RuneLite – open-source RuneScape Client | Hacker News Reader

RuneLite – open-source RuneScape Client

runelite.net

58 pointssegasaturn50 comments

Fun fact, Jagex (the makers of RuneScape) were very close to acquiring OSBuddy (a closed source Runelite competitor) and shutting Runelite down, but Runelite blew up in popularity weeks before the agreement to buy OSBuddy finalized. When Jagex finally told Runelite to close doors, the community retaliated big time, and Jagex+Runelite came to a compromise [0].

[0] https://runelite.net/blog/show/2018-05-16-Update-RuneLite-th...

It is unusual that they allow custom clients in a pvp game, though.

Its not primarily a pvp game, theres pvp stuff you can do but the overwhelming majority of the game doesn't have any pvp.

True, it's not exactly Counter-Strike, but PvP is an important (although optional) aspect. But I'm not sure if it makes any difference.

It definitely makes a difference, there are some runelite plugins (both allowed and against the rules) which make pvp easier for those using them. I think almost all players think that the improvements to the game we get from plugins outside pvp are worth the negative aspects of their use in pvp.

There are also straight up bots people use sometimes in pvp which aren't possible for any human to fight. They can react to what you do instantly and perfectly, you can't really touch them. They're very rare though, the people who are capable of making them keep them expensive and uncommon.

This is also the game that make a big spectacle out of banning players who get caught using bots because it’s such a problem

I would say "players" using bots is a fairly minor problem. The overwhelming majority of the bots around are from people making money out of them. I'm not sure if many of these people really play the game.

For people who don't play the game it might be hard to understand the scale of the botting problem. Recently the majority of the top 100 accounts in the highscores for killing a boss called leviathan got banned. Its not unlikely that in the top 100 there was one real human (who went fron rank 77 to rank 14 in the highscores because so many who were ahead of him got deleted).

For those unfamiliar, it's worth pointing out the OSRS team at Jagex operates pretty differently from most game companies. Nearly every change made to the game is run past the community in the form of in-game polls. Generally, the dev team doesn't build things that the community doesn't want.

OSRS came to be after years of updates and changes to RS3 which slowly alienated the original base. Now, what was originally a reboot of a 2007 backup of the source has hugely eclipsed the original in popularity. Pretty great story.

Is there a maintained open source server counterpart?

It’s really great to see games that would otherwise die live on through a community. Ultima online is a great example with the likes of ClassicUO (amazing client) and ModernUO (an active attempt at a modernised server)

Yes there were many. This is how I got into programming in 2006. The fact that OSRS even happened is because Jagex was losing a lot of people to private servers.

I've been out of the community for 1.5 decades now but there (used to) be a thriving private server community at https://rune-server.org/index.php which shaped my entire programming career

Whether there are still actively maintained ones I'm not sure though.

This is for 2004 version of the game, but probably the most active open source project

https://github.com/2004scape

Also Runelite isn’t open source client per se, its just open source client wrapper that makes many functions available through stable API and adds plugins.

>136,079 online (53,634 in game)

Amazing that there are so many people active still, if that's accurate. RuneScape feels like a half forgotten childhood memory to me at this point.

Well „modern“ MMOs are so bad that people still stick to the good old stuff. Honestly MMOs feel so over now, some old ones still clinging on, but the genre is dead now more or less

MMORPGs are going to have a hard time in an era of instant gratification. The era of grinding for months if not years to reach the elite ranks is a time gone by, gamers these days just will not respond anymore.

MOBAs are perhaps the most obvious reflection of this paradigm shift: Progression is achieved in mere minutes instead of months/years and it only lasts for a sitting session rather than for years to come.

That being said, I certainly miss those years and I for one still fondly remember my RuneScape and Ragnarok Online days. As fun as modern instant gratification MMOs are, the absolute high point of fun just doesn't compare to what I experienced in MMORPGs of ye olde days.

Can you imagine the absolute chaos and fun of almost 340 grizzly players (168 vs. 168) slogging it out in a small map, aka full scale War of Emperium in Ragnarok Online? God damn, I would kill to experience that again; forget 5v5s in MOBAs, that shit is n00bsauce.

Have never played Rag, but in Runescape and WoW progression was only measured in months and years at a time when one would be completely oblivious to any kind of far out goal or meta or otherwise being good at the game, and that's because the nature of the game was to get one level higher, not to the end, and you'd be naively taking ages to even progress that far. After you're aware of the end bits or have done the leveling a few times, progression could be measured in huge time blocks, but I don't know if those have much crossover with what you get through the eyes of a new adventurer.

The only nostalgia I have in RuneScape was learning to write basic bots in Pascal using... SCAR? and then acquiring or aspiring to acquire gear that was only novel because I didn't know how or where to get it, the mystery was the magic, bots did the rest. Wow was more punishing and more rewarding during this same period of wide-eyed new adventurer mode. "How did he get those shoulders!? Maybe some day". Although I do still play retail and haven't bothered with classic, because the systems are better and the fights are a bit more sophisticated

I played UO, AC,DAOC,Lineage2,Shadowbane,Planetside,Darkfall. Never really got into WoW because it lacked meaningful PvP and had grinded enough in previous games that I could see that mechanic clearly and it was no longer motivating.

As a player I remember in all of these games remarking that ‘can’t they just bring us the end game now without me having to grind for it?’ Planetside was the closest I got to that. I think working for something is important but too many games make the mouse trap the game.

Philosophically I wonder about how much ‘anticipation is everything’ is true ha

Progress should be earned like in Dark Souls.

The best example I have is the Caprademon. Early on in the game, you face a single one (granted, in a cramped area) and it is quite an obstacle. Later on in the game you face many of them in a row, and you don’t even blink.

At that point you have better gear, but it’s mostly going through the entire game that has taught you the skillset to make quick work of them.

You should get access to the endgame mostly by skill, not gear. That’s a good game.

Agreed 100%, the reward cycles have become so small.

MMOs will return to super niche games for the most hardcore nerds - maybe that’s a good thing

To be fair, MMOs after WoW were mostly bad as well. Such was the success of WoW (which, make no mistake, was a very good game), that it dried up the field completely: every "MMO" afterwards had to be a WoW clone with the same gameplay, same action bar, same progression, same end-game style, etc. There were exceptions and there was innovation of course, but I feel no game ever came close to making true justice to the possibilities of a shared, persistent, virtual world.

Those that came closer imo were UO and SWG: both before WoW :)

I loved SWTOR. The non-mmo part of it were more than great. If only they did something akin to NWN2 with Skyrim-level mod capacity, it would have been the best rpg of all time.

This is my opinion as well. Every MMO I’ve played since WoW felt like WoW-lite. If I wanted to spend a ton of my time playing a MMO why not play the OG instead of the copy-cats?

Still the best MMO, even for someone (like me) that has never player as a child.

Well a nonzero (and possibly quite large) number of those are bots. OSRS is a fun game but it's design makes it very easy to make bots for. If you play for a while you'll see them almost everywhere.

its*

A lifetime ago I wrote an OpenCV blob detection auto-mining tool for it:

https://gitlab.com/mtekman/runescape-motiondetector

It worked for about an hour before having the nasty habit of attacking monsters, chasing them out into the wilderness where you'd check in on your character and find him dead, barren, and lost.

Fun though.

These days there are bots who hunt other bots. People make bots which kill "reventants" in the "revenant caves" for valuable loot, there were so many bots there that people made other bots to kill these bots and steal their loot from them.

Its almost a cool emergent ecosystem, except it sucks for us real players.

Whelp, just logged in for the first time in 1687 days, 19 hours and 18 minutes

For me there was a roughly 18 year break. I quit the game when I was 12 and started again at 30.

I got my first 99 after a 15 year break. Farming, obviously!

Habbo Hotel or Runescape were the two other ones outside of WoW.

I chose Habbo. Still exists but isn't the same.

They've just released a version as it existed some time in 2005: https://www.habbo.com/community/article/34151/launching-tomo...

Like OSRS but for Habbo

That's interesting. Thanks for the link.

The amount of developers that were building retro servers with modern stacks for their clones was really impressive.

Wouldn't the client being open source mean botting is essentially impossible to control?

I'm curious how you came to this conclusion. Bot detection isn't typically done clientside these days, hasn't for a long time. Have you ever played Runescape?

How do you detect a human-like bot at the server? I mean, something that attempts to resemble what a human would do? False positives would be a big issue.

Yup pretty much. There’s a large percentage of the community botting. Most of the bot builders have forked RuneLite to add custom scripts for automating tasks.

Jagex has made some improvements to their bot detection mostly through detecting if you’re playing on an “approved” build of RuneLite (the primary repo) in the past year or so, but this method went undetected for so long that many have maxed their accounts.

I don't think its accurate to say a large percentage of the community is botting. My understanding is that the overwhelming majority of the botting is by organised groups making money out of selling the gold they make.

I think a large percentage of the community is buying botted gold, but random people botting to get 99 mining or runecrafting or whatever is relatively rare (and relatively sucessfully detected) compared to gold farms.

The RuneScape client has always been "open source".

People have been decompiling and deobfuscating the RuneScape client since 2005.

Since it's written in Java it's not hard to do.

They do have some pretty smart ways of easily detecting bots. They do live streams of them teleporting bots to a world and killing them all before banning them.

It actually quite hard to build a reliable bot for RS.

A game mode cobbled together from a partial backup by a few staffers, yeeted to the fanbase as a fun, nostalgic "sorry" for crapping the main branch of the game up. Over 10 years later its still here.

Personally i think the biggest strength of the game and its development methodology is also its biggest flaw - Community voting and preapproval for updates.

So many updates have failed to make it to the game because the fan base are exactly what you'd expect from reddit/discord/mmo playing nerds. Incredible difficult to please.

It was an haphazard game mode that has grown into its own, and has been creating more and better content than the original for the past few years. The game has been growing a lot again after the COVID peak and it's reaching its all-time high.

The population chart of OSRS vs RS3 (called EOC here) is very telling: https://www.misplaceditems.com/rs_tools/graph/

Buying gf

wave2: selling dragon scimitar 1m

I tried getting into OSRS a few weeks ago. I noticed the official Jagex client doesn't run on Linux, so I installed RuneLite. However Jagex recently mandated the transition of email/password logins to a fancy proprietary OAuthy thing that _requires_ their official launcher.

Apparently the kosher way around this is installing RuneLite and the Jagex launcher in Lutris or Wine, but I just gave up.

This doesn't seem right, I use runelite on linux fine without any extra lutris or wine stuff. As far as I know you don't need the official launcher.

Edit: oh, I understand, I have an old account without the jagex launcher stuff. New accouts apparently need it. Well that sucks for you, I'm sorry.

Have you migrated to a Jagex Account yet? You probably haven't done that which is why you can still play without the official launcher.

You're correct, see my edit above.

I installed this flatpak-packaged Jagex Launcher and RuneLite, and it works flawlessly on Linux. It does run in Wine, but the package takes care of setting that up.

https://github.com/USA-RedDragon/jagex-launcher-linux-flatpa...

It is seemingly somewhat officially sanctioned, as a help article links to a repo that links to the flatpak.

https://help.jagex.com/hc/en-gb/articles/13413514881937-Down...

https://github.com/TormStorm/jagex-launcher-linux

Hey, that's me!

Just want to say I really appreciate you maintaining this!

I use https://github.com/Adamcake/Bolt to play on Linux with a Jagex account.

It's frustrating that Jagex won't support Linux directly, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com