SRL Archive - RuneScape News and General

I've seen alot of people on multiple forums giving just their opinions on how Jagex plans to combat both macroing and RWT'ing. My suggestion is to read some of the feedback from the engine development team itself, as every so often they'll take a number of questions from random players on the forums and answer them to the best of knowledge, which in turn will give us a 'hint' on what to expect.

http://services.runescape.com/m=forum/forums.ws?25,26,529,62199803
^This is a link to Part 2 of the RS engine dev. team's question & answer thread. If you take the time to read some of these answers from the staff you'll get an idea of what to expect in near-future updates.

Some might ask "How would some of these updates have anything to do with bots?" A good example is this:

Q. Does the current engine allow for high quality keyboard movement? Runescape is currently very restricted in its movement. For example, no jumping, no collision system, movement is confined to large squares on a grid. Are there any plans to change this or would it require too substantial of a rewrite for the game and the engine?

A. We plan to change all of this in time and work has already started on some of those elements.
Mod_nick

All bots, whether it's a java bot or a simple color bot like Scar and Simba, rely heavily on tile X/Y coordinates according to the full Runescape map region. A replacement of the system they have now(square X/Y tiles)with a stream-lined position would extremely hard to track and use. Reflection, as far as I know, would also prove to be near-useless in the instance of stream-lined player/npc animations. Static animations are pretty detectable and Jagex knows this, so with an update of this magnitude they'd be shutting down alot of the core methods most bots rely heavily on. By the way, this is also the case for ALL java bots with injection, as it accomplishes the same goal as reflex, it's just MUCH more detectable. ;)

Blended and textured graphics, also a threat to our color detection programs, although a program like Scar/Simba isn't easy for them to stop, an update like that would put a big dent in the scripts we use today. Yes, I know there is already textured graphics in Runescape, but you don't see bots enabling these, and that's for a good reason. Imagine how difficult bitmap and color finding would be if high-end graphics like this were mandatory.

Anyways, something like this wouldn't happen any time soon so it's not an immediate threat, but simply taking some time to read some of what the Jagex dev. team posts can really give you an idea of how things work and what will come in the future so we'll know what to expect and how to adapt to changes like these.

I hope you this even a little bit informative.

From: Flight
All bots, whether it's a java bot or a simple color bot like Scar and Simba, rely heavily on tile X/Y coordinates according to the full Runescape map region. A replacement of the system they have now(square X/Y tiles)with a stream-lined position would extremely hard to track and use. Reflection, as far as I know, would also prove to be near-useless in the instance of stream-lined player/npc animations. Static animations are pretty detectable and Jagex knows this, so with an update of this magnitude they'd be shutting down alot of the core methods most bots rely heavily on. By the way, this is also the case for ALL java bots with injection, as it accomplishes the same goal as reflex, it's just MUCH more detectable. ;)

I'm interested to know how you came to these conclusions. The client needs to know certain things about entities in the world in order to render them, so I'm not sure how changing the movement and tiling system or the animation system in the game would cause bots to be unable to get an entity's position or figure out what animation it is using.

From: Method
I'm interested to know how you came to these conclusions. The client needs to know certain things about entities in the world in order to render them, so I'm not sure how changing the movement and tiling system or the animation system in the game would cause bots to be unable to get an entity's position or figure out what animation it is using.

At the moment with everything tile based, it's easy to grab info about what is where and convert that to MM/MS and so on. If they started being like WoW, where the increments for minimal movements are smaller (eg: on an x vs y graph, runescape could move in 1 x 1, wow could move in 0.0001 x 0.0001) tiles wouldnt be used anymore or your character would take up lots and lots of tiles (since the tiles are smaller). I'm guessing static animations somewhat "standout" in the game code, since most things on tiles arent animated. With this, there would be no way to check what's on what tile, or what is animated where, because of the changes to game mechanics.

I think.

From: The Claw
At the moment with everything tile based, it's easy to grab info about what is where and convert that to MM/MS and so on. If they started being like WoW, where the increments for minimal movements are smaller (eg: on an x vs y graph, runescape could move in 1 x 1, wow could move in 0.0001 x 0.0001) tiles wouldnt be used anymore or your character would take up lots and lots of tiles (since the tiles are smaller). I'm guessing static animations somewhat "standout" in the game code, since most things on tiles arent animated. With this, there would be no way to check what's on what tile, or what is animated where, because of the changes to game mechanics.

I think.

Sure, there wouldn't be a tile system, but the client would still have to convert a 3d world position to a 2d screen position (on the main screen or minimap) to draw an entity. It would also need to know what animation an entity is performing to, well, animate it. I don't see how that would change anything.

I don't think JaGeX will ever require the HD graphics system. One of their main points of advertisement is that the game can be played from any computer that wasn't built in the stone ages, so long as it has internet access, a web browser, and Java. However, knowing the folks over at Jagex, they might do this, as they are known to make self-destructive updates; just look at what happened to their player base after December of '07.

Well Method, if I'm predicting right on the future 'fluent' animations, it wouldn't be something that could be easily read from a static animation ID. Imagine blended animations that wouldn't change ID after one sequence has ended but rather performing the next animation in a que (if in some instances there 'are' sequenced animations). Just like the sudden change of tiles in Runescape low definition compared to blended tiles in high definition. Do you not think this is possible for animations as such?

@The Claw:
My thoughts exactly, the exact X/Y coordinate or tile location would be so fine it's humanly impossible to accurately locate a tiles's coordinates apart from the server that knows the position where exactly where to read, and had a player be able to click in the exact same X and Y, I'm sure that'd send up red flags all over the security system.

@TomTuff:
When it comes to making botting an absolute pain in the ass, I think you'd be surprised just what Jagex will make as client requirements. They won't come right out and say "We're updating this to fight the macroer world" but instead reveal it to players as a graphical update to Runescape up to par with some of the other high-class games.


Over all I'm not saying exactly 'what' Jagex plans to do or how they plan on doing it. I'm simply giving advice on how to predict what 'might' happen next and get some insight from the community on how they plan to adapt to major changes as such.

From: Flight
Well Method, if I'm predicting right on the future 'fluent' animations, it wouldn't be something that could be easily read from a static animation ID. Imagine blended animations that wouldn't change ID after one sequence has ended but rather performing the next animation in a que (if in some instances there 'are' sequenced animations). Just like the sudden change of tiles in Runescape low definition compared to blended tiles in high definition. Do you not think this is possible for animations as such?

@The Claw:
My thoughts exactly, the exact X/Y coordinate or tile location would be so fine it's humanly impossible to accurately locate a tiles's coordinates apart from the server that knows the position where exactly where to read, and had a player be able to click in the exact same X and Y, I'm sure that'd send up red flags all over the security system.

@TomTuff:
When it comes to making botting an absolute pain in the ass, I think you'd be surprised just what Jagex will make as client requirements. They won't come right out and say "We're updating this to fight the macroer world" but instead reveal it to players as a graphical update to Runescape up to par with some of the other high-class games.


Over all I'm not saying exactly 'what' Jagex plans to do or how they plan on doing it. I'm simply giving advice on how to predict what 'might' happen next and get some insight from the community on how they plan to adapt to major changes as such.

I'm still confused. Everything a reflection based bot would want to know, the client also needs to know. Whether the client knows what tile you are on (either a small number of big tiles or a large number of small tiles), or what pixel you are on, as long as you have an updater that can find that information, it's fine.

The only way around this I can see is ditching all the rendering on the client side and stream a video. Basically like having the client and the server at Jagex, and you would just have a VNC viewer kind of thing. Then it really would be down color clickers that would need high-end computer vision algorithms if they went crazy with the blending etc (putting even more load on the server). Although this would lower user hardware requirements, which is an area they are interested in, it would undo a lot of their work up to this point, and require so much on the server side that their f2p model would be out of whack.

From: Boreas
I'm still confused. Everything a reflection based bot would want to know, the client also needs to know. Whether the client knows what tile you are on (either a small number of big tiles or a large number of small tiles), or what pixel you are on, as long as you have an updater that can find that information, it's fine.

The only way around this I can see is ditching all the rendering on the client side and stream a video. Basically like having the client and the server at Jagex, and you would just have a VNC viewer kind of thing. Then it really would be down color clickers that would need high-end computer vision algorithms if they went crazy with the blending etc (putting even more load on the server). Although this would lower user hardware requirements, which is an area they are interested in, it would undo a lot of their work up to this point, and require so much on the server side that their f2p model would be out of whack.

Right now you have objects and such, but what if they divide those objects into thousand little pieces?

From: mastaraymond
Right now you have objects and such, but what if they divide those objects into thousand little pieces?

I think it depends on the size of the pieces, the smaller the pieces, the more dividing the server has to do, and the more pieces it has to send to the client. If the pieces are big enough so that a tree piece can't be a cow piece, then it's a case of getting the pieces with reflection and grouping them the same way we group pixels in color. If they are so small that they are pretty much pixels, it would be like the situation above, which is unlikely.

Client-side interpretation of tiles will not be changed. Unfortunately, making the code easier for runescape developers to use (which is in their best interest) consequently makes it just as easy for hackers to access.