Jard_Y_Dooku

I actually find RS Wiki to be orders of magnitude more helpful, accurate and comprehensive than Tip.It nearly all the time. I've been using it as my primary source of information for a while now. This shall actually be the subject of my next long and controversial topic. Don't take this one off topic though, because I'm sure you'll be dying to defend classic ol' Tip.It without first hearing my argument. Patience, grasshopper.

Altars don't have to be destroyed for them to have talismans. Didn't the Duke of Lumbridge just find one somewhere? My guess is that, whether the altar is destroyed or not, you need a talisman anyway to get to the actual altar. So the Soul talisman being in the cache doesn't prove much. However, consistency is very relevant, and I guarantee you the soul altar will be in ruins just like the rest of them. You watch... I wonder if that Mahjarrat part 5 final ending quest will reveal the altar, and possibly tie in all 13 altars being rediscovered be some important part of the storyline. That'd be cool.

Yay for the small town of Nokia! I was referring to the company, but that too, I guess. It's named after that town, actually. :P

I remember an NPC stating that the altars the Fremennik destroyed never were the REAL altars. Wizard Elriss tells us about every Runecrafting Altar being so powerful that they warp the space around themselves and create their own pocket dimension. This already was the case since the beginning. The Moon Clan apparently sought out a suitable place in RuneScape for a portal to an altar which was in another dimension altogether. The Fremennik destroyed the gate, so to speak, but not the place. My guess is that, with the talisman, you can revive/use the portal to the pocket dimension again. As for EVERY altar being beat up by the Fremennik, I'm just as puzzled as you. I realized too that it's a mystery how they got through the Temple of Light unharmed, there's no historical explanation for it. Likely a fault on Jagex's part. There is always the chance that the Soul Altar wasn't damaged, like the Astral Altar. However it would be a whole lot more interesting if the Soul Altar WAS destroyed while the Mahjarrat need it for their rejuvination ritual... You are right about the "real" altars, I started refreshing myself more on RS Wikia and read about the Runecrafting crusades and everything. One interesting thing to consider is that they only possibly "destroyed" the first 10 of them, the ones they had access to (even so, how would they get into Zanaris?). The others (death/blood) may have simply fallen into disrepair, given their remote locations compared to the others. And I give a 0% chance that the soul altar wasn't destroyed nor fell into disrepair. It's one of the original 13 runes, and soul talismans, tiaras, staff-thingies, etc., have all been found in the cache, waiting to be released. In fact I can even give you the ID number of the soul talisman - 1460. You used to be able to see images of it on the GE. It sits between Law (#1458) and Nature (#1462). The reason there's 2 between each is that for every notable item, the notable form is the item's ID# plus 1. So noted soul talismans are #1461.

Yay Finland. I like Finland because Nokia is there.

Years ago I'd have probably agreed with you about the soul altar coming with Prifddinas, and there's definitely GOT to be something interesting occupying all that blank space to the north, but I'd have to say no for two reasons: one, the elves already have the death altar in that area, and two, there's other places in RuneScape that seem to have a lot more to do with soul - especially the recently mentioned ritual stone of the Mahjarrat, or Arposandra (even though that's in the same area as far as we know, I think it's a lot more likely than Prifddinas). Ooh, just got an interesting thought. Perhaps Arposandra occupies the long-hidden space north of Prifddinas? No reason those tunnels near the poison waste can't lead up north, right? Plus... that poison waste is pretty much AT the coast. There's no space to put anything there. Unless Arposandra is underground like I mentioned before. North of Prifddinas is a fascinating speculation though, I never considered that potential...

Then remove it, obviously Jagex won't like you to do so but if it's opensource then you should be able too. That part's not open source. The OpenJDK itself (with their modifications) along with a 50-line C++ program which basically reads a config file and launches the JVM is all we have. Nothing, really.

If anyone needs to program in Java, it's Mozilla. They can't manage memory for cabbage. The copyright notice isn't that annoying anyways (although bizarre, literally NO other software, game or application, does that), and if it bothers you that much, with a bit of technical skill you can easily remove it. In fact, it's very easy to make the title bar show "GoonScape" and change the copyright text to "Jagex fails at a lot of things", for example, or even hide the advertisements for F2P. Lol. And no, none of this requires modification of their software in any way. And no I won't tell you how. Tip.It mods will probably be like "ILLEGALZ AAAAH" and delete my post or something.

EDIT: Never mind.

This thing's useless (the source). The client itself is great because you don't need Java installed. They were legally required to release that source. That's basically it. /thread EDIT: Admins removing my font 7 on two words in the post.

Is it? I haven't looked into it that thoroughly. If that's the case, why did they even bother open-sourcing it? Makes no sense. EDIT: Oh, just remembered, GPL. The OpenJDK license legally requires them to release the source.

Ooh, EXCELLENT point about liches/Mahjarrat relating to the soul altar. I'm actually kind of disappointed Jagex didn't call them liches (because they basically ARE liches)... in my game liches are gonna be called liches. :) However I am glad Jagex added some Russian/Slavic mythology to RuneScape (Baba Yaga also). Koschei is simply awesome... he's got like, an ultra-phylactery. Although, I've never heard anything about Koschei's "phylactery" being difficult to destroy, whereas apparently liches' phylacteries (at least the D&D ones, from what I've heard) are super difficult. Or maybe I'm wrong, but one of my old friends said they are supposed to be hard to destroy. Bah! Anyways, both Koschei and Buyan are going in my game. :) How do you know the next Mahjarrat quest is the final one? Has Jagex said so? Also, extremely interesting you mention about the portals' locations. I really never though about that before, but it does sound oddly familiar. That's extremely fascinating. EXCELLENT post, A+++. Bah, sounds like an eBay rating. nevertheless, A+++. Ah, just looked at RS Wikia. Looks like you're right. "The Law altar was built by the Moon Clan, which was then a faction of the Fremennik mountain tribe. It is believed to have been built upon the very spot where Saradomin first set foot upon Gielinor in the Second Age." Now, one thing I never understood about altars. Why do you use a talisman on them to get to them? The originals were destroyed by the Fremennik. Do the talismans use magic to recreate an original representation of them? Why do the insides look weird though? This is especially interesting. Many of them look logical. Law DEFINITELY does not. And death... trees growing underground? What? I just really don't get it. Are the talismans supposed to "restore" them to their original states? Why do the environments look SO different? Also I can only understand the Fremenniks destroying the first 10 altars. How did they find the death altar hidden WAY deep underground, not to mention protected by the Temple of Light?! And blood... wouldn't the vampires have ripped them to shreds before they even got close? This is assuming them even knew the locations. And - (assuming soul's up near the Mahjarrats)... wouldn't they have bestowed skeletal death upon them? No matter where the soul altar's located, I'm sure that when it's revealed I'll be wondering how they found it... Ooh, just before I post, Fire Altar on Wikia says "If the theory is true, that the inside of an altar is the past of the altar outside, the northern Kharidian Desert would be a volcanic area, however, there are no history records of this.". I read through them all, this was the only one that mentioned anything besides the Law altar being about Saradomin stepping foot there. Again, trees in the death altar? -.- UNDERGROUND? Also, Water Altar says "Some theorize that the water altar's inside is the past of the water altar's outside. This seems unlikely, as Wizard Elriss explains that the isolated locations the Runecrafting Altars are located within are actually "pocket dimensions" created by the rune energy of the altars. He could, however, easily be referring to time dimensions, rather than spacial dimensions.". Spatial dimensions would make more sense than time dimensions, though, seeing from the areas, such as tiled floors and the like. Then again, Mind altar says "The altar may be the remains of a former Zarosian fortress. A Zarosian symbol can be found south of the altar." That would explain the tiled floors. However, we come to underground trees yet again...

Wow... at first I thought it was going to be the source code for a stupid 3-line client that just loaded an ActiveX IE object into a window. But it's actually calling the the JVM itself. Incredible. Although... where is that advertisement coming from? Goddamn it, it is IE ActiveX isn't it? I didn't see anything in the code though. EDIT: Regardless, performance is stunningly better. Developing a custom client will be highly interesting now. I might even uninstall Java to celebrate the release of this thing.

And carpentry. :P Yeah I didn't read it properly. Also, you think EW will go beyond 4? I was kind of thinking EW4/Soul would be the last. That would give us a full armor set - helm, body, legs, shield. I don't think capes, gloves and boots are generally considered to be part of an armor set by Jagex. For one, a cape sort of can't be armor, and gloves and boots have almost never been included in armor sets. Think about "rune sets" on the grand exchange, or the original set of metal items we could smith. It was helm, body, legs, shield (2 versions of each) and the rest were all weapons. Still is, I think.

First paragraph: you're the most accurate person to post as yet. It does depend on what code you use for the "library things", which is a good point. However, think about this: in Java, the default libraries are extensive, and support a good amount of whatever you could want to do in a program. C++ standard libraries are very basic and don't have any support for things like GUI and networking. Some see this as a disadvantage because it "inherently" makes programs less cross-platform. However, there are a great amount of toolkits available for cross-platform C++ programming, such as Qt and wxWidgets. Qt is simply amazing, it's one of the best software development frameworks I've ever seen. 99.9% of all their classes (just like Java) are fully cross-platform. So if you write a Windows app with the Qt library, you've automatically written a Mac OS X and Linux/X11 app. Now, you don't use different libraries for each platform, you don't write 3 separate programs. What you do is use a toolkit like Qt (or make your own, but that's generally not a good idea), which itself hooks into the native libraries of each platform and provides you with an interface that is cross-platform. Behind the scenes, when you want to create a window, for example, it'll call the Win32 API if you're using Windows, it'll call Cocoa or Carbon on Mac OS X, and it'll call X11 on Linux/UNIX. All this is transparent to you. However, there comes a time when you need to do things beyond what any particular toolkit supports and this applies to any language, Java OR C++. For example, I am writing an application now that requires advanced interaction with the window manager of the underlying platform. I need to be able to get a tree of windows and their properties running in the current session - including their handle (ID#), name, bounds (location on screen), etc. So what I do is create a class to wrap this functionality. Inside my class I have switches inside each method, so for my "get window text" function it will run a different block of code depending on what platform it's running on, and throughout my programs I call that abstract function I made (so, like, WindowManager::getWindowName) INSTEAD of using the underlying platform's methods. Second paragraph: at my university, nearly everything is Java. The kids in my courses won't be learning C++ until our fourth semester, or even not at all. Sad. What you introduce people to first is what they become most familiar with (most of the time). I myself started with PHP as my first programming language, but feel far more comfortable programming in C++ and C# because I took it upon myself to learn it all. Unfortunately university forces Java upon me, which I really don't care for... It's my specialty. ;)

Please, do not post subjective misinformed information as facts... runecrafting is one of the newer skills of runescape and was released a little more then 6 years ago. I'm sure there are others misfireing in there but i couldn't have been bothered to read it that thoroughly. What concerns soul runecrafting....why? Why is it important? there is nothing really missing from the runecrafting skill than an unused novelty altar seen once in a lifetime during a miserable quest? what ever quest it is released with, it's bound to have low requirements and be easy, and not have any good rewards. I meant one of the oldest RS2 skills (in fact THE oldest), and I was going by the beta (2003). You are correct in saying it's "little more than 6 years", it's about 6 and a half I think. I usually don't count months and tend to round quite overzealously (7 = 10). So it's not a misprint, just me rounding too much. :) I guess I'll change it. And it's important because it's something that is guaranteed to be released but has gone so for many years. Just a pet peeve of mine, and I think it's fun to speculate about what will happen in the future. Many others also enjoy speculation. If you think soul runecrafting is useless, you won't hear any disagreement from me; I just think it's interesting and I always like things to be complete, regardless of how novelty they may be. I'm sorry for being so blunt about it, but as many people know, people do judge a book by it's cover, and the first statement in an article very commonly decides if you are or not going to read it, and as it was, it just wasn't right. rs2 realease was 29. march 2004, so it's as near as makes no differance 6 years 2 months from today. The 10 year statement is poor because even runescape itself isn't that old, and rc was the 19th(or even alot later if you count the failed skills) skill to be released. Slayer and Farming are good skills. The rest are stupid. Then again, as a skill itself, slayer is pretty dumb; I'd never implement it in my own game. I'd definitely have monsters that you'd need special abilities to kill, but I wouldn't have a skill for it, just like I wouldn't have an damn UNDERGROUND EXPLORING skill (you know, the 25th one they just released)? Hunter's also a good skill idea, RuneScape's version sucks. And construction should have been called house-making. It's too limited. Hmm, I'm getting kind of off-topic though.

But kids in Africa --who use the money we donate for food to buy laptops and wifi-- can't afford GW,SC, or Oblivion. Runescape is built for accessibility not performance. It shows in the way it performs. Why do you think people in India can play? Stellar Dawn will be the same way. Umm... I think kids in Africa have more to worry about than playing computer games... You could just as easily build a more accessible game in C++. And I'll bet there are people in India with better computers than me. :P

Yes, I think this makes a lot of sense actually. That's a well-defined quest line, with a fairly easy and low-leveled starting quest (although it's easy to see from the start that this is an 'important' quest line, much more so than Plague City or In Search of the Myreque was). How do you know the location (or direction, at least) of the Soul Altar? The altar definitely seems a bit closer to me, if only slightly. And I meant to write Soul Wars Island, not soul altar. I'll fix that. Please, do not post subjective misinformed information as facts... runecrafting is one of the newer skills of runescape and was released a little more then 6 years ago. I'm sure there are others misfireing in there but i couldn't have been bothered to read it that thoroughly. What concerns soul runecrafting....why? Why is it important? there is nothing really missing from the runecrafting skill than an unused novelty altar seen once in a lifetime during a miserable quest? what ever quest it is released with, it's bound to have low requirements and be easy, and not have any good rewards. I meant one of the oldest RS2 skills (in fact THE oldest), and I was going by the beta (2003). You are correct in saying it's "little more than 6 years", it's about 6 and a half I think. I usually don't count months and tend to round quite overzealously (7 = 10). So it's not a misprint, just me rounding too much. :) I guess I'll change it. And it's important because it's something that is guaranteed to be released but has gone so for many years. Just a pet peeve of mine, and I think it's fun to speculate about what will happen in the future. Many others also enjoy speculation. If you think soul runecrafting is useless, you won't hear any disagreement from me; I just think it's interesting and I always like things to be complete, regardless of how novelty they may be.

Don't forget the reformatted Barrows area, with a named changed to Jonasrow Brothers to make is sound less frightening, and it is 3 brothers interested in younger generation pop culture all using different parts of the combat "triangle". After helping them fix they're instruments they let you pick one from they're chest! Item's included are Joerak's Great Axe guitar, Nickril's Crossdrums, and let us not forget Kevrim Staffivarius! BRILLIANT post, mate.

Runecrafting is one of the oldest RS2 skills, in fact the first to be released with RS2. Nearly 7 years have passed since Runecrafting's first debut, and the skill is still incomplete. Only just... there's still just one thing left to do. And that is release the soul altar, allowing players with a Runecrafting level of 90 to craft soul runes. We already know the level required to craft them is 90, due to patterns and level-up messages. We already know they will give 11 xp each, and that the tiaras will give 55 xp. We already know they're coming out - Jagex have already stated so, a soul talisman and tiara are already in the game (just not obtainable) and there is a portal in the abyss. It's inevitable. The question is when and where. First let's go through a bit of history regarding Runecrafting. Originally, there were 13 different runes (not counting the life rune which was an unobtainable item in RSC, originally intended for summoning and never released). These were: AirMindWaterEarthFireBodyCosmicChaosNatureLawDeathBloodSoulFrom later updates, we got Astral runes, used for casting Lunar spells. Those are a unique rune and are not really relevant to our discussion. We also got 6 combination runes (mist, dust, mud, smoke, steam, lava) which are simply... combinations, of the elemental runes. Also irrelevant to our discussion. Lastly there are elemental (which acts as an air, water, earth or fire rune) and catalytic (which acts as any other type of rune) which are used in minigames. These simply exist for convenience rather than forcing players to carry 13 different runes. Don't worry about those either. Now, these runes are usually grouped into several categories: Elemental runes: Air, Water, Earth, FireMissile runes: Mind, Chaos, Death, Blood (I guess you could also call them combat runes but I'm taking "missile" from their in-game examine info)Curse runes: Body, SoulUncategorized runes: Cosmic (enchantment rune), Nature (alchemy rune), Law (teleport rune)Originally it was only possible to craft the first 9 runes - air through nature. In 2004 the Law talisman and altar were released, the talisman (untradeable) being a reward from the Troll Stronghold quest. At first the player could normally only get one law talisman, but could obtain more by dropping the first and requesting a second. Because this enabled players to craft large amounts of law tiaras for no cost and thus gain runecrafting XP very quickly, Then a second trick was used, which involved dying to drop a talisman, filling your inventory with buckets and requesting another. I believe you could get a maximum of two talismans this way. Finally in 2008, Jagex changed the architecture. Rather than granting a law talisman, the quest now granted access to the law altar itself, and talismans became tradeable (becoming consistent with the others) and were dropped by several different monsters such as guards. The altar is located on Entrana. Back in time again. The year after, in 2005, the coveted death altar was released with the Mournings Ends Part II quest. The altar is located in the Temple of Light, deep below the Arandar mountains west of Ardougne. Then, after skipping two years, the blood altar was released in 2008 with the Legacy of Seergaze quest. The altar is located in a series of tunnels approximately underneath Drakan's castle. Now, let us consider the locations of the altars. They each have a logical location that has something to do with the rune's element. Air - located just west of Varrock, right out in the open. I don't think it's documented but I suppose you could say it's fairly windy around that area. The altar was formerly located south of Falador, just north-west of where the road forms a T. Its location was changed for whatever reason - Jagex claims it's the same distance from a bank as before, but I think it's closer, if only slightly.Mind - this is the only altar with no real sensible explanation. It's located directly east of the Goblin village, and west of the Black Knights' Fortress. I suppose you could say that it's at the "top" of RuneScape (just below the Wilderness) just as the mind/brain/head is at the top of the body.Water - located in Lumbridge Swamps. A watery place.Earth - just east of Varrock, between the Lumberyard and Digsite. This one's also a little harder to place, since earth is everywhere, but the proximity of the Digsite to it (which is full of dirt/earth/digging/etc.) does make perfect sense. It's also located right next to the Silvarea mountain range.Fire - located in Al-Kharid, near the Duel Arena. The desert is a hot and fiery place.Body - near Barbarian Village. Barbarians are all about strength and combat and using the body. Makes sense.Cosmic - in Zanaris. That's a pretty cosmic place if you ask me.Chaos - in the Wilderness not far north of Edgeville. The Wilderness is lawless and chaotic.Nature - on Karamja, in the middle of a jungle. Like earth, nature can be everywhere, but the fact that it's basically in the middle of nowhere and that jungles are generally seen as very "natural" reinforces it.Law - on Entrana, a Saradominist island that does not allow weapons. This one's a no-brainerDeath - in the Temple of Light, accessible underneath West Ardougne and through the Underground Pass. Both of those places, especially the latter, and along with the evil elves, all involve plenty of death.Blood - underneath Lord Drakan's castle. Vampires - this one needs no explanation.Soul - ?Now for details on the quests. Troll Stronghold was a fairly low-level quest, rated level 2 difficulty. Its predecessor, Death Plateau, was also low level (2 difficulty). This quest made sense, too, because you were helping the Burthorpe guard, which is a legal authority. Mournings Ends Part II was the 7th (or 6th, if you don't count Roving Elves, which was more of a sequel to Waterfall, but the requirements draw a straight like from Regicide through Roving Elves to Mournings Ends Part I so I guess it's officially #7) quest in its series, at master level. It had fairly "high level" requirements for a quest for its time. It started out with a small, innocent looking level-1 quest called Plague City. The next altar: blood. Legacy of Seergaze. This was a level 3 quest, the 4th in its series. "Mid level" requirements for a quest. This series also started with a small innocent looking level 3 quest with pretty low requirements. According to Jagex, the soul talisman will also be a reward... but from what? It's now time for what we RuneScapers love most. SPECULATING! This is where the Elemental Workshop comes into play. We've had 3 quests so far, focusing on: elemental, mind, and body. I'm sure you're all aware of the popular "mind, body and soul"... saying, or whatever you refer to it as. As much as Jagex loves puns, there's no doubt that Elemental Workshop IV will involve crafting "Soul legs" or some other nonsense. Now the Elemental Workshop series is primarily a collection of puzzle quests. The requirements and difficulty levels (and the series' overall importance in the RuneScape mythology) are fairly low. Now, we must remember that Death Plateau, Plague City and In Search of the Myreque all started out small, but their plots did expand quickly, and their requirements did increase. We're already at the third quest without any sign of this. Personally, I believe this is just to throw us off, or just something that happened to be developed by coincidence. I'd love to hear your theories, though. There's not a lot of "soul" oriented stuff in RuneScape, but I have no doubt the release of the last altar will be rewarded by an appropriate quest, with the altar located in the appropriate place. I have two possibilities in mind for this: One is the Nomad quest. Soul Wars is all about souls. Nomad was collecting them to take over the world. Even though we were left with quite an interesting cliffhanger at the end and the reason he states "you ruined everything" could be because he was protecting or doing something with the soul altar, I believe it is more strongly connected to WGS and the Stone of Jas than anything else. So, while a possibility, a far less likely one in my opinion. THE most likely candidate for the soul altar is... the gnome quests! Because of Hazelmere (also connected to WGS) - this is interesting due to what I said in the above paragraph, but it's probably coincidental; it's about equivalent to saying the Warriors Guild has something to do with the soul altar, probably. Anyways, there's 3 quests centering primarily on Glouphrie the Untrusted - The Grand Tree, The Eyes of Glouphrie, and The Path of Glouphrie. I don't think they're officially a series but do seem like it. Notice Glouphrie went to Arposandra, a hidden city, and experimented with the anima mundi, the life force of all living things. That, to me, screams soul more than anything else. I think it's also interesting to note that the dwarf quests are also heavily tied in with these, but those may follow a totally different subplot unrelated to the soul altar. We have two more of those quests planned. Also, due to the Waterfall quest, the elf, gnome, monkey and dwarf series are all tied together in some way. An interesting web. Another thing i find fascinating is that the Soul Wars Island was moved from west of the elf region, to south of it. Do you think this has any significance? I'm particularly interested in why this was done. Perhaps it was just to save space and not waste a perfectly good body of water, but I still find it a bit suspicious. SO, to end, I think Arposandra will likely be located at the very south of the elf region (probably underground), the entrance either being through that pipe thing where there are locked doors at the end, or even perhaps at the very bottom of Tirannwn, below the poison waste. That's a pretty small area to "censor", and it's been "censored" for quite a long time. We can only wonder what's north of Prifddinas, and east of the Sanguinesti region, eh? So what are your thoughts on the soul altar? Predicted location? Predicted release dates? (For reference, Law - 2004, Death - 2005, Blood - 2008). I'm betting on 2011 since it's been such a long time and I don't really see them waiting any longer. 2012 at the latest.

Please stop citing this. Stop, stop, stop. Java is not any better than any other language for that. No language in the world is going to change the speed of your Internet connection. It's all about how much you're sending. Java doesn't inherently send less data than other languages. I would be fine with an optional downloadable C++ client. As long as I don't have to tolerate the slowness of Java. EDIT: Even better pic.

Like i said .. :mellow: What has Jagex gotten themselves into .. Indeed. Still, think of the money they could potentially be receiving which would lead to more updates. I just pray it won't lead to a Miniclip type of deal. It is amusing to argue with 12 year olds though. :) Yesterday one asked me if I played RuneScape all the time because I was level 137 and he was 95. This eventually led to "well I am better than you at life". That made my day.

Yes, because not learning programming concepts and relying on a virtual machine to do the dirty work is a good idea. You highlighted the problem Java programmers have perfectly.

I totally agree with this point. I actually play runescape because it is a browser-based game. That is because I play on my work laptop when I am home. That is allowed. What is not allowed is that I install programs myself on the computer. I actually don't have the rights to do so. And this work computer isn't build for resource hogging games of course. A modest graphics card and semi-outdated CPU. And when I don't play on this computer I play on my own computer. And the ability to switch between computers without effort is just great. Imagine having a client installed on several computers who all need to be updated regularly with massive patches. I couldn't even switch between computers within a time span of one minute like I do currently. The browser-based aspect is personally for me one of the main selling points of runescape. I probably wouldn't play it if it was a client-based game. I'm not disagreeing that RuneScape being browser-based does have some advantages, such as being able to play games while you are supposed to be working, studying or doing something other than playing games. ;) But it's all about architecture. If RuneScape were out-of-browser and supported the ability to run from a thumb/flash/stick/whatever-the-hell-they-changed-the-name-to-now-but-whatever-you-know-what-I'm-talking-about-anyways drive, you wouldn't be impaired by access right preventing you from installing software, since nothing would be written to protected directories like C:\Program Files. Plus if you had it on a flash drive you wouldn't need to install it on multiple computers. Download once, play anywhere. Also, RuneScape being a browser game doesn't inherently make its patches small. It's (a) due to Jagex's streaming update architecture and (B) they simply don't release large patches. So I think the flash drive approach is a pretty awesome (and even better) alternative to browser games. For one, no Java needed. 100% pure, native code, with all required libraries packaged in. Any other dependent code is in system libraries which are guaranteed to exist (obviously). There could be 2 executable files for each of the 3 (or more) major platforms. runescape[Caution: Executable File] and updater[Caution: Executable File] for Windows, runescape.app and updater.app for Mac OS X, and runescape and updater for Linux/X11. Whatever platform you're on, you run the runescape[[Caution: Executable File]/.app] file, it runs the updater[[Caution: Executable File]/.app] if needed. The updater program then updates the game executables for ALL platforms in one go (ftw) and all the resource files. Everything stays on the flash drive. This would be an advantage over the browser, since you wouldn't have to download all those cache files every time you play on a new computer like you have to now, and you wouldn't be impaired by lack of a JVM or almost any permission restrictions. AND you wouldn't leave junk on other peoples' computers... I am definitely taking this approach with the MMO I'm working on. It will have an install option too, creating all kinds of nice shortcuts and all that. I think the operating system agnostic flash drive approach would be super cool though.

1. Fortunately our posts are getting shorter. I know the client is not purely Java, but the part that is in Java makes it very slow. Maybe Jagex programmers are horrible as well, but either way both of those factors contribute, and Java's portion isn't negligible. 2. I am completely aware of the server tick. I am referring to CLIENT SIDE LAG, I have said this before. The slowest dial-up connection in the world does not make the client freeze to a standstill and send your CPU usage rocketing to 100%. 3. I know it's not going to die soon. COBOL hasn't... but that doesn't mean it's a great programming language. Furthermore the overhead IS noticeable. Don't say it isn't. When you lose connection to the server, you lose all input and the screen freezes. I know this because I've had idiot roommates mess with the router and reset it for no apparent reason. My computer is fast enough to play RS under any settings, so when it freezes its my net connection. Try unplugging your computer from the 'net and see what happens to your screen. I bet you'll get the same symptoms. Also, Sun/Oracle has gotten very good with their VM optimizations. In an object oriented sense, java is just as fast or faster than C++ because it spreads out the work. In C++, when you want to lose an object / garbage collect, you have to do it while the program is running. With java, you can forget about it and the VM will take care of it when thread executing isn't so processor intensive. When I disconnect from the network, my client doesn't freeze. The idle animations still play, everything can be clicked. Then it logs you out. RuneScape does not have great performance, and don't tell me the lag is due to my Internet connection. I've had the same ISP for years, and the speed of RuneScape has gotten worse over the years. It's simply a result of slow Java and poor programming - has nothing to do with the network. Java is not as fast as C++ and definitely not faster. The Java VM is programmed in C++, and there are many different methods of implementing garbage collection yourself in C++ that are more efficient than Java. Also, ALL Java objects are allocated on the heap... O(log(n)) vs O(1). That's not good for performance. The garbage collector itself ADDS overhead.