If this inspired you, would encourage people to try it out by pointing their agents to this repo and giving a goal:
https://github.com/MaxBittker/rs-sdk
You can also view the realtime activity of the server here: https://maxbittker.github.io/rs-world/
I have a question about the economics of the server:
>Build and operate bots within a complex economic role-playing MMO.
Since Lost City predates the Grand Exchange, I'm curious how trade and commerce function in practice, especially in an economy now driven largely by agents. I haven't logged on yet, but my obsession as a younger F2P user was making as much gold as possible, not necessarily leveling to 99.
My great essence mining bot contraption horribly broke when Runescape started randomizing all colors slightly, after making a paltry amount in dollars selling the essences.
I tinkered a little with SCAR but I primarily used Powerbot. I loved hanging out on their old forum buying/selling accounts, scripts, and photoshopped signatures.
Using SCAR and making bots was my intro to SVN and the concept of importable libraries made by others.
Simpler times. Happier times.
Does anyone remember an article titled "We are the hunted"? I couldn't manage to find it anywhere, live or archived.
Essentially it was about how the ethos of one of those communities (It was Simba when I was around), was not to spam mass bald lvl 3 bots, but to blend in and be essentially undetectable, that the goal was not unsophisticated money but something else.
I'm going to try to find it and get back to you.
A lot of the techniques and pitfalls he talks about also aligns with my experience on WoW agents too. It's also interesting to see how agents coordinate in these kinds of game environments.
The agent pathing seemed to clip a bit through the sides of mountains at times though -- or maybe that is just a bug of GM camera following player?
One of my side projects is a game, and I've made it so agents can spawn off their own world shard to play in. There's a little Chrome-driven agent harness that can grab low res screenshots while it speaks directly to the game over the wire to control things.
I've had Luna play it and it can drive around (you play as a bike) but it did struggle to play one of the mini-games (Disc Golf). My idea was that model trainers could run it an RL loop using the harness to get feedback data and screenshots to use, then reset the game world as needed during the process.
A smart model capable of multi-modal inference on screenshots/game context at 30-60fps could be pretty interesting, and I'm sure it's coming. No idea how much it would generalize but would be fun to see done.
It's very neat though.
Edit: I really should watch the video before commenting. Looks like it goes into lots of these problems itself, and they got much further than me.
For a homing pigeon, this would be literal, driving further and further each time you release them.
For an agent that you train to walk, this would be flat surface to past some line, then introduce speed reward, then non-flat surfaces, then obstacles, then curves, etc [1].
[1] "AI Warehouse" channel is all about training AI for light gaming tasks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_4BPjLBF4E
I did this at https://github.com/agent-wow/agent-wow but haven't yet gotten to the level that the rs-sdk author has with benchmarks and running economy experiments.
That said, a lot of the key points he talks about in the video align pretty well with my experience too.
This formative moment could never happen today, because the wilderness is behind 3 confirmation screens instead of just being something you get to discover in the game:
> You have to know that [items] are worth something in order to not get taken advantage of. And it goes to kind of extreme levels too because not only will people, try to give you a bad price, but the game is just really well known for the scamming and the lying and stealing your password. And it's really the wild west out there.
> And so, and really this is true. My very first memory of the very first time that I entered the world of RuneScape, I was asking somebody for help. I said like I was trying to make bread and I was like, "Where can I find a mill so I can make some bread?" And a guy was like, "Follow me. I'm going to show you." And I followed him like into these woods. And you know, you can imagine he turned around. He started to attack me. And I realized what was happening. I was probably 11 years old. I realized what was happening. And I made a break for it. I ran back south for cover and I got away. I didn't die. And I remember like, you know, closing the game.
> I think that my parents hadn't been home, so I had time to think about this. And I was like, that was the coolest thing that's ever happened to me. And I think that this is kind of the beauty and the magic of this game is that it's a little bit of like a rough and tumble world where you have to look out for yourself. And as a kid, it's like that's actually really great practice to be out in the world with real people and have to understand what's going on and learn things like, oh yeah, if somebody offers you a really great deal, maybe be careful.
Cheers to this kind of game design. Wish we'd see it again some day.
> because the wilderness is behind 3 confirmation screens
Today's youth will never re-live the experience of having someone tell you to "follow them to hidden area" and then one-hitting you with a rune weapon the second you crossed into wildy + taking all your shit.
I remember grinding away to a set of black armor, going right to the wilderness and getting immediately crushed and losing it immediately lol.
The modern game - either one - has more safeguards to make sure you don't enter a dangerous area by mistake. There isn't "three confirmation screens" but there is a ditch you have to click to jump over, and when you do you get the one screen that basically says "hey you know players can attack you past this ditch right? [Acknowledge] [Cancel] [Acknowledge and don't ask again]"
(Technically it's not even correct because the first few tiles past the ditch are also still in the safe zone)
There's plenty of enticing stuff in the Wilderness to make you want to go there and accept the danger, you don't really need to be tricking 11 year olds to have them face danger. Though I suppose you're arguing it's better to teach the 11yo that they can be tricked like this, in a video game instead of real life. I agree with that. At the same time it's a pretty unfair game if it has no indication you're walking into a PVP area other than scenery objects nobody pays attention to, and I think they current system is adequate.
Yeah, that's the argument. I'm kind of getting at something deeper though, like when you say this:
> At the same time it's a pretty unfair game if it has no indication you're walking into a PVP area other than scenery objects nobody pays attention to
Unfair by a comparison to contemporary game design practices maybe, but my point is that it was more fun before (and paying attention to scenery is a valuable lesson to learn as well).
Anyway the point isn't that I think Scamming is Good, Actually. The point is that Modern Game Design is Boring, and bringing back some of the discovered elements of gameplay rather than having everything explained in a dialog box or bright yellow safety paint would serve the industry well.
Ah, yes. The "Pac-Man reimagined as a modern AAA game" problem: https://youtu.be/tVY_oJlv_Eo
I don't think Runescape goes overboard with warnings. A lot of places have a "hey this place is dangerous, are you sure you want to go in?" dialog but they usually don't even explain exactly what the danger is, they don't stop you from going in unprepared if you click yes, and there were some changes to reduce how much stuff you lose if you die but dying in the game is still overall a huge PITA, especially in PVP where your killer gets to keep most of your stuff. The most impactful softening I can think of is that you can pay a large fine to the Grim Reaper to get your stuff back if you die to monsters and don't get back to claim your gravestone in time.
Somebody is working on this for Factorio at: https://www.youtube.com/@FactoryArenaAI
I have the exact same story. Mopar, RuneServer, then SoulSplit (look at what the founder of SoulSplit is doing now...)
I wonder how many people have the same background?
Back in those days I didn’t know about VPSes so I’d host the private server on our family computer. Going to bed I’d keep the computer on and pray that the server stayed on for at least 3 hours before crashing. Worst feeling was waking up and checking the logs to see the server crashed 10 mins after you went to bed :’)
Jagex almost certainly knows of lost city, but it's not really comparable to OSRS these days. People are likely to play 2004scape and then move to the live version of the game once the nostalgia wears off.
Jagex's lawyers have been absolutely decimating botting communities in the last 6 months, if they wanted Lost City gone, it would be gone already.
I wouldn't surprised to see them reach out for the valuable data he's collecting on the SDK's main server.
Only use of Delphi I have ever seen personally.
As a product the inside scoop is that the recent success of the game is in large part due to the community itself. The community development of Runelite, the OSRS wiki, the 117 HD plugin, and YouTube personalities.
I don't have high hopes that the status quo between Private Equity and the community will sustain itself.
The relationship isn't perfect. But the fact that there's a relationship and a two way dialogue at all? Unheard of.
Maybe RS's origins from the text MUD era led it to a weird path-dependent place. The other day I watched a whole video essay about how weird it is that everything has an "examine" option when no other graphical game has this, but every MUD has it.
Why would you think that?