How 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
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The record 3 press and posts · last 26 hours presspostscomments
The conversation 11 comments and posts from 1 site · verbatim
- Today
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Brother, I've been in software for decades. I signed up for github this year and my only repo is a single zip file. What I'm arguing is the Runescape code isn't that bad compared to the 35,000 lines of garbage I got away with. Code may be ugly but it can still make millions. Edit: I find this subreddit to be filled with sub-par programmers lapping…
- Yesterday
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It's supposed to be one of the worst spaghetti codebases out there. It shows they did have insane focus on one thing that truly mattered at the time.
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Andrew Gower and team did an amazing Job, I remember playing Classic, and Dipping into the RSPS scene to get a deeper understanding of their network and RuneTek Engine, the RuneScript language they made, and the cache was ahead of it's time
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RuneScape has some weird shit though. Poison doesn't affect cows because the would be done the same server tick that they moo. A specific enemy will only drop their normal loot if you use a ball of wool on a kitten Environmental damage in the desert area was negated because of a completely unrelated quest being added that checked every players…
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Just because something is unreadable to you doesn't mean it's unreadable to someone else. By its very nature assembly language is spaghetti code, yet I find it easy to read.
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Absolutely untrue and you gave no evidence or explanation. In actuality it comes from good design first that doesn't stifle performance and then avoiding performance pitfalls like bad algorithms or using too much scripting for hot loops. Then it comes from avoiding memory allocation, then memory access patterns. The idea that to be fast things…
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Thanks for the very enlightening opening for a discussion :) Hope next time you'll actually contribute something if you want to make a claim!
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I think you’re confusing the fan-made project with Brighter Shores which is the official one
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That’s a common misconception but that project was scrapped hence the fan-made alternative
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That's cool, I was watching one of the OSRS podcasts yesterday with an engine dev talking about this.
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RuneScapes early success can be tied in part to how efficiently written it was. The short version of this post is that there was absolutely no wasted communication. Everything was packed into as few bytes as possible. Even the encryption didn’t allow the data size to increase. There was a 1-1 substitution of bytes of the cipher.