Ronan

Seems odd, rarely do Jagex push the time-constraints that they usually keep to and deploy an update after the usual hours. Definitely very intrigued as to what this must be for Jagex to want it released so badly.

At first I thought - "Ooo, this could be big!", then I realised we really shouldn't read into this much. It could really mean anything when you consider the technical possibilities that could warrant a reboot. Still, am interested in seeing what it is - and also, glad it's update day! :)

I believe Outlaws are designed to only give ~0.25 exp per damage hit. I may be wrong about the figure but I'm pretty certain they're designed to give very little experience per damage point. Although I've never seen it clarified why it's like that.

This is a good sign! :^_^: I'm glad to see that Jagex aren't letting off the higher-levels lightly, surprised that someone who can max out is silly enough to try and utilise a glitch. I am quite surprised though at the low number of accounts that abused the glitch (at least the ones that got flagged, < 250). Perhaps Jagex's harshness has been noted by players or Jagex have missed people? Keep it up Jagex!

Or at least, the re-make of the project. I think this will be a great chance for lots of people to get a feel for playing an MMO right when it's released. Another great thing is upon new release the community aspect is a lot closer, more people trying to understand the game's dynamics and discussing it with others. Not to mention that people will always be trying out all kinds of new tactics to progress, not knowing the best way to train immediately always shows the people that have a more natural insight for MMOs.

I can empathise with you on this, definitely. I've played quite a few MMOs just as they're released in Open-Betas and even a few Closed-Betas and there's nothing quite like it. Another great thing about starting a new MMO is getting the feel that everyone is at the same level as you and you've got just as much of a fighting chance as anyone else in the game, something that changes a lot even within the first few months of an MMO being released. Sites that I've used to commonly keep track of new up-coming MMOs in general are mmorpg.com and onrpg.com. They're not perfect, but with a bit of searching you can find newly-released ones.

Thanks for the replies! :) I did indeed end up just writing my own clone methods, they're surprisingly easy with most classes actually, certainly more so than I had imagined. I was rather surprised that there was no 'built-in' way to easily get another 'clone' of an object in java without writing your own method actually, but then I suppose that it's rarely needed, so writing a few methods yourself is hardly any trouble. If interested, currently the area that it's being utilised in is within levels of my game. Once all the levels have been completed, large modifications have been made to the objects that the level is comprised of so resetting the level involves changing all the objects back to their original state. Doing so via cloning is a relatively easy solution. Whenever a new level is created, a clone is placed in an ArrayList which contains all levels in their 'initial' state, allowing me to replace a modified level with a clone of their initial-state counterpart whenever it should be played again. Another option was to define a structure which would contain all the objects at their initial state of the level and create a constructor for a level based on the structure - again, would involve cloning too.

Hey there, Well - getting forward with my game, but I'm finding I'm in need of 'cloning' objects, as such; reusing all the data from one object in another one, in a similar fashion to the 'ByVal' implementations in other languages. However, I've never looked into this in Java before. With a bit of searching around, it seems that implementing your own clone method is the most viable solution, but I'm wondering if anyone else has more experience in this area and some potential solutions. :)

You'll notice that the frame on the main Runescape game page (at least on the Signed version), links to a webpage like so :- http://world36.runescape.com/m0 If you view the source of this page, you'll see that you're wanting to remove the 'menubox' element from the page to remove what you're speaking of. Removing that gives the following effect, which I presume is what you're after :- [spoiler=Image]

I'd definitely agree with you here. Although on the surface it seems nice, any game i've come across that uses these kind of tactics and ideas has always turned out for the worse, seems somewhat 'tacky' to me. Still, I've finished up with RuneScape to focus on my game development, I just hope Jagex don't send RuneScape downhill - it's one of the few MMOs I've seen that are actually well designed! (Second thoughts - bit of an exaggeration here, of-course even to begin developing an MMO it takes great consideration. Rather, I feel Jagex have actually done a pretty good job of it when compared to most.)

Heh, I actually laughed when I saw this! :P Reminds me of a previous game played, with Exp 'hours', gaining double experience within those specified hours - like they said, it's not a new idea. I do find it odd though - doesn't exactly seem like a 'Runescape' feature, not something that I would of expected Jagex to do. I'm wondering too if they're going to try and do some sort of publicity stunt for the new skill during the weekend. Still, it is nice to see that they're trying new things!

I'd like to say I'm surprised by people abusing this bug, considering Jagex's well known stance with bug abuse. And yet, I can't really - people are always tempted by things like this, even more so in the online-gaming world, where so much is showing off wealth, largely based on time / luck. Can only hope Jagex deals with the players in a proper manner and if not, that the players themselves get what's coming to them with that attitude! I did notice Mod Emilee referring some people to the Bug-Abuse topic in the Knowledge-Base when the threads were cropping up on the Official-Forums, at least that's something! Glad to see it! :)

It can sound awesome based upon people's connotations with the information given by Jagex. For the most part, when people are told something 'entirely new' and 'never used before' is coming along - they get excited! It's natural for people to speculate, sure - but the basic information and the simple idea of a new skill can definitely make people think it 'sounds awesome' and they're well within their right to believe so. Even if not that - let people speculate, surely you're not suggesting people getting excited is a bad thing? ;)

I would of thought that if it's anything similar to other implementations of it (which in itself suggests it's not really the skill, but anyhow), then equipment in general wouldn't be present on the 'shifted' body. In previous games, the character would simply morph into the form of what you have chosen, having equipment simply vanish (:P), or be unequipped to an inventory. To relate to this suggestion, I guess you'd be controlling say, a Blue Dragon as you've seen in RuneScape previously, and equipment wouldn't show. Can't say I see that working all too well though! ;) Lol! :P One of the best videos i've seen in a while!

One thing that may be good to clarify is if Jagex are referring to any other game genre, or just the MMORPG genre when saying that the concept hasn't been done before. If the first, it certainly would be pretty staggering to say the least. I think Shape Shifting would certainly be quite an interesting concept to add to the game, I just don't quite believe it would work entirely well within RuneScape's environment. I can certainly say I find it a cool area though, I always loved the Polymorphing in Neverwinter Nights! You can see where it would add some tactical skill into the game, if different forms had various weaknesses / advantages and had to be countered with other styles, but I'm just not sure RuneScape is quite flexible enough to allow that kind of dynamic. (Edit :- Granted, this is actually already in RuneScape with the combat weaknesses, I guess I'm thinking more in real-time reactions than preparations.) If they could pull it off, it would be fantastic to have though! One of the major cons that always come up in my discussions about game design is always the need to have actual skill in a game and it's implementations, primarily around MMORPGs. It's such a tricky area because one of the long-time traditions is that time is a major relation to progress within MMORPGs, getting around that certainly requires something revolutionary if it's to remain difficult and balanced. I believe it's also mentioned that the new skill will involve all other skills in some form, which again, although possible - doesn't seem entirely plausible with a skill like Shape Shifting. Although I can certainly think of some great concepts that could occur! :^_^: Nonetheless, I do love the skill speculation and really brainstorming the idea certainly can't be bad! Heavily anticipating this - really hoping for some actual skillful content!

Currently still working on my 2D, Missile-based game in Java. Going pretty well, certainly a lot of fun to do! [spoiler=Screenie]

Just for confirmation about Lootshare / Coinshare, here you go :- [spoiler=RSOF Image] Quick-Find code :- 15-16-447-60397856

Not quite true, I've dropped / lost mine multiple times and have always managed to get another from Diango.

It's an idea that's prevalent throughout many, many MMO's - so I guess it could work. However, from what I've always seen this just ends up with having the high-players able to have 'uber' equipment, pretty much destroying any chance that lower-players have in the game. With work, a lot of it, the idea could work - although personally I wouldn't be a fan of seeing it, I like RuneScape's simplicity in this area.

Yea, as far as I'm aware he's ZMI'd quite a bit - but even his Graahking rates are pretty staggering, I mean - 31k xp/hr? I like to think I'm pretty determined and tend to average only 29k. I think it's a great achievement, hell - I'm going for 25M experience in the skill at the moment and that's pretty damn hard in itself! Recently though I've not seen Odin on the RuneTrack top-gains for Runecrafting, I was wondering if he's taking a slight break before the final stretch. If his previous gains are anything to go by - it'll take him about a month to get the last, roughly 6-million experience. I definitely wish him Good luck in that! What I find interesting about this is that Larryr went for her experience using Collectors and Runners, ofcourse, it's still a fantastic achievement and requires massive determination, but Odin is the first to get his experience all through Runecrafting himself, without runners etc. (As far as I'm aware, although someone may want to clarify if they know.)

Yup, believe so - it's also featured in a quest so doubt they'd remove it. I'd say Falador's water pump or Edgeville are both great recommendations, Edgeville seems closer in my head, but you may want to check them both out!

The Court D&D does seem like a great call - nice one! But I am wondering, what about the French hint? Is it a perfect translation or could there be a mistake? Perhaps if it were more along the lines of "To repent", but worship doesn't quite tie in so nicely with the Court idea.

If you base it around vials, the following applies currently at market price :- (Also note this assumes you have a steam staff) Spell Costs :- 1x Astral Rune = 211gp Item Costs :- 27x Vials = 540gp End Result :- 27x Vials of Water = 1512gp Overall profit should be ~761gp per cast if everything buys at market price. Although the last time I checked I'm not sure how quickly standard Vials buy.

Unfortunately, I don't think this is really that possible. I drew up a quickie in Matlab to try and parse data and although it works, Jagex don't like people making excessive requests which this would come under and they block your IP-Address after a short while temporarily. Hiscore-Lite obviously isn't an option as that's for specific player requests. You could probably process in the range of 20 hiscore pages per skill, coming in at ~420 ranks per skill of data but even then you're not really getting enough data to provide an interesting graph over a variety of levels. Still, I must agree with you - it is a very interesting area to look at! I must say I'm quite prone to just dropping skills at certain levels, particularly the 99s. Edit :- Although pretty poor, I recently did a quick one of the top ~420 ranks of Runecrafting as I'm training that at the moment, here's the graph. Relatively similar to what I expected, the experience gap between ~200-400 is pretty low compared to higher ranks. [spoiler=Runecrafting Top-400 Exp]

Intriguing, we used emacs for Haskell in the Functional Programming course. It was pretty nifty as the Haskell-compiler could be run with a nice shortcut from within it, making design-run cycles a lot easier. Unfortunately, I was already used to an IDE so I'm biased towards them! :P I can't quite fathom supporting a text-editor, albeit advanced over an IDE, but it is pretty cool to see that you prefer it! :)