JN13
2012-04-14 14:05:18
So, I was looking at the Q&A and decided to paste the stuff that might be important. Bare with it, its quite large. (yes that is what she said).
Overview: Lots of talk of Optimus, which is slated to be released within a few weeks.
Overview: Lots of talk of Optimus, which is slated to be released within a few weeks.
I can't say too much about the release date, as we don't want to tell the botters too much about how we are getting on. However, I can tell you that we are working on it at the moment, and we are hoping to be able to get rid of the bots again in the near future, and keep on kicking them while they are down, so that they can't get up again…
With respect to FPS
Optimus should help us to do this, as should some other things we are working on (it is not by any means the only trick up our sleeves). Watch this space… (sorry I can't tell you more).
1: Optimus? Is it close to being released (I.E Will we see it before summer?).
- Yes, it's close
We are certainly planning on getting rid of the bots in the game. The reason for the secrecy is that we don't want to give them too much info about how we are going to get rid of them. Making the removal permanent is going to be an ongoing challenge. We expect to be constantly adding more and more blocks in the way of the bot writers, so that they have to spend more and more effort to get around this.
Java is dying?? Will the future mainstream consumer products no longer support Java, like the Android and iOS now, I’ve heard that future browser will no longer support plugin, and do you plan to make Runescape available to tablets?
- Yes, it is. We have plans, watch this space!
We are working hard to try and come up with an arsenal to throw at the bot makers, so that we can take them out. Any battle to defeat the botters is going to be an ongoing one. The bot makers make too much money out of it for them to give up easily, so we are going to have to keep on throwing change after change at them to keep them guessing. That should mean we get rid of the worst bots completely.
This is not our only line of attack. We are working on several different things that should help to get rid of botters, and should tidy up any we miss with our major updates.
I think it is not unreasonable to say that we are going to get rid of all of the botters. We are not afraid of a challenge, and if we put our minds to it, I am sure we can beat them
There are some games for tablets having better graphics and higher fps than Runescape, like the Infinity Blade(if I have remembered corectly), has crytek engine and its graphics is really good, and is very smooth as well What do you think?
- Yes! We want to emulate and surpass what is possible in the browser - we have major updates planned to bring us back in line with other titles. Watch this space.
The game engine even before bot nuke is not efficient, what do you plan to do to improve it
- Optimus will address many of these issues. Other than that, a brand new graphics architecture is required.
- Turn off 'idle anims: all', other than that it's because of our animation architecture. We know it sucks and plan to improve it!
Our obfuscation software inevitably introduces inefficiency into the client code base. Optimus will improve this.
See previous answers about obfuscation and the cluster flutterer, and Optimus. We don't program to be slow - but it's an unfortunate side effect of having to protect our software from cheaters.
We introduced some obfuscation that made it much harder for the bot makers to analyse our code. This had the unfortunate side-effect of making everything that happens in the game very slightly slower. Sadly, the graphics engine is a bit inefficient for historical reasons*, and so the slight decrease in performance was amplified in the graphics engine.
We are working on some different changes to the obfuscation that shouldn't have the same slowdown, but should still have the same effect on the botters. The reason we have left it in so far is that it gives a high entry-cost for people starting to write a new bot, making it harder for anyone other than the people who already have a working bot to write one.
4) Will there ever be better ways of moving your game cameras? E.G zooming in and out, top view etc.
- We have plans for this soon.
5) What are your plans for the future the game engine?
- Too many! A few: Better graphics, texturing, animations, shadowing, post process effects. Improved controls, finer movement, speedier responses to requests from the server, more player customisability for the client.
@Game Engine Crew
In regards to the engine / coding itself, would it be hard to change the code for the bank PIN option.
Instead of when you scroll your mouse of a particular number and only one number disappearing, how much code would be involved [roughly] to make all the numbers disappear upon scrolling your mouse over 'any' number? This would be a great feature in helping fight against hijackers using key-loggers ?
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We have much bigger plans for account security - keep your eyes out for these in the future.
Hi Mess up:
"Are you still going to update the engine to allow us to move around by using WASD keys?"
We explored this possibility a while back and the results were promising - the conclusion we came to was that it would be a very large and ambitious project! While there aren't any plans to do this just now, it's certainly something we're considering for the future.
It is near to being ready for release. I can't tell you an exact release date, but it will be soon. Bot busting will certainly continue in the future. We see it as an ongoing issue that is high on our list of priorities. Rest assured, it is being worked on, and we are putting effort into it.
The FPS concerns are mostly rather related to the anti-bot work we have done. We hope that the Optimus changes will mitigate this somewhat.
I can tell you catagorically that the frame rate is not as much of a problem as it was in October. It has improved significantly, but it has happened so gradually that it hasn't received much attention. We still think the frame rate is pretty terrible, and it is our number one priority to try and fix this.
I have a top-of-the-line computer with the most highly-acclaimed graphics card I could find.
I still cannot run RuneScape on any decent settings without terrible FPS issues.
Is the issue still being resolved? I heard it was mostly fixed, yet I see no improvement.
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Yes: Optimus, soon.
"Mod Philip,
What is your ultimate update goal at the moment?
My ultimate update goal is to get rid of all of the bots, and have excellent frame rates for everyone! I would rather that we didn't have to spend time on fighting the bots. If botters didn't exist, we wouldn't have to do things that hurt the frame rate, and we would be able to spend time writing more awesome game features.
I would rather be spending time writing game-play features that make RuneScape more fun for everyone, but the botters have other ideas about how a lot of our time is spent
Could we expect to see day to night transitions on RuneScape one day?
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We already have this a little, but it may be expanded upon in the future.
There are several things that add up to cause the frame rate issues. The underlying issue is historical. When RuneScape was first written (before HD), it was a purely software based graphics engine. That means that all of the work was done on your CPU, rather than on your graphics card. This is good in some ways and bad in others. It meant that RuneScape would run (slowly) on any computer, regardless of what graphics hardware you have. It did however mean that the graphics were a bit rubbish.
When HD was introduced, we moved to having 4 ways to render the graphics:
- Pure Java (now called Safe Mode). This is the slowest way to see the game (I can't really emphasise this enough, as people seem to think it is faster), but it will always work, if the other methods don't work for you. You should never need to choose this, which is why there is no button for it in the graphics options
- Software mode. This also does not use the graphics card, but it works by running some native code (i.e. not Java) written a mixture of C++, assembly and intrinsics in order to provide an experience that is faster that safe mode, but also does not need any particular graphics drivers to be installed. This is generally the best way to play on netbooks, and other low-end devices
- OpenGL and DirectX. These two are the hardware modes, and are generally the best way to play RuneScape. However, the problem that exists with this is that the software mode was written first. When writing graphics code to run on graphics cards, you have to write it in a very different way to how you would write it to have a software rasteriser. As our hardware modes are grafted into the existing engine, they are not quite so efficient as they might be. When we obfuscate this code, any slowdown this causes is magnified, which has caused the slowdown since the bot update. The underlying issue is difficult for us to solve, but it is certainly something we keep on coming up with ideas to deal with, and we have plans that should mitigate this to some degree. The anti-botting issue I think I have covered fairly thoroughly elsewhere.
1. There has been talk of "Optimus", the next bot and engine performance update, Is there any word to when it may be released, and if no date is available, will it be soon? ( I see this was asked, I read the answer, thank you!)
- Soon, but no concrete date, yet, sorry
2. When the "Optimus" update is released, what kind of engine fixes will we expect to see, in regards to improving performance and FPS on our end? (Again, I see this was already asked, Thank you!)
- A big FPS improvement!
How does the game process/deal with text?
Apparently it is really difficult to enable the typing of most notably the character ^ on certain languages and keyboard settings (lots of Dutch users for instance are unable to enter the character and end up with a blank space). It has been complained about and been sent bug-reports about for years, but was never fixed, so I assume it's difficult to do. So now I just wonder: why?
I also tried to send ascii codes to the game, but somehow this ended up cycling through ^ and the Yen sign and some others. Any clue how that could happen? Sorry if that doesn't make sense, I don't understand it myself, lol.
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Text in game only supports the characters in our our font system - mainly the lower 128 ASCII characters - this is because we use old fashioned bitmap fonts - something I wish to improve!
"Oh, and, do you ever plan to add VOIP to the game? You had a poll on it once that made me hope you would. It would be immensely useful while bossing, doing dungeons, etc."
It's definitely something we want to do, but we don't have a set date for it just yet - sorry.
As part of the measures to try and make it harder for bot makers, we added something that locks the client you are playing with to a particular IP address (amongst other things). 3g connections tend to be a bit flaky when it comes to IP addresses, so when you connected to a different world, your IP address was different to what it was when you logged in before, and so you get rejected. Sadly, this is one of our key anti-bot measures, so we don't plan to change this.
Hope that helps to answer your question, at least partially.
with respect to color bots
Our main target with the bot nuke was reflection/injection bots. We have already made some changes to make colour-scraper bots more unreliable. They tend to be a bit rubbish anyway. We have more plans to deal with them. They will probably come a little while after the Optimus changes, as they are rather a different class of bot to deal with.
This is a bit of topic but why doesn't a J-Mod just go to green dragons on a few worlds and ban the bots? This would take 10minutes max and you'd be able to ban 200+ bots atleast…
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Because they'd be back in 5 minutes. We have better plans up our sleeves We know we haven't got this sorted yet. But we have spent the last few months designing and building new systems to tackle this from the ground up. More news soon.
Can we expect bot nuke #2 to be put into effect before the end of April? I hear two hidden updates this week (11th) and last (3rd) were to set Optimus up to be fully-implemented, or something of the like.
I can't give specifics, but we're talking weeks rather than years here.
Is it possible to remove the tiles from the game or make them smaller so you actually move to the spot you clicked? and if so, are there any plans for this?
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It's part of our very-distant plans, yes.
is possible then will be ever be able to see the sky?
- Yes.
By any chance could we get a screenshot or something similar of how the report system works? do you get a snapshot of ingame, is it purely text logs, and even then so with such reports on macroing, do you get statistics sent from the client? I've always wondered how you could indeed record any of that.. Being able to monitor every mouse movement from each player real-time is surely impossible.
Thanks!
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Can't give too much away but I think it's safe to say we have detailed reports that provide enough info for us to deal with each incident.