6 ms·

RuneLite – open-source RuneScape Client

58 points by segasaturn 2y ago

OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago
Fun fact, Jagex (the makers of RuneScape) were very close to acquiring OSBuddy (a closed source Runelite competitor) and shutting Runelite down, but Runelite blew up in popularity weeks before the agreement to buy OSBuddy finalized. When Jagex finally told Runelite to close doors, the community retaliated big time, and Jagex+Runelite came to a compromise [0]. [0] https://runelite.net/blog/show/2018-05-16-Update-RuneLite-threatened-to-shutdown/ https://runelite.net/blog/show/2018-05-16-Update-RuneLite-th...
- yreg 2y ago
  It is unusual that they allow custom clients in a pvp game, though.
  - eigenket 2y ago
    Its not primarily a pvp game, theres pvp stuff you can do but the overwhelming majority of the game doesn't have any pvp.
    - yreg 2y ago
      True, it's not exactly Counter-Strike, but PvP is an important (although optional) aspect. But I'm not sure if it makes any difference.
      - eigenket 2y ago
        It definitely makes a difference, there are some runelite plugins (both allowed and against the rules) which make pvp easier for those using them. I think almost all players think that the improvements to the game we get from plugins outside pvp are worth the negative aspects of their use in pvp. There are also straight up bots people use sometimes in pvp which aren't possible for any human to fight. They can react to what you do instantly and perfectly, you can't really touch them. They're very rare though, the people who are capable of making them keep them expensive and uncommon.
    - repeekad 2y ago
      This is also the game that make a big spectacle out of banning players who get caught using bots because it’s such a problem
      - eigenket 2y ago
        I would say "players" using bots is a fairly minor problem. The overwhelming majority of the bots around are from people making money out of them. I'm not sure if many of these people really play the game. For people who don't play the game it might be hard to understand the scale of the botting problem. Recently the majority of the top 100 accounts in the highscores for killing a boss called leviathan got banned. Its not unlikely that in the top 100 there was one real human (who went fron rank 77 to rank 14 in the highscores because so many who were ahead of him got deleted).
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- joenot443 2y ago
  For those unfamiliar, it's worth pointing out the OSRS team at Jagex operates pretty differently from most game companies. Nearly every change made to the game is run past the community in the form of in-game polls. Generally, the dev team doesn't build things that the community doesn't want. OSRS came to be after years of updates and changes to RS3 which slowly alienated the original base. Now, what was originally a reboot of a 2007 backup of the source has hugely eclipsed the original in popularity. Pretty great story.
bragr 2y ago
>136,079 online (53,634 in game) Amazing that there are so many people active still, if that's accurate. RuneScape feels like a half forgotten childhood memory to me at this point.
- portaouflop 2y ago
  Well „modern“ MMOs are so bad that people still stick to the good old stuff. Honestly MMOs feel so over now, some old ones still clinging on, but the genre is dead now more or less
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    MMORPGs are going to have a hard time in an era of instant gratification. The era of grinding for months if not years to reach the elite ranks is a time gone by, gamers these days just will not respond anymore. MOBAs are perhaps the most obvious reflection of this paradigm shift: Progression is achieved in mere minutes instead of months/years and it only lasts for a sitting session rather than for years to come. That being said, I certainly miss those years and I for one still fondly remember my RuneScape and Ragnarok Online days. As fun as modern instant gratification MMOs are, the absolute high point of fun just doesn't compare to what I experienced in MMORPGs of ye olde days. Can you imagine the absolute chaos and fun of almost 340 grizzly players (168 vs. 168) slogging it out in a small map, aka full scale War of Emperium in Ragnarok Online? God damn, I would kill to experience that again; forget 5v5s in MOBAs, that shit is n00bsauce.
    - brailsafe 2y ago
      Have never played Rag, but in Runescape and WoW progression was only measured in months and years at a time when one would be completely oblivious to any kind of far out goal or meta or otherwise being good at the game, and that's because the nature of the game was to get one level higher, not to the end, and you'd be naively taking ages to even progress that far. After you're aware of the end bits or have done the leveling a few times, progression could be measured in huge time blocks, but I don't know if those have much crossover with what you get through the eyes of a new adventurer. The only nostalgia I have in RuneScape was learning to write basic bots in Pascal using... SCAR? and then acquiring or aspiring to acquire gear that was only novel because I didn't know how or where to get it, the mystery was the magic, bots did the rest. Wow was more punishing and more rewarding during this same period of wide-eyed new adventurer mode. "How did he get those shoulders!? Maybe some day". Although I do still play retail and haven't bothered with classic, because the systems are better and the fights are a bit more sophisticated
swarnie 2y ago
A game mode cobbled together from a partial backup by a few staffers, yeeted to the fanbase as a fun, nostalgic "sorry" for crapping the main branch of the game up. Over 10 years later its still here. Personally i think the biggest strength of the game and its development methodology is also its biggest flaw - Community voting and preapproval for updates. So many updates have failed to make it to the game because the fan base are exactly what you'd expect from reddit/discord/mmo playing nerds. Incredible difficult to please.
- sph 2y ago
  It was an haphazard game mode that has grown into its own, and has been creating more and better content than the original for the past few years. The game has been growing a lot again after the COVID peak and it's reaching its all-time high. The population chart of OSRS vs RS3 (called EOC here) is very telling: https://www.misplaceditems.com/rs_tools/graph/ https://www.misplaceditems.com/rs_tools/graph/
codersfocus 2y ago
Whelp, just logged in for the first time in 1687 days, 19 hours and 18 minutes
- eigenket 2y ago
  For me there was a roughly 18 year break. I quit the game when I was 12 and started again at 30.
- dvko 2y ago
  I got my first 99 after a 15 year break. Farming, obviously!
doublerabbit 2y ago
Habbo Hotel or Runescape were the two other ones outside of WoW. I chose Habbo. Still exists but isn't the same.
- bdsa 2y ago
  They've just released a version as it existed some time in 2005: https://www.habbo.com/community/article/34151/launching-tomorrow-habbo-hotel-origins https://www.habbo.com/community/article/34151/launching-tomo... Like OSRS but for Habbo
  - doublerabbit 2y ago
    That's interesting. Thanks for the link. The amount of developers that were building retro servers with modern stacks for their clones was really impressive.
dev-jayson 2y ago
Buying gf
- navigate8310 2y ago
  wave2: selling dragon scimitar 1m
naggie 2y ago
Is there a maintained open source server counterpart? It’s really great to see games that would otherwise die live on through a community. Ultima online is a great example with the likes of ClassicUO (amazing client) and ModernUO (an active attempt at a modernised server)
- arianvanp 2y ago
  Yes there were many. This is how I got into programming in 2006. The fact that OSRS even happened is because Jagex was losing a lot of people to private servers. I've been out of the community for 1.5 decades now but there (used to) be a thriving private server community at https://rune-server.org/index.php https://rune-server.org/index.php which shaped my entire programming career Whether there are still actively maintained ones I'm not sure though.
- pasmat 2y ago
  This is for 2004 version of the game, but probably the most active open source project https://github.com/2004scape https://github.com/2004scape Also Runelite isn’t open source client per se, its just open source client wrapper that makes many functions available through stable API and adds plugins.
xcdzvyn 2y ago
I tried getting into OSRS a few weeks ago. I noticed the official Jagex client doesn't run on Linux, so I installed RuneLite. However Jagex recently mandated the transition of email/password logins to a fancy proprietary OAuthy thing that _requires_ their official launcher. Apparently the kosher way around this is installing RuneLite and the Jagex launcher in Lutris or Wine, but I just gave up.
- eigenket 2y ago
  This doesn't seem right, I use runelite on linux fine without any extra lutris or wine stuff. As far as I know you don't need the official launcher. Edit: oh, I understand, I have an old account without the jagex launcher stuff. New accouts apparently need it. Well that sucks for you, I'm sorry.
  - yett 2y ago
    Have you migrated to a Jagex Account yet? You probably haven't done that which is why you can still play without the official launcher.
    - eigenket 2y ago
      You're correct, see my edit above.
- remedan 2y ago
  I installed this flatpak-packaged Jagex Launcher and RuneLite, and it works flawlessly on Linux. It does run in Wine, but the package takes care of setting that up. https://github.com/USA-RedDragon/jagex-launcher-linux-flatpak?tab=readme-ov-file#manual-installation https://github.com/USA-RedDragon/jagex-launcher-linux-flatpa... It is seemingly somewhat officially sanctioned, as a help article links to a repo that links to the flatpak. https://help.jagex.com/hc/en-gb/articles/13413514881937-Downloading-the-Jagex-Launcher-on-Linux https://help.jagex.com/hc/en-gb/articles/13413514881937-Down... https://github.com/TormStorm/jagex-launcher-linux https://github.com/TormStorm/jagex-launcher-linux
pfdietz 2y ago
Wouldn't the client being open source mean botting is essentially impossible to control?
- joenot443 2y ago
  I'm curious how you came to this conclusion. Bot detection isn't typically done clientside these days, hasn't for a long time. Have you ever played Runescape?
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    How do you detect a human-like bot at the server? I mean, something that attempts to resemble what a human would do? False positives would be a big issue.
- 16mb 2y ago
  Yup pretty much. There’s a large percentage of the community botting. Most of the bot builders have forked RuneLite to add custom scripts for automating tasks. Jagex has made some improvements to their bot detection mostly through detecting if you’re playing on an “approved” build of RuneLite (the primary repo) in the past year or so, but this method went undetected for so long that many have maxed their accounts.
  - eigenket 2y ago
    I don't think its accurate to say a large percentage of the community is botting. My understanding is that the overwhelming majority of the botting is by organised groups making money out of selling the gold they make. I think a large percentage of the community is buying botted gold, but random people botting to get 99 mining or runecrafting or whatever is relatively rare (and relatively sucessfully detected) compared to gold farms.
- impulser_ 2y ago
  The RuneScape client has always been "open source". People have been decompiling and deobfuscating the RuneScape client since 2005. Since it's written in Java it's not hard to do. They do have some pretty smart ways of easily detecting bots. They do live streams of them teleporting bots to a world and killing them all before banning them. It actually quite hard to build a reliable bot for RS.

58 points by segasaturn 2y ago

Fun fact, Jagex (the makers of RuneScape) were very close to acquiring OSBuddy (a closed source Runelite competitor) and shutting Runelite down, but Runelite blew up in popularity weeks before the agreement to buy OSBuddy finalized. When Jagex finally told Runelite to close doors, the community retaliated big time, and Jagex+Runelite came to a compromise [0]. [0] https://runelite.net/blog/show/2018-05-16-Update-RuneLite-threatened-to-shutdown/ https://runelite.net/blog/show/2018-05-16-Update-RuneLite-th...

yreg 2y ago
It is unusual that they allow custom clients in a pvp game, though.
- eigenket 2y ago
  Its not primarily a pvp game, theres pvp stuff you can do but the overwhelming majority of the game doesn't have any pvp.
  - yreg 2y ago
    True, it's not exactly Counter-Strike, but PvP is an important (although optional) aspect. But I'm not sure if it makes any difference.
    - eigenket 2y ago
      It definitely makes a difference, there are some runelite plugins (both allowed and against the rules) which make pvp easier for those using them. I think almost all players think that the improvements to the game we get from plugins outside pvp are worth the negative aspects of their use in pvp. There are also straight up bots people use sometimes in pvp which aren't possible for any human to fight. They can react to what you do instantly and perfectly, you can't really touch them. They're very rare though, the people who are capable of making them keep them expensive and uncommon.
  - repeekad 2y ago
    This is also the game that make a big spectacle out of banning players who get caught using bots because it’s such a problem
    - eigenket 2y ago
      I would say "players" using bots is a fairly minor problem. The overwhelming majority of the bots around are from people making money out of them. I'm not sure if many of these people really play the game. For people who don't play the game it might be hard to understand the scale of the botting problem. Recently the majority of the top 100 accounts in the highscores for killing a boss called leviathan got banned. Its not unlikely that in the top 100 there was one real human (who went fron rank 77 to rank 14 in the highscores because so many who were ahead of him got deleted).
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
joenot443 2y ago
For those unfamiliar, it's worth pointing out the OSRS team at Jagex operates pretty differently from most game companies. Nearly every change made to the game is run past the community in the form of in-game polls. Generally, the dev team doesn't build things that the community doesn't want. OSRS came to be after years of updates and changes to RS3 which slowly alienated the original base. Now, what was originally a reboot of a 2007 backup of the source has hugely eclipsed the original in popularity. Pretty great story.

bragr 2y ago

>136,079 online (53,634 in game) Amazing that there are so many people active still, if that's accurate. RuneScape feels like a half forgotten childhood memory to me at this point.

portaouflop 2y ago
Well „modern“ MMOs are so bad that people still stick to the good old stuff. Honestly MMOs feel so over now, some old ones still clinging on, but the genre is dead now more or less
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  MMORPGs are going to have a hard time in an era of instant gratification. The era of grinding for months if not years to reach the elite ranks is a time gone by, gamers these days just will not respond anymore. MOBAs are perhaps the most obvious reflection of this paradigm shift: Progression is achieved in mere minutes instead of months/years and it only lasts for a sitting session rather than for years to come. That being said, I certainly miss those years and I for one still fondly remember my RuneScape and Ragnarok Online days. As fun as modern instant gratification MMOs are, the absolute high point of fun just doesn't compare to what I experienced in MMORPGs of ye olde days. Can you imagine the absolute chaos and fun of almost 340 grizzly players (168 vs. 168) slogging it out in a small map, aka full scale War of Emperium in Ragnarok Online? God damn, I would kill to experience that again; forget 5v5s in MOBAs, that shit is n00bsauce.
  - brailsafe 2y ago
    Have never played Rag, but in Runescape and WoW progression was only measured in months and years at a time when one would be completely oblivious to any kind of far out goal or meta or otherwise being good at the game, and that's because the nature of the game was to get one level higher, not to the end, and you'd be naively taking ages to even progress that far. After you're aware of the end bits or have done the leveling a few times, progression could be measured in huge time blocks, but I don't know if those have much crossover with what you get through the eyes of a new adventurer. The only nostalgia I have in RuneScape was learning to write basic bots in Pascal using... SCAR? and then acquiring or aspiring to acquire gear that was only novel because I didn't know how or where to get it, the mystery was the magic, bots did the rest. Wow was more punishing and more rewarding during this same period of wide-eyed new adventurer mode. "How did he get those shoulders!? Maybe some day". Although I do still play retail and haven't bothered with classic, because the systems are better and the fights are a bit more sophisticated

swarnie 2y ago

A game mode cobbled together from a partial backup by a few staffers, yeeted to the fanbase as a fun, nostalgic "sorry" for crapping the main branch of the game up. Over 10 years later its still here. Personally i think the biggest strength of the game and its development methodology is also its biggest flaw - Community voting and preapproval for updates. So many updates have failed to make it to the game because the fan base are exactly what you'd expect from reddit/discord/mmo playing nerds. Incredible difficult to please.

sph 2y ago
It was an haphazard game mode that has grown into its own, and has been creating more and better content than the original for the past few years. The game has been growing a lot again after the COVID peak and it's reaching its all-time high. The population chart of OSRS vs RS3 (called EOC here) is very telling: https://www.misplaceditems.com/rs_tools/graph/ https://www.misplaceditems.com/rs_tools/graph/

codersfocus 2y ago

Whelp, just logged in for the first time in 1687 days, 19 hours and 18 minutes

eigenket 2y ago
For me there was a roughly 18 year break. I quit the game when I was 12 and started again at 30.
dvko 2y ago
I got my first 99 after a 15 year break. Farming, obviously!

doublerabbit 2y ago

Habbo Hotel or Runescape were the two other ones outside of WoW. I chose Habbo. Still exists but isn't the same.

bdsa 2y ago
They've just released a version as it existed some time in 2005: https://www.habbo.com/community/article/34151/launching-tomorrow-habbo-hotel-origins https://www.habbo.com/community/article/34151/launching-tomo... Like OSRS but for Habbo
- doublerabbit 2y ago
  That's interesting. Thanks for the link. The amount of developers that were building retro servers with modern stacks for their clones was really impressive.

dev-jayson 2y ago

Buying gf

navigate8310 2y ago
wave2: selling dragon scimitar 1m

naggie 2y ago

Is there a maintained open source server counterpart? It’s really great to see games that would otherwise die live on through a community. Ultima online is a great example with the likes of ClassicUO (amazing client) and ModernUO (an active attempt at a modernised server)

arianvanp 2y ago
Yes there were many. This is how I got into programming in 2006. The fact that OSRS even happened is because Jagex was losing a lot of people to private servers. I've been out of the community for 1.5 decades now but there (used to) be a thriving private server community at https://rune-server.org/index.php https://rune-server.org/index.php which shaped my entire programming career Whether there are still actively maintained ones I'm not sure though.
pasmat 2y ago
This is for 2004 version of the game, but probably the most active open source project https://github.com/2004scape https://github.com/2004scape Also Runelite isn’t open source client per se, its just open source client wrapper that makes many functions available through stable API and adds plugins.

xcdzvyn 2y ago

I tried getting into OSRS a few weeks ago. I noticed the official Jagex client doesn't run on Linux, so I installed RuneLite. However Jagex recently mandated the transition of email/password logins to a fancy proprietary OAuthy thing that _requires_ their official launcher. Apparently the kosher way around this is installing RuneLite and the Jagex launcher in Lutris or Wine, but I just gave up.

eigenket 2y ago
This doesn't seem right, I use runelite on linux fine without any extra lutris or wine stuff. As far as I know you don't need the official launcher. Edit: oh, I understand, I have an old account without the jagex launcher stuff. New accouts apparently need it. Well that sucks for you, I'm sorry.
- yett 2y ago
  Have you migrated to a Jagex Account yet? You probably haven't done that which is why you can still play without the official launcher.
  - eigenket 2y ago
    You're correct, see my edit above.
remedan 2y ago
I installed this flatpak-packaged Jagex Launcher and RuneLite, and it works flawlessly on Linux. It does run in Wine, but the package takes care of setting that up. https://github.com/USA-RedDragon/jagex-launcher-linux-flatpak?tab=readme-ov-file#manual-installation https://github.com/USA-RedDragon/jagex-launcher-linux-flatpa... It is seemingly somewhat officially sanctioned, as a help article links to a repo that links to the flatpak. https://help.jagex.com/hc/en-gb/articles/13413514881937-Downloading-the-Jagex-Launcher-on-Linux https://help.jagex.com/hc/en-gb/articles/13413514881937-Down... https://github.com/TormStorm/jagex-launcher-linux https://github.com/TormStorm/jagex-launcher-linux

pfdietz 2y ago

Wouldn't the client being open source mean botting is essentially impossible to control?

joenot443 2y ago
I'm curious how you came to this conclusion. Bot detection isn't typically done clientside these days, hasn't for a long time. Have you ever played Runescape?
- pfdietz 2y ago
  How do you detect a human-like bot at the server? I mean, something that attempts to resemble what a human would do? False positives would be a big issue.
16mb 2y ago
Yup pretty much. There’s a large percentage of the community botting. Most of the bot builders have forked RuneLite to add custom scripts for automating tasks. Jagex has made some improvements to their bot detection mostly through detecting if you’re playing on an “approved” build of RuneLite (the primary repo) in the past year or so, but this method went undetected for so long that many have maxed their accounts.
- eigenket 2y ago
  I don't think its accurate to say a large percentage of the community is botting. My understanding is that the overwhelming majority of the botting is by organised groups making money out of selling the gold they make. I think a large percentage of the community is buying botted gold, but random people botting to get 99 mining or runecrafting or whatever is relatively rare (and relatively sucessfully detected) compared to gold farms.
impulser_ 2y ago
The RuneScape client has always been "open source". People have been decompiling and deobfuscating the RuneScape client since 2005. Since it's written in Java it's not hard to do. They do have some pretty smart ways of easily detecting bots. They do live streams of them teleporting bots to a world and killing them all before banning them. It actually quite hard to build a reliable bot for RS.