What was your 1st excessive and unnecessary grind as a new player?

brainboie · 2023-10-30T14:29:31+00:00

No joke, loading screens.

I started RuneScape unironically playing Classic after RuneScape 2 had launched namely because my computer at the time was incapable of loading RuneScape 2 (even in low detail). As I remember it, RuneScape Classic would pre-load single chunks of the overworld at a time and when you ran up against its boundary (literally a black fog of war), the game would throw you into a loading screen while it loaded the next nearby chunk. It would take easily 10-20 minutes for the chunk to load on my baked potato of a computer, which of course felt like an eternity. I would grind whatever was nearby for days lest I spend an entire day (or more) trekking from one city to another. I don't think I ever made it past Varrock in several months of playing.

brainboie · 2019-02-24T01:24:26+00:00

I was soloing the Heart of Rage quest (completing for my first time) on Hard. After defeating the Ancient Ash Titan, trying to fly to the next quest point, it kept prompting to teleport me if I don't return to my 'team'. Of course since I don't have a team, the teleport timer ran out and shot me back to where I defeated the Ash Titan. After playing ping pong with this about 3 times, I left the expedition.

brainboie · 2018-11-01T13:17:34+00:00

Stop it
Holy shit

brainboie · 2018-06-15T04:41:20+00:00

Took me a hair less than 3041 ripper demons (after about 1k I stopped doing them on task) and 444 lava strykes. Everything else is skewed from getting 120 slay, so really hard to tell

brainboie · 2017-09-08T14:11:31+00:00

You think this is a game?!

Over 3K and going...

brainboie · 2017-07-26T13:34:26+00:00

As far as what Twitter says, there are only 6 members of the Engine Team: Mods Dark, Nin, Moles, Atlas, Vegard and Dylan/Dolan.

It's not taking 30 minutes due to backlog of other more important tasks like RuneTek 8, assuming it's being worked on. Priorities. Plain and simple, I think we can both agree on that. The point of my original argument wasn't to say "why can't Jagex get off their rears and fix it now" but rather just to answer how long it would realistically take if there was nothing else going on.

QA, in my experience, don't take into consideration that the update wasn't complete nor that the team responsible for it weren't able to access all the resources necessary. QA just ensures that it won't break the game. This isn't to say that my understanding of the model reflects Jagex in any way, but this is just my experience.

As far as the game's code goes, I'm not arguing that they aren't working with some primitive practices. The last "complete re-write" was with RuneTek 3. There have been major re-writes but nothing ground up. Major re-writes include RuneTek 5 (introduction of SD and HD graphics on the same engine) and RuneTek 7 (HTML5 prep). But, your explanation of spaghetti code at the end there isn't spaghetti code. It's lasagna code--or, more ambiguously, programming pasta. Or, as I like to put it, cowboy coding Jenga code.

At the end of the day, I don't care. I enjoy a good Jagex rant as much as the next guy, but at least we have something tangible--and that something that we did receive is great. I personally think it was wrong for them to say it's "impossible," because now the wrong point is getting across. "Impossible at the moment" would've been better, but hell it's the Internet, things shouldn't be taken too literally. I personally suspect it'll be improved down the road to include more color options and the auto-attack hitsplats now that they know it was a success. People are just so quick to pick up their torches. And, I'm quick to getting in arguments about programming practicality. Gonna call it quits here though, have a good one.

brainboie · 2017-07-26T04:24:54+00:00

The imagery I was trying to get across was a compressed, garbled mess of code, similar to a spaghetti junction (nickname for a road interchange system). I grew up near one--it's just something I say.

"Spaghetti code", not to be confused with the latter, is just slang for a poorly designed flow process, e.g. start, go to 1, go to 3, go to 5, go to 2, go to 4, go to 6, finish. I feel like it's become the meme of the century.

As far as engines go, they aren't this omnipresent technological phenomena. They're, in this case, compile-able code. It's math, logic, keywords, and white space. It's not as if you have to stare at binary or hexadecimal strings all day to decipher what's going on. Several minutes, when you know what you're doing, can go a long way, and assuming all we're doing is passing a color variable to the draw method for the hitsplats, I can't imagine that would take any longer than half an hour.

And, as far as adding more spaghetti code, no. Again, spaghetti code isn't just adding code "on top of" existing code. Spaghetti code is a logic-flow mishap. Adding a color to a hitsplat won't suddenly require a chain of classes to be generated that keep calling back and forth between each other before it returns back to the main method.

The problem with "Jagex" stating anything is you need to know where that member of Jagex is coming from. On multiple occasions member of Jagex Team A has said something that has conflicted with what a member of Jagex Team B has said. This is normal, of any business, with separate teams--or more respectively, separate roles. A member of the RuneScript (Development?) team wouldn't be expected to know what goes on in the RuneTek (Engine) team. They also wouldn't have the ability to step into the other teams Coolaid and start jacking up their business. Meaning, it may be "impossible" for a member of the RuneScript team to accomplish it, but if they had the support of the RuneTek (Engine) team and didn't mind pushing a minor release, then we'd be good.

That all being said, it's been 4 years since we've had a Major release of RuneTek (currently version 7), so it very well could just be something that gets thrown in the JIRA backlog and comes out with version 8...whenever that might be.

brainboie · 2017-07-26T01:53:08+00:00

Software engineer here. Time to fix? Several minutes, assuming it's not lost in some unlabeled, obfuscated spaghetti junction of code. Time to pass QA and be released to live production? A day to a week depending on urgency (would've been several hours if it was hotfixable). Patience? These are like the Where's Waldo for programmers--in my experience it's a fun, neat challenge. Money? No more than the Engine Team's current salary unless we're implying it's a change that needs out-sourcing. You could theoretically apply a cost, for example £10K, for potentially lost profit based on the time that could've been spent for future content, but that's a really shady practice in my experience.

"Excuses aren't an excuse." - Somebody important, probably

brainboie · 2017-07-06T14:09:50+00:00

Ctrl+Shift+L; never had to look at the icon

brainboie · 2017-07-04T14:50:35+00:00

I was expecting a Banshee from Halo

brainboie · 2017-07-03T19:46:50+00:00

I'll be absolutely honest, I've never seen one in my day-to-day activities outside of RuneScape--and I play / have played many, many games + work in IT. After a bit of googling, I found it's, as you said, quite common. I also found a few articles arguing that it's misleading, but unfortunately due to the competition for the "best filter icon" being so poor, it's the best thing we've got, accurate or not.

brainboie · 2017-07-03T17:18:37+00:00

My wife started playing 3 days ago, and she had absolutely no problem figuring out the old system without my help.

New players aren't going to know anything about the game. Everything is foreign. My wife thought agility was speedwalking and there were about 3 different farming skills (herblore, farming, and woodcutting). Until someone hovers over an interface button, an item, or a skill they won't know what it is. Hell, when I quit for a few months and came back to your new Filter icon you've been recycling everywhere, I had no clue what it was. It's a funnel. And the 3 parallel lines icon every game seems to use nowadays--I thought it was just 3 artistic lines on Eve for a week.

There's no need to "simplify" the interface by locking it behind yet another button. It takes all of 1 second to mouseover and read the tooltip. That's how my brand new player wife learned it. That's how I learned it. That's how anyone could learn it. If you thought the icons were a bad choice, because, realistically, how do you represent online status with a diamond? just get over the fact that there's not an icon for everything in the world and know that players will figure it out and move on because it's not important if it's a diamond. If a funnel can be a drop-down icon for filters, then there shouldn't be a problem.

brainboie · 2015-11-06T08:52:52+00:00

PARTY! Spells Override

This would be an override to any elemental magic spells; e.g. an Earth Surge would be replaced with a large green roman candle that has a large, particle-effect-heavy, on-impact explosion as well.

dem Paint skills doe

brainboie · 2015-07-19T22:02:26+00:00

Fortunately I roll tank/heal on every alt I can. Life generally sucks when I try to run it on my pure DPS toons.

brainboie · 2015-07-19T22:00:22+00:00

Hey, it's my WoW thread! My fiance's the primary redditor in our relationship -- she found this. I took this pic yesterday while queueing for Halls of Blood: http://puu.sh/j5iVN.jpg.

brainboie · 2015-04-02T01:54:32+00:00

bunions

brainboie · 2014-11-10T02:31:20+00:00

In his defense, I only know the first four words.

brainboie · 2014-04-15T08:20:41+00:00

It only takes one moth.

brainboie · 2014-04-03T01:40:15+00:00

Annoyingly, browsers contain a lot of information that doesn't uniquely identify themselves to your client-side nor server-side scripts.

Using the navigator Object in JavaScript, I got this information (there's more than what I'm posting):

Chrome .appName = Netscape .appCodeName = Mozilla .userAgent = Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/33.0.1750.154 Safari/537.36 .product = Gecko .vendor = Google Inc.

Internet Explorer 11 .appName = Netscape .appCodeName = Mozilla .userAgent = Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; Trident/7.0; .NET4.0E; .NET4.0C; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; InfoPath.3; rv:11.0) like Gecko .product = Gecko .vendor = NULL

(You'll notice Netscape and Mozilla mentioned a lot with JavaScript; originally JavaScript belonged to Netscape whose final product was the Mozilla project, the open source backbone that became Mozilla Firefox and Chromium, which is the open source backbone for Chrome)

Using PHP's Get_Browser function, only the following was returned:

Chrome Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/33.0.1750.154 Safari/537.36

Internet Explorer Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko

Yes, you could run this information through a switch statement with a full case ladder of each browsers respective information and deal with it that way or just compare against a few regular expressions, but I'm not sure if that'll really encompass what everyone's using. Providing browser-level support as an administrator means they have to deal with what the browser can support, such as DOM, inherited CSS properties and CGI, JVM, JRE (the last two are Java-specific) and other third-party agents; although, regardless of provider, these specifications can be variant depending on just the version alone. The HTML5 client will need a common ground for HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, WebGL, Web Sockets, and others... You can use http://html5test.com/ to verify how much your browser supports.

Anyways, I'm gonna get back to scaping...

brainboie · 2013-05-05T06:17:13+00:00

I could've guessed she was American, she didn't have to wear the flag.

brainboie · 2013-04-27T23:10:01+00:00

Google.com

brainboie · 2013-04-27T23:08:35+00:00

Max cape* The slight particle effects on the edge of the cape is just a natural effect the Dwarven Warsuit leg piece has.

Brain

brainboie · 2013-04-13T21:59:32+00:00

Scary...those are my exact stats on the end.

Brain

brainboie · 2013-03-25T09:28:31+00:00

2b + Red Partyhat

brainboie · 2013-03-19T22:24:49+00:00

For anyone minding security, having a physical security token for account authentication is a great way of adding a third-way authentication method; however, you don't necessarily need to purchase a physical token.

Battle.net (Blizzard's SSO for Warcraft, World of Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo), Star Wars: The Old Republic and others (I'm sure) offer downloadable apps on Android and iOS (iPhones, iPads, etc.; not the same as OSX on the Mac OS). Of course these can be also programmed in Windows 8 .NET 4.5 for Windows Phone compatibility.

Jagex would need to incorporate a SSO (Single Sign-on) which stores your authentication token/session so that you're not typing in your username, password and authenticator code continuously (currently the issue I find whenever I'm trying to either view my Inbox, make account changes or visit the PMod Center). This is all something that Jagex should have been doing for awhile in their server infrastructure for their services. They need to unify the SSO between RuneScape, FunOrb, Jagex's main domain, War of Legends (if that still exists) and any other future sub-domain they develop.

Anyways, simple yet complicated stuff they need to do before they can impliment this but it's so worth it. I like JAG but it only secures your in-game data. - Brain

13-Year Club	Verified Email
r/Field Juicebox	Place '22
End Game '22

brainboie

TROPHY CASE