Hacker News Reader

Comment by blamazon | Hacker News Reader

PSA - note the below quoted passages! If you played RuneScape between 2001 and 2012 and have any data archives or machines sitting around from that time, you might be able to help this project :)

> 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.

View on HN

Amazing!

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!

Any way I can find out about this book when its done? Sounds interesting!

Second that, osrs had consumed my life after I found it. Dam crack addiction.

Oh man, I also need to buy this book when it drops

Absolutely would read this.

haha I will 100% read this. I am endlessly fascinated by Runescape and the reasons it held such a grip on so many people. In my opinion, a far different appeal than a more mature game like World of Warcraft. There was something to endearing, innocent, and scary about Runescape, all at the same time.

RSC was a good way to learn networking concepts, or: Why Closing the Browser in Varrock Sewers May Not Save You from Death.

The botting community kept meticulous archives of the client and cache during these times. I know there was very complete archives of the 2004-2011 era and I can't imagine those having disappeared completely. moparisthebest ran a script that collected it and he wasn't the only one.

Are they looking at the RuneScape Private server scene? I remember some OSRS servers that provided custom clients from those years. I don't know how accessible some of those are now, but it wouldn't surprise me if you could find those old clients that way.

There is a project by a RSPS community member to accumulate all caches (https://archive.openrs2.org/) by similarly asking people, pulling from other archives, etc. This is probably the best archive in the rsps scene / I'm sure they are aware of it, there are just caches nobody has.

From the FAQ:

> 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.

This is true, however, if you reach out to maintainers, you might be surprised to find old files from them.

I don’t know of my parents kept my old computer in NZ. I wouldn’t be able to check till end of the year when I move back. But I may have several versions from around 2002-2005.

Seems a bit dishonest to ask people to contribute without explaining what the files are actually used for anywhere in the site, just "they could be used by Jagex". C'mon, I'm not against piracy, but I don't think it's cool trying to manipulate people like this.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Are you insinuating that people are being manipulated into unwittingly pirating software? The files alluded to are obfuscated Java byte code, so it's not piracy. It's useful for reverse engineering historical versions of the game for which no source or artifacts are known to exist. Perhaps you'd consider that unethical but I'd say it's ethically ambiguous at worst.

> Are you insinuating that people are being manipulated into unwittingly pirating software?

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.

Piracy? No one wants to play random early versions of Runescape. It's purely about preservation.

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

I've done a quick search through that repo and its dependencies, and I see no mention of the project above. How do you that they're using the files from there?

The project is run by the runescape wiki [1]. I got the above link from a reddit comment [2], the author of which is a poweruser on the wiki [3]

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_...

[3] https://runescape.wiki/w/User:Hlwys

The FAQ https://rs-archive.github.io/faq.html is pretty clear about what they're used for:

> 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.

That's what they contain, it says nothing about what they're using it for.

For archival purposes, as the name implies. I don’t understand why you try to stir something up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com