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Open RuneScape Classic
- camhart 4y agoI grew up playing this game, which is what eventually led to me learning to program. Jagex shut the game down a while back, but a group of dedicated fans have recreated the server and kept it going.
- hesdeadjim 4y agoAsheron’s call is in a similar situation. The community has implemented, from scratch, their own servers and a huge amount of the game post Throne of Destiny. Interestingly, the game was content complete for Throne of Destiny on the server side because apparently someone found a thumb drive of the server files at a conference long ago. I’ve been secretly hoping that someone from Turbine would leak the entire game source as a final fuck you to WB backpedaling on making the servers public.
- diceduckmonk 4y agoI wrote my first Java program as a means of automating in game tasks. At the time, I didn’t know about background processes or VMs. I used the Mouse cursor api in the JCL, so my computer was preoccupied. There were 5 second intervals between actions where I can quickly change the song on YouTube.
- iinnPP 4y agoHas your SN changed? Camhart is the name of a player I recall from the Reinet/SYI days. I went by DollarBill/Xenox.
- rpmw 4y agoIt's impressive the amount of effort the Runescape community puts into these projects. It's amazing how many people have abandoned the game at one point in youth, yet come back and contribute as an adult. It makes me wonder what current games will still exist in 20+ years.
- eddsh1994 4y agoHonestly I come back every 2 years for about a month and then realize I'm spending hours cutting virtual trees and leave again. But for that month... man it's so much fun & nostalgic!
- insanitybit 4y ago99 wc crew
- TrapLord_Rhodo 4y agoI always come back to runescape every couple years and the things i do in game speaks volumes to my mindset. Back when i first started playing I never really did much of anything really... explored around, tried quests and never thought of looking up a guide, talked to alot of people standing in the bank, played alot of minigames etc. etc. Years go by and I come back and i was hooked on efficiency. What wierd methods were there for getting insane xp per hour like sitting in lunar island, cannoning the trolls, while woodcutting the trees and high alching the logs. skip to my early 20's when i first started programming for my day job and i would come home and write runescape bots for all sorts of stuff. One of my favorites that i wrote would have around 20 bots with gmauls sit in multi-wildy and hive mind spec poor souls who walked by. I haven't touched RS in years, but funnily enough last weekend I found out the OS buddy and the runescape Wiki post grand exchange data. Was spending some time learning rust and decided to build a grand exchange analysis tool that looked across a number of factors (Volume, stability, beta) to determine the best items to flip. Don't really want to post it on github cause it'd probably fuck with the economy but if anyones interested, hit me up at rhoades.lorenzo@gmail.com
- 4y ago
- rcme 4y agoCheating 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.
- pohl 4y agoNoticing that others were scripting their labor is what got me out of RuneScape.
- voxic11 4y agosame here, I used https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/awt/Robot.html https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/awt/Robot.htm...
- jeremysalwen 4y agoSame here! It was also my first programming "job". I sold 4 copies of my script for 10$ each. My script would play one of the members-only minigames :D
- dayjaby 4y agoWhich minigame? I made a bot for mage training arena for all rooms, but the most interesting one was the enchanting chamber: there were dragonstones with a very high, but constant respawn rate that were highly contested. My script jumped through different servers and after finding and collecting one, it remembers the time when it spawns on that particular server. It was very satisfying to watch it run there just few seconds before they spawned, leaving other players no chance.
- torranceyang 4y agoSame! Though I got in much later when it was Simba
- openair18 4y ago“Shit Compared To AutoRune”. I think Kaitnieks’ (creator) website is still floating around out there.
- 4y ago
- blamazon 4y agoPSA - note the below quoted passages! If you played RuneScape between 2001 and 2012 and have any data archives or machines sitting around from that time, you might be able to help this project :) > Contribute to the RuneScape Archive [1] with any lost RuneScape data prior to 2010 and receive any obtainable item of your choice as a thanks! [1] https://rs-archive.github.io/index.html https://rs-archive.github.io/index.html > Our goal is to recover missing versions of RuneScape from 2001 until 2012. These versions were not saved by Jagex and are at risk of disappearing forever, with over 2/3 remaining unrecovered. If you ever played Runescape just once on a computer, the full game files were all downloaded.
- dandellion 4y agoSeems a bit dishonest to ask people to contribute without explaining what the files are actually used for anywhere in the site, just "they could be used by Jagex". C'mon, I'm not against piracy, but I don't think it's cool trying to manipulate people like this.
- DEFEC8ED 4y agoI'm not sure what you're getting at here. Are you insinuating that people are being manipulated into unwittingly pirating software? The files alluded to are obfuscated Java byte code, so it's not piracy. It's useful for reverse engineering historical versions of the game for which no source or artifacts are known to exist. Perhaps you'd consider that unethical but I'd say it's ethically ambiguous at worst.
- dandellion 4y ago> Are you insinuating that people are being manipulated into unwittingly pirating software? Maybe not, but it could be. They don't give any information so there's no way to know what they're doing, so you can assume good intention, or bad, or neither, whichever you prefer. To me personally it stood out how they put up a very nice landing page, with very verbose text, and never once mention any examples of what they're doing with it.
- 4y ago
- shpongled 4y agoI just got a massive hit of dopamine from the nostalgia of seeing the classic homepage. So many hours of my middle school life spent playing Runescape...
- blamazon 4y agoI sometimes load up music from RuneScape on YouTube and it takes me back to the simplicity of that time like nothing else. Absolute time warp.
- lurker616 4y agoThat's a great idea! Take me back to my best life - 10 years old spending my summer vacations playing RS with my cousins.
- galleywest200 4y agoThe Oldschool Runescape official channel has some lofi mixes and I have been mellowing out to these this past week or so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkOMJ7jAjxk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkOMJ7jAjxk
- blamazon 4y agoThis is amazing, thank you!!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ALittleLight 4y agoI honestly don't know whether I love this game or just loved being a teenager with nothing better to do but play RuneScape with my brother all weekend. Probably both. I think about my adventures in this game pretty often.
- hirvi74 4y agoOne might say that I am very into personal finance and money management. People tell me that I am good with money all the time. I often wonder, what in my life made me even remotely care about money? I realized some time ago, that is was literally Runescape. It was my first introduction to the world of finance and economics. Seriously, it might be one of the biggest positive impacts I can think of in my youth.
- donutshop 4y agoPhats FTW!
- trynewideas 4y agoNot related to Open RSC, but the https://runescape.wiki/ 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 https://runescape.wiki/w/Help:Editing They have an active and friendly community, including in-game cosmetic rewards for editors: https://runescape.wiki/w/RuneScape:The_Wikian https://runescape.wiki/w/RuneScape:The_Wikian They open-source a lot of their work: https://gitlab.com/weirdgloop https://gitlab.com/weirdgloop And the staff is looking for additional funding: https://runescape.wiki/w/Forum:Funding_the_wikis https://runescape.wiki/w/Forum:Funding_the_wikis
- cookmeplox 4y agoCool to see our site show up on HN! Thanks for the kind words :)
- herodoturtle 4y agoI 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 ^_^
- onei 4y agoThere's [1] for an encyclopaedic overview of the game. For actual gameplay for new players, there's [2]. There's also a mobile game client if you wanted to give the game a go. 1: https://runescape.wiki/w/RuneScape https://runescape.wiki/w/RuneScape 2: https://runescape.wiki/w/Guide_for_new_players https://runescape.wiki/w/Guide_for_new_players
- herodoturtle 4y ago
- knapcio 4y agoFishing lvls?
- askafriend 4y ago53, I was more of a woodcutter. Catch me selling yew logs on server 2.
- bdcp 4y agoBank sale 20k
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- Aleksdev 4y agowave:45! <><
- soared 4y agoFYI it’s the glory days of RuneScape (old school) private servers. The big ones have teams of developers and they’re even better than Jagex in some ways!
- synunlimited 4y agoIt's funny to read this now given I was a mod on RuneLocus during what I would consider RSPS's heyday (2006-2012ish range). It felt like the scene died off a bit especially when Jagex finally brought back OSRS in 2013. That said it doesn't surprise me that certain servers have continued to grow and thrive over the years.
- soared 4y agoId be very curious to see player counts from then compared to know, but at least in the quality of servers they feel comparable and even better than osrs in some aspects!
- TheBaconGuy 4y agoAny suggestions? I've been looking for any to play on the side while I grind the main game but all the popular ones seem sketchy in terms of monetizations and stuff.
- soared 4y agoAnything in the top of the top lists is good, ikov is probably best for pvm comparable to osrs with a little bit of uniqueness, while runewild is the best for pvp and has absolutely incredible ui/ux. Unfortunately all servers have some aspect of random boxes/currency for getting items and gambling, but the major ones make donating easily avoidable. They do all let you but the donor ranks with in game gp so donating definitely isn’t required.
- Aleksdev 4y agoI’m happy to hear that. I used to develop for a RSC server. I remember doing completely for free and one day I got paid for it and I will never ever forget it. Thanks Brwn. Long live rsckbd!
- 12345hn6789 4y ago** play runescape classic via private server again
- diceduckmonk 4y agoWho’s down to make an open source RuneScape with me? Outdated polygon graphics, simple 2D grid, simplistic combat system, lots of craft/skills. A framework for promoting emergent phenomenon.
- pjbeam 4y agoOh the nostalgia is rushing back. I love to see this!
- ivraatiems 4y agoThere's still an official version of this, Oldschool RuneScape: https://oldschool.runescape.com/ https://oldschool.runescape.com/ But like many people are mentioning, private servers have long been an important part of RS's legacy (and WOW's, and many other MMOs). So godspeed to these folks!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- welshwelsh 4y agoThat's for 2007scape/RS2 though. There's no longer an official way to play RuneScape Classic (2001-2004) anymore
- nojs 4y agoHaha, 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-values-from-a-linear-congruential-generator https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/2086/predicting-v...
- RyanHamilton 4y agoGreat story. Thanks for sharing. Took me back to my own young coding days.
- KhalPanda 4y agoLove the story. My first exposure to programming was through automating RSC. All I was doing though was writing scripts for SCAR. I think maybe in… pascal? I remember trying to learn some Java at the time, but could never make the leap between building simple CLI app’s and primitive string manipulation to integrating with the RS client and actually doing something ‘useful’. However, I was only 8, so I’ll cut myself some slack!
- alexchantavy 4y agoI love that there are botting-allowed worlds! I've commented on this before but RS macros are what got me into programming and computer security: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29716900#29720860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29716900#29720860
- clepto 4y agoI 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.
- Dracophoenix 4y agoI've always wondered how private servers were developed. How was the netcode for private servers developed without any documentation? Were there source code leaks that helped?
- iamricks 4y agoMy 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.
- iamricks 4y agoWondering if anyone played on the RSPS 2speced back in the day? it was really popular
- bullen 4y agoUses this apparently: https://github.com/konsoletyper/teavm https://github.com/konsoletyper/teavm "TeaVM is an ahead-of-time compiler for Java bytecode that emits JavaScript and WebAssembly that runs in a browser."
- sph 4y agoI never played the game as a kid, but thanks to the amazing content creator scene (Swampletics) and memes over at r/2007scape I gave OldSchool RuneScape a go in my 30s and went directly for an Ironman (where you cannot use the market, but have to do everything yourself). It's such a charming game, I'm too old to spend hours playing, but I'm doing one hour here and there and I'll probably max some time in my 70s. Looking forward to doing some serious bossing when I'm retired :)
- tohmasch 4y agoWow this is great. I wish they would do the same thing for Maplestory. OR bring back OSRS in the same style for Maplestory. RIP childhood games.
- nivenkos 4y agoRunescape was incredible for the time, I played even before there was a paid membership, starting around 2000. There were so many great features like cooking being useful for people heading to mine rare ores in the wilderness so you'd have cooks naturally lined up on the border trying to sell stuff. The wilderness PvP worked with a level gap system, so when we went out as a group it was good to bring some mid-level characters to be able to suddenly attack lower-level players in the early wilderness who wouldn't expect it. That really felt like D&D - having someone prepare meals beforehand, etc. It's a shame most games have given up on that systemic, open-world player driven style of game. Back then with Ultima VII, Baldur's Gate, Runescape, Daggerfall, Ultima Underworld, etc. it really felt like in 20 years we'd be playing games like Daggerfall persistently with thousands of players online. And instead it's just devolved into Skinner boxes and microtransactions.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoWhile it's not as open as Runescape, some games still have this feeling of a persistent world; a friend of mine mentioned building an automated shop in a Minecraft server to sell things to other players. Games like Rust and Valheim allows you to shape your world, although it's not "massively" unfortunately. Before Minecraft, there was a game called Wurm Online (the creator of Minecraft was involved in that) where players could band together and (tediously) shape the world around them. The other side is modern-day MMOs; I mainly play FFXIV and have done so for a long time now, and while it doesn't have the freedoms as Runescape had, it's still a great game with a pretty good community and ad-hoc community activities.
- nivenkos 4y agoValheim was great, my friends and family hosted a persistent instance on AWS so we could play from all over the world. It was awesome building bridges and then finding someone else had built a new base the next day, etc.
- smcn 4y agoI still have a few friends who play 2007scape and it looks like the thing to do these days is Ironman mode, which is just "no trading with other players". It's apparently fun in a North Korean self reliance kind of a way. No microtransactions at all. I've been tempted to join them but I currently lack the time to get addicted to it again.
- michaelbrooks 4y agoThis brings me back to the days of Moparscape and creating my own private server. I remember joining the forums and sharing my code for colour coding the menus. Great times!
- bsagdiyev 4y agofwiw, this appears to be a fork of a now missing repo, and I cannot speak to the cleanliness of the files but it's a decent sized dump of old bots and sources including AutoRune. Repo -- https://github.com/runescape-classic/runescape-classic-dump https://github.com/runescape-classic/runescape-classic-dump AutoRune -- https://github.com/runescape-classic/runescape-classic-dump/tree/master/AutoRune https://github.com/runescape-classic/runescape-classic-dump/...
- bsagdiyev 4y agoJust remembered, a private server written/modified by a buddy of mine. https://github.com/gen0cide/firescape https://github.com/gen0cide/firescape
- Karsteski 4y agoAh yes, the game that I've spent over a year of my life in :) Very cool
- 9395480387 4y agoFree fire
- Aleksdev 4y agoI will never as long as I live forget how to count by 28 due to the inventory spaces.
- egberts1 4y agoNever used a bot, but dang, I am only at mining level 78 before I turned my account over to my son in 2009; mining level is now at 83. Makes you wonder how many got to mining level 99 so easily.
- dayjaby 4y agoThe Uranium server looks really appealing! Already 15/15/15 att/def/str in two hours killing small spiders (modified the chicken script as ALL chicken spawns are highly occupied by other bots). I wish more games/servers would allow this kind of thing :)
- Bonesdog 4y agoSomeone made a 2023 game very similar to this called Genfanad