RuneScape Bench: MMOs for Agents [video]

Thank you for your work, I've had a pretty absurd amount of fun with this project over the last week

Thanks for building this. I remember someone (perhaps you) mentioning this would be an interesting idle game. I was half expecting to comment mentioning that effort, only to realize it was the exact same one when I had opened it.

I have a question about the economics of the server:

>Build and operate bots within a complex economic role-playing MMO.

Since Lost City predates the Grand Exchange, I'm curious how trade and commerce function in practice, especially in an economy now driven largely by agents. I haven't logged on yet, but my obsession as a younger F2P user was making as much gold as possible, not necessarily leveling to 99.

Hey, really interesting talk!

Recognizes you as the creator of River [1]. I originally lost hours of time to it. Ended up recreating it on my own photo-library locally (250k+ images). It's been a fantastic way to browse 2 decades of active photography.

Thank you for what you're putting out there!

[1] https://river.maxbittker.com

That was such an amazing talk, thank you so much for doing it!!!

This is awesome, I love OSRS and I've often wondered what the world would be like if bots were how you were supposed to play the game. Great project!

Yep I got started with programming with SCAR and on srl-forums with SRL as well. Was really fun.

In high school I'd meet with people in the back alleyways of my school where they'd hand me stacks of cash to buy... Runescape gold that I gained from botting.

I tinkered a little with SCAR but I primarily used Powerbot. I loved hanging out on their old forum buying/selling accounts, scripts, and photoshopped signatures.

I also got into programming through this scene, though a little later (irc.rizon.net #rsbotjava around 2008). I had already been doing a little coding but couldn't come up with decent project ideas (other than games, which always stalled out because I didn't know any artists or how to collaborate online). The RS scene was a perfect combination of interesting programming challenges, a decent size community of mostly other teenagers to hang out with, and getting to see my programs working in a "real" (virtual, ha) world. I learned about JVM internals, compiler techniques, IDEs, GUI programming with Swing, version control...... I don't know if I would have chosen CS as my major and gone into programming professionally if it weren't for this game and the community around it.

> My introduction to programming as a kid was also writing Runescape bots

4th for that! Although screen scraping always infuriated me, so I spent most of my time writing bots for decompiled RS clients.

Same here! In university I was studying under a different major, but started dabbling with writing a bot when OSRS came out based on my HS programming experience, and decided hey this is cool why not switch to CS? 10 years later and here I still am (though I've left the OSRS vice well behind me)

Wow, same! Seeing SCAR and AMX Mod X just unlocked some memories.

I remember using it to chop wood. Thought it was so crazy cool that you could do that. Stopped as I didn’t wanna get banned. I was also afraid of the ent that would kill you if you weren’t paying attention. This was also the time where your axe head would randomly fall off.

I've tried, casually, quite a bit of this. With generally poor results. Often this ends up similar what I have seen as classic RL problems with seeking reward in sparse environments. Unless you give the agent an a-priori goal outside the world it tends to not do anything interesting. Theoretically there ought to be ways around this such as herarchical approaches, but those tend to scale in complexity faster than my limited resources can keep up.

It's very neat though.

Edit: I really should watch the video before commenting. Looks like it goes into lots of these problems itself, and they got much further than me.

There were two paths in the 2000s some people went with Runescape, others went with Habbo Hotel. The amount of insanity that was done to Habbo since its inception to date, is astounding. To the point that because the Habbo community kept tinkering with Shockwave, Sulake made Habbo Origins from the fruit of their labor.

> RuneScape was what led me to become a software engineer (through the private server communities)

I have the exact same story. Mopar, RuneServer, then SoulSplit (look at what the founder of SoulSplit is doing now...)

I wonder how many people have the same background?

I too got started because of RS. Writing scripts for SCAR to automate RS :)

The software doesn't work on the live game - it's designed for a "private server" / fan reconstruction based around the 2004 version of the game.

Jagex almost certainly knows of lost city, but it's not really comparable to OSRS these days. People are likely to play 2004scape and then move to the live version of the game once the nostalgia wears off.

Jagex's lawyers have been absolutely decimating botting communities in the last 6 months, if they wanted Lost City gone, it would be gone already.

I wouldn't surprised to see them reach out for the valuable data he's collecting on the SDK's main server.

Jagex is an interesting finance story if you look into how they're passed around between private equity as one of the UKs largest game studios.

As a product the inside scoop is that the recent success of the game is in large part due to the community itself. The community development of Runelite, the OSRS wiki, the 117 HD plugin, and YouTube personalities.

I don't have high hopes that the status quo between Private Equity and the community will sustain itself.

He isn't playing on live servers. He is running a 2004scape private server, a project which Jagex has blessed.

The options you have to interact with an NPC banker are completely different to the options you have for trading with humans - there is no way a human or even a scripted bot would ever confuse them. Perhaps an LLM unfamiliar with the game would think that "Trade with Banker" is how you put items in the bank, however, which would be pretty funny.

Similar experience in a MUD. I fled a faction that experienced a hostile takeover, and was subsequently consistently hunted down by one of the leaders of the faction. Rather than it killing my motivation, it forced me to learn the survival skills the game gave to discover and monitor the locations of others, identify incoming presences through various shortcuts, etc. In essence, it made the game more alive to me and forced me to develop my character's story to go with it. Just a totally unique experience.

RS3 became an enshittified hellscape, that's why everyone is on OSRS. Without OSRS the company was enshittifying to its own death.

The modern game - either one - has more safeguards to make sure you don't enter a dangerous area by mistake. There isn't "three confirmation screens" but there is a ditch you have to click to jump over, and when you do you get the one screen that basically says "hey you know players can attack you past this ditch right? [Acknowledge] [Cancel] [Acknowledge and don't ask again]"

(Technically it's not even correct because the first few tiles past the ditch are also still in the safe zone)

There's plenty of enticing stuff in the Wilderness to make you want to go there and accept the danger, you don't really need to be tricking 11 year olds to have them face danger. Though I suppose you're arguing it's better to teach the 11yo that they can be tricked like this, in a video game instead of real life. I agree with that. At the same time it's a pretty unfair game if it has no indication you're walking into a PVP area other than scenery objects nobody pays attention to, and I think they current system is adequate.

Truly, the wilderness was the best part of the game.

I remember grinding away to a set of black armor, going right to the wilderness and getting immediately crushed and losing it immediately lol.

  > because the wilderness is behind 3 confirmation screens

Some of the earliest social/life lessons I learned were through interactions in that game

Today's youth will never re-live the experience of having someone tell you to "follow them to hidden area" and then one-hitting you with a rune weapon the second you crossed into wildy + taking all your shit.

"I wish it was easier to get scammed in online games" is a wild take.

I found the YouTube video the other day and enjoyed watching it.

The agent pathing seemed to clip a bit through the sides of mountains at times though -- or maybe that is just a bug of GM camera following player?

> but people are also hooking them up with LLMS for more planning, strategy, and conversation.

I did this at https://github.com/agent-wow/agent-wow but haven't yet gotten to the level that the rs-sdk author has with benchmarks and running economy experiments.

That said, a lot of the key points he talks about in the video align pretty well with my experience too.

lol, this person owns a gold mine that he is using Astra? Subscribed.

> You'd think AI would have no problem designing 50 good quests for an NYC mob boss in a few days or less.

Why would you think that?

Have you ever done RuneScape’s quests? No way an AI could create something so original

The problem with modern LLMs is that their writing/creativity skills are still fairly stilted. Like, it's not bad material? But it's stuck in the most common, trope-ladden ruts. Even if you get out of that, it suffers from the fact that every instance will write approximately the same quests.

That said, give it a year or two and I think we'll start seeing some pretty amazing stuff, there - LLM writing has been consistently improving, and I suspect at some point you could just generate quests by simulating a world and having the AI assign quests when it wants to accomplish goals outside of the character's skill-set, or when things go wrong with the economy (someone killed a traveling merchant -> farmer will now pay you to acquire good fertilizer/seeds)

RuneScape took a lot of lessons from UO. Originally though they did allow player-killing anywhere outside towns if you had the pk setting on. This didn't last very long though and they introduced the wilderness idea the game has now.