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I woke up this morning with my fresh cup of coffee and hopped on antenna to see what was new. That's when I noticed moddedbear's post[1] and gave it a read. Surprisingly, they mentioned my previous post on RuneScape and private servers[2] and mentioned that they, too, loved the game. Which honestly surprised me. I wrote that post with the idea in mind that literally no one would care or read it. Comes to show you never know who's reading it, haha. Anyway, enough rambling, I decided I wanted to write a follow-up post going into a little more detail and providing links to already-established open source remake projects! Let's get to it, eh?
As I stated before, these are few and very far between in the RSPS community due to that community's.... nature, let's just call it. Nonetheless, there are some very good ones and some awesome people involved in all of them! What I will list below are the hosted open source projects, as in the ones that run a server themselves that you can hop on and play immediately.
This is a full and completed 100% GPL RuneScape Classic remake. In case you aren't aware, in the context of RuneScape, completed remakes are a VERY BIG deal. Even for something as old as classic (2001-2003) that's an absolute TON of content and work! All of the people involved with this project are super awesome people and I have had the pleasure of knowing them and talking with them for several years now. Their website is also quite the thing to behold!
As I mentioned in my previous post, this was my previous project. It is based off revision 530 of the game, released in January of 2009. I put probably thousands of hours of work into this beast! That's not to say it doesn't have a plethora of bugs. The codebase that I used as groundwork and built off of was released in ~2013 under the name of "Arios." It was not a good codebase, and unfortunately 2009Scape suffers from some of the bad design decisions of that codebase. Nonetheless, it's quite playable and there's easily a hundred hours or more of content to enjoy! I have since given this codebase to its contributors and loyal playerbase and retired from it in order to write my own, from-scratch, brand new codebase, which is still in the works. 2009Scape is still very much anti-donation, if you decide you want to contribute, contribute code not money! The people I left this project with are some awesome and respectable people, true gems of the RSPS community that came along in the 2-3 years I was developing this project largely solo. Stop by and let them know ceikry sent you!
This is a bit of a weird one, as it's a partial 2006 remake with a focus on allowing botting and restoring old botting clients. Was never my cup of tea, personally, but as any RuneScape player will know, it always had a very large botting scene! If that's your thing, or you just want to say hi, swing by!
These are also amazing projects, though most of them are incomplete at the moment, still in heavy development, or otherwise not ready to host. They are still very interesting projects to keep an eye on!
This is graham's masterwork. For anyone who doesn't know, Graham is one of the leading RSPS experts out there, he knows the protocol like the back of his hand and he is responsible for some of the largest advancements to our understanding of the RuneScape client and protocol. OpenRS2 is being meticulously made to be perfect - that is perfectly emulating every single feature of the client, protocol, cache, runescript, etc. You can make a full and accurate remake without most of these featurese, but he's going the extra 100 miles anyways!
He also maintains an archive of the client + cache(assets) of every single revision of the game that we've been able to scrape together! This is outrageously useful, and the first archive of its kind.
This is Greg's masterwork, another titan of the community. Void is a "high performance single player 634 server focusing on knowledge representation and AI architecture." If you want something cool to play around with, this is it!
This is where I will maintain a list of all the upcoming open source projects I'm aware of. Unfortunately, as of the time of this writing, there is only ONE open source project I'm aware of, and that's my own.
Praes (latin - surety, bondsman, at-hand, now) and echo, as in an echo of the past, is my current project. It is going to be a base (not a fully complete remake) for revision 578, which was released January of 2010. It is going to ship with full support for every single packet in the protocol and easy-to-use constructs for writing content. It supports both SQL and SQLite for databases, it has clean, simple, and easy to use base classes for adding content (called scripts in the codebase), it is extremely performant, and it aims to be able to access and use every part of the cache! This is going to be my masterwork, and has been in production for quite a while. When it releases, it will ship with fully complete documentation on everything about it, and will be licensed under the AGPL! I imagine it'll be quite some time yet before it's finished. That's not to say it isn't already "done" - you can implement all of the content with perfect accuracy as it already is - but there's some more features of the client I need to support and a few more packets to find. And also a lot more documentation to write. Keep an eye on my blog for when I release this puppy! I am working on this one in conjunction with one of my friends who I won't name out of respect for their privacy.
As I stated before, open source is a very rare thing in the RSPS community. Unfortunately, the largest brunt force behind RSPS is only interested in making small servers that turn a profit - not remakes and preservation. I've seen things such as lootboxes, item shops with real money, etc all over the most popular private servers out there. It's just the nature of the community. Everyone's in it for money excluding a very select few, and those few are all listed above. I wish this was not the case! If everyone pooled their resources and worked together, we could have perfectly remade several versions of the game by now! But it's just not the case, there's no interest in this, and remake projects get very low player counts relative to the big servers out there who implement practically none of the content - only bad custom work that generates money. I don't know why they are so successful, but I've never let that bother me too much. The good news is, there are good people in this community who are passionately driven to preserve the game they loved growing up, and every single one of them I've had the privilege to meet are amazing people! If you are interested in these projects, I really do encourage you to at least stop by and introduce yourself to the OpenRSC and 2009Scape communities! There's awesome people in both, and they'd love to see a new face. As for me, I will continue developing Praesecho - and probably posting about its development from time to time - until it is ready. That's all I have time for, for now. Ciao!
-charick
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