
The latter 3 of which will likely come all at one time (Troll Stronghold and Tourist Trap are pre-reqs to DT). I'm considering dropping Tourist Trap from the DT reqs for the time being, and will possibly do so if time becomes an issue. Shadow of the Storm has just had work started on it by Bitter and I can shed a bit of light on it, but not much since it's so early on: Darklight will take Silverlight's stats on release of the quest with Silverlight seeing a nerf (it'll still be more powerful than the original).

In addition to all that jazz, our newer member to the team Saxi is working on One Small Favour to clear out reqs for Swan Song. It'll be added some time from now maybe before a revision update, maybe after. It'll likely be after. Nature Amulet also saw a re-code and will be fixed and patched into the game next update.


And now for the progress pics on DT:
http://puu.sh/j9jHs/3dc87cfd80.jpg     (Tell me about Ruantun.)
http://puu.sh/j9g5e/2469d51e36.jpg
http://puu.sh/j7MuF/2916202b5e.jpg      (I SURE DO LOVE CAMERA WORK)
http://puu.sh/iT3uN/17099c1d7e.jpg
http://puu.sh/iR9Ca/eb36f59cf4.jpg
http://puu.sh/j9znv/82416750f8.jpg
http://puu.sh/iIt5W/87e5b0d016.jpg


P.S
Don't forget to make an account on the Mantis bug tracker! We primarily draw bugs from there these days. You can sign-up with a throwaway email for all we care (we don't really see any part of registration - it's for Mantis itself), all it does is allow you to view submitted bugs and report your own.

Odel Ramblings

Just kind of felt like it was a good time for a new post on my personal blog. First of all, shout-out to the bretty neat 4th of July event the team (Pickles and Bobster) threw together, events involving some kind of player interaction element is something we'll try to continue for sure.  Another shoutout to my good irl friend - Saxi.  He started working on stuff back in April and has really been active in the last 2 months, it's always great to have more help with things.

We've heard some input about wanting to track the number of clue scrolls completed on the highscores site.  Anything else you might like to see tracked?  Time played probably won't happen at this point, its just been too long and would be wrong (meaning 0) for so many accounts.

We've done a respectable amount in the first half of this year and we've got some big stuff on our to-do list.  The bug tracker continues to be awesome, and thank you to everyone contributing!

A few post bags from the (h)edge:

I wanted to make a java applet out of the original interactive map by Jagex and replace the lame one on the site, but it looks like applets are becoming depreciated.  Chrome is dropping them entirely and signing an applet is a painful process.  I'd like to make a map that works like the old 06' one, maybe html 5 can make that a reality some day?  Right now though my pet project is a stress tester that can log 2000 characters in and see what blows up on the server side of things (a test server, I won't burn the actual server to the ground).  I really enjoy pushing those kinds of boundaries and seeing what happens.

I've been testing the Windows 10 preview on one of my computers, turns out vscape didn't have working sound.  I wrote a patch for this, but it may not even be something present in the W10 final build, either way we're ready and everything else works fine.