darthoctopus

A long time ago (when I was a young, impressionable high school student [okay, younger, more impressionable]), Jagex used a very different way of sending music to the game client. In effect, they exploited a quirk of IE to play MIDIs by having one on the HTML page itself, which was directed to a midi file. Since IE was directly accessing the MIDI file, it had to be somewhere (and had to be immediately available in .mid format), and since Jagex doesn't like to link directly to its assets (for a good reason), the game client downloaded the MIDI to a local directory. In effect, this exposed the raw MIDI files to anyone who knew where the directory was. Of course, this also made audio in general accessible to only Internet Explorer. So when Jagex decided to use more standard methods to get audio out of Java, it meant that the problem of having the MIDIs directly available to anyone who wanted them could be eliminated (which it was). Fortunately, when I was infatuated with RuneScape way back then, I decided to keep a copy of some of the MIDIs (mostly from F2P areas, like Garden from Varrock, and Scape Original, when it used to be Scape Main, and of course, the new Scape Main when it was first introduced). I'm not very familiar with how the RuneScape client handles MIDIs now, though.

whoops, double post

Well, I DID heavily modify the timpanis and strings (so that they don't sound blatantly synthesised) and play around with the percussion and vox and balance, but besides that I didn't do much (since I didn't really spend a lot of time doing this) it WAS fun to do, though. If someone could do this professionally I think it would sound awesome.

Well, I didn't know where this goes, but I suppose this qualifies as art. Recently, I've been very bored. So bored, in fact, that I decided to play with RuneScape music in GarageBand (which I haven't done for nearly a year). After incessant, obsessive-compulsive tweaking, I finally arrived at something I was happy with (Scape Main), and promptly put it online: (no, it's not a rickroll.) If you're interested, the audio can be found at http://www.mediafire.com/file/whjflmt2htj/Scape%20Main%20(GarageBand%20remix).mp3. I guess some feedback would be nice.

Apple seems to sell a mini-DVI to s-video adapter for use with their powerbooks and macbooks. I don't think I can find any VGA to S-video adapters, though.

Mac OS X 10.2 "Jaguar" was released in August 2002. since Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" was released last year, it is indeed "later" than 10.2 . also, you should get an upgrade soon anyway, because besides the Java update there are many new features in each iteration of OS X (you're 2 versions behind at the moment)

google is your friend. since the .avi extension is associated with the divx codec normally, go google for "divx for windows" or something.

That's a matter of opinion, and such an opinion can only be formed after one has heard said music & sound ;) Intrestingly, it appears that the new RS engine uses the Java VM's own built-in MIDI engine, or an available hardware synthesiser, instead of relying on the system's default synthesiser (In my case, it's the Mac Quicktime synthesiser). while this should help make RS more "universally supported", it is interesting to note that my sound card's MIDI synthesis is awful compared to Quicktime, and I can't use SoundFonts with it. thus, when compared to the playback of MIDIs ripped from the Windows version of Runescape (jingle#.mid in the C:\WINDOWS\._file_store_32 thing), the new MIDI playback does sound "bad" and "annoying", since the quality (or lack thereof) is something I'm not used to. (btw I'm not a fanatic or anything I have 3 computers in my home, one mac one linux one windows. I can vouch that in the end, the best RS experience is still with Sun Java on MSIE. darn.)

Interestingly, i gave up on getting MIDIs to work on my linux box last year. after installing a "highly recommended" soundfont, I get stuff all off-key when playing MIDIs. I'm guessing that my soundfont is too detailed for my soundcard, causing it to mangle the playback (it works fine if I output the MIDI to an OGG or AIFF file. only real-time playback doesn't work)

the random crashes on high detail occured when tested on Safari, Firefox, Opera and Camino on Mac, and Runescape crashes VERY randomly (for no reason actually...I checked the logs and all) on Firefox 1.5 RC3 on my linux box (which has been hogged by my brother since I installed America's Army there, so much so that I can't even update the software there). The random crashage on Linux is absent in Firefox 1.0.8, but the last time I tried playing using firefox 1.0.8 on that linux box, Runescape's performance was considerably slower than on windows on the same machine. Overall, I think Runescape's Java is actually optimised for MS Java, which hasn't recieved updates for a VERY long time.

How about this one? =P http://www.artlebedev.com/portfolio/optimus/

Um correct me if this is wrong, but I noticed that Runescape has severe disparities in terms of operating systems and platforms it runs on, even though Java is supposedly the standard in cross-platform development. For example, my intel box runs runescape at roughly 110 FPS on windows, but drops to 25 FPS on linux (both on high detail, on the same machine). On my Powerbook, however, the performance on high detail is so bad that it usually goes at 0.33 FPS (1 frame every 3 seconds) in "crowded" areas (e.g. world 1 varrock square) and roughly 15 FPS when I'm alone, in high detail. Interestingly, after a while of loading RS on high detail, Java crashes on Mac for no reason whatsoever (it usually happens when the extra files are at 97% of loading). This has severely degraded my experience on the game as I am forced to play on Low Detail despite having 1.25 GB of RAM and a 1.25 GHz PPC G4. I have absolutely no idea as to the cause of the random crashage of Java on mac when loading High Detail. Is there anyone who can offer a plausible explanation? I'm considering dual-booting FC4/SuSE just to play Runescape on High Detail.

From what I know, Acer makes pretty good tablet PCs (http://global.acer.com or something like that). Personally, I use a 12-inch Powerbook and I wish i had bought one of the bigger ones (but I was on a $2500 SGD budget). Tablet PCs are a bit overpriced IMHO, You could just buy a touch screen and connect it to any old computer, instead of forking out the money for an expensive laptop that happens to have a touch screen built in.

409.6 kilobits per second Communications 409.6 kilobits per second Storage 50 kilobytes per second 1MB file download 20.5 seconds Subjective rating Not bad

back when i was using windows it BSOD'd when i closed notepad. 0_0