Monday, August 17, 2015

Staff additions!

I've given two players positions on staff, it's clear we need more quality people helping with things.

The first is Saxi who has been given the position of Admin (gold crown).  He has been writing quests for months and is someone I know I can trust.  For those who don't know, I've known Saxi in real life for years now and this will give him the ability to assist people with quests and other content he writes.  While he won't be the definition of active in the player base, he is now an official "part of the staff" and someone I know I can count on.

Then there's Latent who has been made a Mod.  After coding for a while now and being online *all the time*, I believe it will be a good addition to the staff.  Regardless of words that have been exchanged or who got pk'd by who, the staff and I see nothing wrong with this move.

In personal and development news, I have over a month with no real responsibilities until Fall term starts.  I'm gonna try to get an ton of vscape stuff done, my first little pet project is resurrecting the original Jagex map viewer.  Here's an initial version for testing, lemme know if anyone has problems with it running: https://www.dropbox.com/s/r8m32x7cr844msi/map.jar?dl=0  I'm aware it is the wrong map and it would seem no one has the correct version of a data file it uses out on the internet. I'm sure it's sitting on a hard drive somewhere in a beige box out there, but I'm working on figuring out how to make one myself.  I've also started work on a update script that will pull code from our repository, compile it and update data files quickly.  This will mean quicker and more frequent updates.  There's some other big things I'd like to do, but there's also a good amount of bugs to work on so we'll see. Again, thanks to you guys for reporting bugs @ http://vidyascape.no-ip.org/mantis

Also, that tournament was awesome, it had it's hitches but it was great to see so many people online and participating.  Shout-out to Nijia who kicked tons of ass.

Saturday, August 8, 2015

Just weak my shit up

----The Npc Weakness System----

I guess this is long awaited or what have you, although I don't think it really changes the course of things too terribly much. But muh accuracy, so, here we are! The system works pretty much like original Runescape's did, each npc can have 3 weaknesses from each side of the combat triangle. Magic and Melee can be broken down into their sub styles / elements while ranged weakness is just a boolean value (true or false).

So you have:
-MELEE (Rare, used mainly on unique npcs such as Dagannoth Supreme and varies %-wise)
-MAGIC (More common, a global 20% increase in accuracy for this weakness)
-RANGED (More common than melee, but not as much as magic, 15% boost)
-STAB (15%)
-CRUSH (15%)
-SLASH (15%)
-FIRE/WATER/EARTH/AIR (25% accuracy boost for specifics like this)
[Ancient spells do NOT count as elemental spells, per original runescape]

This is pretty much how the original system worked, although finding accurate accuracy percentages (so meta) is nigh impossible unless someone wants to watch some OSRS Q&A videos for hours on end. What can be found is which npc's have which weakness, which is the next section of this post...

I spent a few hours last night scripting some shit to parse through a downloaded copy of the OSRS wiki and pull weaknesses from every NPC I could. Now, the formatting in the source of the wiki is garbage and all over the place from various edits and stuff, so it's very possible the script missed a few NPCs (I noticed fire giants, but those were my test subjects and had weaknesses at that point anyways). So, that's why the update will come with the ::checkweakness / ::checkweak / ::weakness / ::npcweakness command. You use it like ::weakness blue dragon, and get results as such:
http://puu.sh/jucEc/06f49e1ac2.png

While the parsing of the wiki found a huge amount of weaknesses and set them to an equally massive amount of NPCs, like I said, you never know. Have fun with the command, check what you're fighting and use it to your advantage, but also report any npcs that have either an incorrect weakness or no weaknesses at all (If and ONLY IF they should have one). You'll need to cite the OSRS wiki or an archived wiki page from 2006-7 like RuneHQ, tip.it, whatever. DO NOT USE ANY MODERN RUNESCAPE WIKI! Weaknesses changed tremendously on the EOC update on realscape and are entirely inaccurate to this time period.

Thursday, August 6, 2015

FoxterGate. 5-11 Never4get etc.

The server is back up. Here's what went down.

Last night I was informed that someone's old account was missing all valuables. I took a look and found all the items were traded to Shiggydiggy on 5-11. Mr Foxter was logged into the account that was looted. Before this, Telescope tried to log in and saw he was banned.

This is around the time Mr Foxter was losing his staff privileges, and Telescope and Mr Foxter were always close. Telescope, presumably in reaction to Mr Foxter being demoted, chose to look through old files he had from running the server way back when. Some of these passwords were still current. They checked out and looted 5 accounts and over 100,000,000 gold worth of wealth.

All persons involved were banned (including accounts items were traded to and stored on) and the affected accounts will be getting their items back.

This was about 4 hours of detective work into the morning.

325 accounts are still using at risk passwords that Telescope still has.  These accounts have been locked and their owners will have to contact staff to unlock them.

If you're getting a banned message please contact staff in game on another account.

!Change your password and pin regularly, PLEASE!


Oh, also we scored a slightly better server package with the same provider.  It's double the ram and a little bit cheaper.  Win-win!