I used to be really involved in RuneScape private server development in the early to mid 2010’s. It is to this day some of the most enjoyable programming I’ve done. The challenge presented by reverse engineering an obfuscated client and building a server framework off of that works almost like a puzzle game.

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.