2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up

ffagnerbrack about 3 hours ago 24 commentsRead Article on jkm.dev

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Discussion (24 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

saejox•10 minutes ago

Ultima online released in 1997 and required only a 28k modem.

I also would argue it was a more complex game.

akersten•12 minutes ago

I wish the author got more into the weeds of anitcheat and how it evolved over time. Jagex was banning bots based on mouse movement heuristics in like 2005. 20 years later and there's some JS framework on the front page here heralding that same kind of analysis as some revolutionary new approach. I can only imagine what the modern anticheat engine entails, especially in the era of LLMs that can reliably emulate a human player. (Some of them can even write quite technical blog posts that almost escape detection ;)

hansvm•6 minutes ago

It's gotten pretty good (finally good enough that you can observe it in the game's macroeconomics), but if you're any good as a programmer then it's no work whatsoever to build something which can bypass it indefinitely.

stux•40 minutes ago

> Before any networking occurs, the client runs a breadth-first search using the local collision map to build a path from where you are to where you clicked, and then writes the packet for the server to read. [...] The packet contains the absolute position of the first waypoint in the path, followed by the delta of each waypoint in the path against the first one

How come the client sends waypoints rather than just the destination? Naively it seems like sending less data would be better. Is the pathfinding so expensive that you'd want to avoid doing it on the server? I suppose it works out as long as it's cheap to validate/correct the client's path?

hansvm•3 minutes ago

It's a trade-off, especially for longer paths, especially when you count the cost of server RAM cache misses.

fufi2022•24 minutes ago

The algorithm is very cheap to run for a client (linear first, then diagonal to target, stitch together as many of these as it takes in the fewest number of hops), as they have full map data downloaded. For 2k concurrent players on mid range 2004 hardware (you have to remember they had kind of old school tech even for the time, though I'd love to be proven wrong on this), and with all the other interactions that needed to run before the next game cycle, I think they probably decided it was better to be clientside.

It's also possible they could have made it work, and it would have been a technical win, but just didn't need to since they had an MVP.

connicpu•35 minutes ago

Validating that a path on a grid doesn't move through impassable objects is definitely much cheaper than running a pathfinding algorithm, especially on 2004 hardware. You'd have to make those checks as well in order to run the pathfinding.

OsrsNeedsf2P•about 2 hours ago

Is this article just an analysis of the Lost City[0] codebase without linking Lost City?

[0] https://github.com/LostCityRS

NeutralWanted•about 1 hour ago

It is. Code snippets in the article are JavaScript as well, while only ever mentioning Java in the article

percentcer•about 1 hour ago

I don't understand how RuneScape managed to get the traction it did. 2004 was the same year World of Warcraft came out!

VertanaNinjai•43 minutes ago

It was free to play when that wasn’t a popular financial model for games at the time. The memberships were also much cheaper than WoW and accepted different payment methods that would be more available to minors at the time.

junon•40 minutes ago

Also no need to install or commit to a guild or clan or whatever. You could just log in, screw around for an hour or ten, and log off. Then log in again from somewhere else. It was miraculous for a kid like me.

connicpu•33 minutes ago

Could even run on the computers at my middle school, nobody thought to block it

cyphar•22 minutes ago

As a kid, I didn't have a computer that could run WoW, nor would I have been able to convince my parents to pay for the subscription. I suspect most of the popularity was from kids in a similar situation, probably playing it on library computers when they should've been studying.

MapleStory was also quite popular back then for similar reasons.

terribleperson•11 minutes ago

Besides what everyone else said, it was a pre-WoW style sandbox MMO with a lot of freedom at the time. Those have their own appeal.

pton_xd•about 1 hour ago

It's free and you could play it in the school library, for one. Also it came out a few years before WoW.

thothless•27 minutes ago

in addition to what others said...

2004 runescape, now "old school runescape", which is actually successor 2001 Runescape "Classic", were both playable in a browser.

and my (parent's) PC couldn't even install, let alone run WoW. despite me trying with all my might.

so I'm sure I wasn't alone.

it was absolutely magical to me.

terribleperson•18 minutes ago

Yep. You could play it almost anywhere. School, friends house, parents work laptop. It required little hardware and, as you said, ran in a browser.

Meanwhile, WoW had to be installed, took a fairly large amount of space (I remember 14gb on my 28gb HDD), and Ironforge ran like garbage on my PC.

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7•about 2 hours ago

not to take away from the article, but some did with similar fidelity on 14.4k

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_massively_multiplay...

i think the author would find ultima online emulators interesting

reactordev•about 1 hour ago

Oh Britannia, how you were so amazing before the Tramel/Felucia split.

grebc•about 1 hour ago

Come play The Second Age, it's free and still kicking! https://www.uosecondage.com/

reactordev•20 minutes ago

I no longer have the time to invest

YouGuysAreBorin•about 1 hour ago

Ultima and Tibia are the references you are looking for.

What you linked is nowhere near the same genre or remotely the same concept, nice try though

——-

You edited good boy, however to call Tibia an Ultima emulator is even more ignorant (and arrogant the way you did it).

I played this game in the 90s/00s but thankfully outside HN it blew up into a mega sensation and everyone who knows Tibia will know that calling it a mere Ultima emulator massively sells it short on the saga and era that was possibly the most beautiful and thorough MMORPG to ever exist.

HackerNews is boring. The people here are stupid. All the “high levels” here are ignorant retards. You have the worst community here. I literally cannot believe this site is important at all - Idiocracy is upon us

stackghost•10 minutes ago

The comment you're replying to links to a wiki article that explicitly mentions both Tibia and UO.