Open RuneScape Classic
rsc.vet
rsc.vet
From there, it could "read" enough to find the right places to click to buy things. The bot basically world hopped constantly, 24 hours a day, and bought cheap items until the general store was depleted. I'd then sell them in bulk for several times more. I never got hit with random events (in-game captchas), because I never stayed logged in for more than a minute or so. I was also not hit by any of the big banning waves, since I didn't rely on reflection in Java or use any of the popular "frameworks" for macroing.
Joke's on me though, because that game consumed several years of my life and I spent a lot of money buying several years worth of "members".
Later on there was also a gambling culture of "dicing" where you'd join an IRC channel, type a command to a bot like '/roll', and get paid in-game if the 'dice roll' came out in a certain way. I took an educated guess that the channel operators were running bots with mIRC, and reverse engineered the random number generator in the mIRC client (which was fun, because it was written in C++). Turns out it was a linear congruential generator which was in principle brute forceable given a few consecutive rolls. I wrote some OpenCL code for my GPU in the very early days when "GPGPU" was a new idea, but was never able to get it fully working because mIRC used 64-bit floating point arithmetic and the least significant digits were relevant to the outcome of the RNG, and my GPU was only 32 bit.
Link to my SE question at the time: https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/2086/predicting-v...
I remember trying to learn some Java at the time, but could never make the leap between building simple CLI app’s and primitive string manipulation to integrating with the RS client and actually doing something ‘useful’. However, I was only 8, so I’ll cut myself some slack!
PS, offering armour trimming on World 23 if you still play ;)
I had no other inputs beyond that, and I remember that the script would work well for about an hour or two and then I'd accidentally try to attack something else that had the nerve to sparkle at me, which would send me on a wild goose chase. At one point I came back to the machine after dinner and found myself running in the wilderness.
This resulted in me having to keep an eye on it whilst it "automines", which was frustratingly boring, and probably is similar to what certain drivers feel in their autopilot cars.
The worst part is that I was in the vicinity of actual miners who were all talking to each other, and sharing stories, and I was just this dumb mute. When enemies came to grief us during mining, my character would just ignore them and keep mining. It was incredibly rude, and after a while I just stopped using the autominer since it wasn't saving me any time or effort, and was turning me into an antisocial jerk.
It's good to learn such life lessons in a virtual game rather than real life!
That was definitely not the only life lesson though, I also way overpaid for a halloween mask once when they were just dropping in 2002 due to the hype.
That has to be a scam as old as time. Glad I learned that lesson on runescape instead of in real life.
> Contribute to the RuneScape Archive [1] with any lost RuneScape data prior to 2010 and receive any obtainable item of your choice as a thanks!
[1] https://rs-archive.github.io/index.html
> Our goal is to recover missing versions of RuneScape from 2001 until 2012. These versions were not saved by Jagex and are at risk of disappearing forever, with over 2/3 remaining unrecovered. If you ever played Runescape just once on a computer, the full game files were all downloaded.
Maybe not, but it could be. They don't give any information so there's no way to know what they're doing, so you can assume good intention, or bad, or neither, whichever you prefer. To me personally it stood out how they put up a very nice landing page, with very verbose text, and never once mention any examples of what they're doing with it.
> They contain all the various raw assets used in the game (e.g. maps, models, sounds) and the definitions of content like NPCs, Items, and scenery objects.
An example use case here, an interactive world map with a slider that lets you see how it was updated through the years: https://mejrs.github.io/historical
There's nothing nefarious going on here, I promise you. It's just a community project that has the usual poor documentation.
[1] https://runescape.wiki/w/User:Manpaint55/T:CHD-main
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/100m73e/how_the_...
> What about old private servers?
> These didn't focus on keeping a historical archive of all versions of the game; only a handful of old game versions were found from these sources. Everything that was available from private servers has already been saved.
I’m writing a book about RuneScape, Why We Play, and this project is the most exciting thing I’ve seen toward this end in awhile. I can’t believe I didn’t know about it!
The tutorials are great: https://runescape.wiki/w/Help:Editing
They have an active and friendly community, including in-game cosmetic rewards for editors: https://runescape.wiki/w/RuneScape:The_Wikian
They open-source a lot of their work: https://gitlab.com/weirdgloop
And the staff is looking for additional funding: https://runescape.wiki/w/Forum:Funding_the_wikis
Might I make a suggestion? I am completely new to Runescape (as in, this HN post is the first time I’m engaging with it), and I was hopping around your lovely wiki trying to find some kind of intro / “about the game” section with a bit of backstory.
Perhaps I missed it? (I’m on mobile)
Either way, looks like a project of love! Well done ^_^
He’s a great guy.
This one has such a relaxing colour scheme.
Also, while we're on hacker news, is it known how the party hat duplication bug happened? I like reading hacking white papers, but I assume nothing was published regarding that.
Depends on the client that was used. AutoRune was a popular client that sent direct packets. The game client gathered metrics on mouse movement though, so if you used direct packet injection you still had to fake the mouse movement to some extent so you could escape this rudimentary detection. Or your bot could just control the mouse in a somewhat realistic way and avoid needing to do extra work.
For reading game state, many bots in this time used color detection. So for example a flax picking bot might be coded to click on specific colors of cyan on the screen. Jagex would likewise respond with bot mitigation that was intended to fool the color detection system, for example by making flax have the same color whether it could actually be picked or not.
Later, clients would be developed that used decompilation and reflection of the Java game client to directly read game state in the form of Java objects. This would then be able to be queried and interacted with by scripts via an API that the client exposed. So for example, a script could be written that queried for all the flax (identified by their object id) around the player and instructed the client to pick it; the client would handle exactly how to move the mouse and the camera to achieve that.
I don't know for sure but I understand a lot of early bug abuse was due to a failure to perform server side validation. So hypothetically you might enter into a 2 part trade transaction flow where you offer items for trade in the 1st step and then commit that transaction in the 2nd step. Server side validation might be done in the 1st step to make sure you actually own the item you declared an intent to trade, but none is done in the 2nd step. So you could declare an intent to trade a worthless item you possess, but modify the transaction commit packet to give away an item you don't possess.
I was not part of the bug abuse community but I did find one bug in the game that involved multiple actions being done in a single server tick. As I understand it there have been a lot of bugs like this over the years. As a hypothetical example, it might be impossible to teleport while holding a certain item, but if you picked up the item on the same tick as you performed the teleport, the server might process the two actions in such a way that it allowed you to perform both.
Basically true, though:
- Aryan wasn't the first clientmod, not even the first to deob - probably the first to go fairly 'mainstream' and end up being well known outside the circle of people using it, though (being free probably helped here)
- No legal action, tbh. Well, the same amount of legal action that all of the cheating scene got (some C&D's, domain takedown attempt type stuff at various times, but not the scary kind of legal action in the way other bots got)
- The banwave backdoor did happen, and basically as you say (iirc it was the actual UID but negative, rather than -1) but was more of a conscious decision, there wasn't an 'agreement' beforehand - it was proactively taken. Jagex were informed about it in order to detect it though, as far as I'm aware.
Doubtful. I was just a kid at the time who lurked on forums. Were you involved in the scene? If yes, do you mind if I ask what you ended up doing professionally? RS cheat developers were my role models growing up. I’ve often wondered what members of that community are up to now.
Professionally nowadays I'm a pen tester/security consultant.
Worked on contributing a lot to that project, became my first (semi) open source contributions, and the scripts were my first forays into selling my work :)
https://archive.fo/DafO7 is an archive (of an archive) since I can't find the original page.
Lead me to writing an auto hit bot for Mu Online.
I wonder what this generations "gateway drug" to programming will be? Roblox?
Back when i first started playing I never really did much of anything really... explored around, tried quests and never thought of looking up a guide, talked to alot of people standing in the bank, played alot of minigames etc. etc.
Years go by and I come back and i was hooked on efficiency. What wierd methods were there for getting insane xp per hour like sitting in lunar island, cannoning the trolls, while woodcutting the trees and high alching the logs.
skip to my early 20's when i first started programming for my day job and i would come home and write runescape bots for all sorts of stuff. One of my favorites that i wrote would have around 20 bots with gmauls sit in multi-wildy and hive mind spec poor souls who walked by.
I haven't touched RS in years, but funnily enough last weekend I found out the OS buddy and the runescape Wiki post grand exchange data. Was spending some time learning rust and decided to build a grand exchange analysis tool that looked across a number of factors (Volume, stability, beta) to determine the best items to flip.
Don't really want to post it on github cause it'd probably fuck with the economy but if anyones interested, hit me up at rhoades.lorenzo@gmail.com
1. Tons of free content. I didn't get a membership for a long time. When I did it was something like 5 dollars a month, which I could scrape up as a kid.
2. Massive world. You could wander around for hours and find new stuff. Even just little things like some cool empty building, all of it was so fun to explore. Staying up late and exploring the wild with a friend was legitimately thrilling - and horrifying when you'd see a little yellow dot show up on the minimap.
3. Tons of quests and content, new content came out all the time.
Whoever pushed RS3 greatly misunderstood all of this. Graphics improvements were appreciated but not super necessary - otherwise, the game was basically ruined by having tons of random shit and an extremely cluttered UI. Really bad mobile game vibes.
I played against a year or two ago, just for a week or two, and it was still super fun. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a time sink, and I just can't spend time on it anymore. But it was a hell of a lot of fun.
There are some really old multiplayer servers kinda like that, where you can find ruins of ancient buildings from early betas
I got back into it a year ago and it's nostalgic and fun - but yes, definitely a time-sink. I'll often have it in a spare window though doing some AFK skill such as fishing or woodcutting - helps keep me sane when I need to do some more mundane work tasks, lol.
We probably would have played WoW if we could afford it and our computer could run it but for a lot of folks like us that just want realistic.
There were a lot of really talented developers in the space, but unfortunately the predatory donation systems and toxic culture between different servers/projects generally caused the good developers to move away from the community(or be just outright banned from community forums for no sane reason). It’s really nice to see a project in this space building a strong community with good open source culture.
I didn’t see on the website anywhere, but I’m curious if Jagex has given them any kind of permission for distributing the copyrighted assets/client? They may not care since it is focused on very old versions that Jagex themselves don’t even have or intend to profit from ever, but it would be cool to see them actually endorse a community project like this.
Interestingly, the game was content complete for Throne of Destiny on the server side because apparently someone found a thumb drive of the server files at a conference long ago. I’ve been secretly hoping that someone from Turbine would leak the entire game source as a final fuck you to WB backpedaling on making the servers public.
At the time, I didn’t know about background processes or VMs. I used the Mouse cursor api in the JCL, so my computer was preoccupied. There were 5 second intervals between actions where I can quickly change the song on YouTube.
I went by DollarBill/Xenox.
The wilderness PvP worked with a level gap system, so when we went out as a group it was good to bring some mid-level characters to be able to suddenly attack lower-level players in the early wilderness who wouldn't expect it. That really felt like D&D - having someone prepare meals beforehand, etc.
It's a shame most games have given up on that systemic, open-world player driven style of game. Back then with Ultima VII, Baldur's Gate, Runescape, Daggerfall, Ultima Underworld, etc. it really felt like in 20 years we'd be playing games like Daggerfall persistently with thousands of players online.
And instead it's just devolved into Skinner boxes and microtransactions.
The other side is modern-day MMOs; I mainly play FFXIV and have done so for a long time now, and while it doesn't have the freedoms as Runescape had, it's still a great game with a pretty good community and ad-hoc community activities.
It was awesome building bridges and then finding someone else had built a new base the next day, etc.
I've been tempted to join them but I currently lack the time to get addicted to it again.
I often wonder, what in my life made me even remotely care about money? I realized some time ago, that is was literally Runescape. It was my first introduction to the world of finance and economics.
Seriously, it might be one of the biggest positive impacts I can think of in my youth.
That said it doesn't surprise me that certain servers have continued to grow and thrive over the years.
It's such a charming game, I'm too old to spend hours playing, but I'm doing one hour here and there and I'll probably max some time in my 70s. Looking forward to doing some serious bossing when I'm retired :)
Outdated polygon graphics, simple 2D grid, simplistic combat system, lots of craft/skills. A framework for promoting emergent phenomenon.
"TeaVM is an ahead-of-time compiler for Java bytecode that emits JavaScript and WebAssembly that runs in a browser."
Makes you wonder how many got to mining level 99 so easily.
But like many people are mentioning, private servers have long been an important part of RS's legacy (and WOW's, and many other MMOs). So godspeed to these folks!
Repo -- https://github.com/runescape-classic/runescape-classic-dump
AutoRune -- https://github.com/runescape-classic/runescape-classic-dump/...
Very cool