Thread: Recreating the game that I loved (2011 Recreation Server)

Update 12/5/2018:

Sorry it has been a little while since I posted or made an update post.

One thing I have been working on lately was the Death system. This includes Gravestones, the death mechanics and the get ready to respawn interface.

Grave stones weren't a very hard concept to make, the hard part was recreating them accurately, since they have changed heavily in Rs3 and don't exist in oldschool. I had to use the wayback machine for the Runecape wiki and search through youtube videos to find even the least important information like game messages.

Gravestones work 100% accurately.

When you die and drop items, a Gravestone spawns right away in the spot you died in.

Each gravestone has a base time the starts ticking down the moment you die.

If you aren't carrying any items or don't have anything to drop because it is all protected, a grave stone will not spawn.

Reading a gravestone properly displays the name of the player who died with the inscription based on the grave type. It also tells you how long the grave has left before it vanishes. Reading your own gravestone sends the game message "Isn't there something a bit odd about reading your own gravestone?" If the grave's timer is <= 1 minute or the player who died picked up all of their items, it will say "The inscription is too unclear to read and not open the interface.

The gravestone will crumble with 1 minute left then break into pieces with 30 seconds left, then finally vanish. When the grave vanishes the items become public for 1 minute and then disappear.

If a player has 70 prayer, they can bless a gravestone provided it hasn't been blessed already. A player cannot bless their own gravestone. This will cause the grave timer to refresh to 1 hour, as well as the grave items.

When a gravestone has one minute or less left, it is possible for players to repair it, provided they aren't the person who died, they have level 2 or above prayer, and the grave hasn't been blessed. This refreshes the timer to 5 minutes, as well as the grave items.

A player can demolish their own grave. If the gravestone has not been blessed, the items become public for one minute upon demolition. If the grave was blessed, the items remain hidden to only the owner for the time left. Other players cannot demolish another player's grave.

Grave Stones do not appear in the Wilderness, Minigames/Instances or the Corp Beast lair.

Two things I was missing for the gravestones was the animation for when it vanishes and the hint icon showing up when the player is in the same plane, not just the same region.

The next thing I had to do was the death mechanic system/choosing the items you keep on death.

This interface gave me some trouble but luckily I found some information on it in the Cs2 script dump and a 742 source called rage-scape.

When you die it determines the amount of items you protect, items that are always kept (this is determined through a client script in the item's definitions), and items that are always lost on death.

Once it determines this, it calculates the items to protect based on the highest value(s) depending on how many you are able to protect.

I made sure it works correctly for stackable items, too. If you have 5 Dragon Arrows and they are most valuable, it will protect 3 dragon arrows and display it correctly.

In the interface, you are able to switch which items you want to protect. This interface always appears even if you don't have any items to protect or only have items <= the amount you can protect.

When protecting a stackable item it properly will protect one. If it is already protected it will display another etc.

You can also choose the respawn point in this interface.

Once you have selected the items to protect, they are added to the ground and the time remaining on your grave is displayed.





One issue I was having is that I cannot get the server to recognize dragging items off the protected items selection/ vice versa. It doesn't appear to be the switch interface packet and nothing prints saying the packet is missing:

[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

Update 12/21/2018:

Sorry I was a little busy but I wanted to update what I had been doing.

Firstly I created most of the Ranged weapons and their special attacks.

This includes: Seercull, Dark Bow, Morrigan's Javelins/Axes, Magic Shortbow/Longbow, Handcannon, God Bows, all Regular Bows, Crossbows, Bolt Effects, Knives, Darts, Javelins, Thrownaxes and some other misc weapons.

The Ammo retrieval system works properly. Without an Ava's device, there is a 20% chance that the Ammo/Weapon will be destroyed. Other wise it is added to the ground under the target.

While wearing Ava's Attractor, there is a 60% chance the ammunition will be recovered, 20% it will be destroyed, and 20% to be added to the ground.

While wearing Ava's Accumulator, there is a 72% chance the ammunition will be recovered, 20% it will be destroyed, and 8% to be added to the ground.

While wearing Ava's Alerter, there is an 80% chance the ammunition will be recovered, 20% it will be destroyed, and it will never be added to the ground.

All the correct projectile and drawback gfx's have been found. Zaryte was quite annoying because the GFX id's were about 1000 apart....

The weapons all have the correct speed, and will slow down based on your attack style.

The weapons all have the correct range, and will change based on being on accurate/rapid or longrange.

The combat movement for Ranged is working properly; if you are out of range you will attempt to run into attack range and stop when you have reached it.

Honestly the most challenging thing for Ranged weapons was the God Bows. Aside from the Zamorak bow, there is literally no information on them. I was luckily able to find a video with around 300 views from 2010 of something trying out their special attacks. I was able to recreate them the best I could.



The next thing I decided to start working on were the ancient curses. For now, I've only completed Turmoil, Soulsplit and the combat stat related leech prayers

All of the prayers have the correct information and correctly activate. I had to guess on the drain rate because the wiki from 2011 isn't in the correct format. There is so much more information on the regular prayers since Mod Ash released the drain rate and how it works.

There was little information on Leech Curses and no information on the Sap curses, so I had to use youtube videos from pre eoc as a reference. RS3 is too different to get any information unfortunately.

For the Sap curses, I made it so that upon the first proc on the target, it will drain the initial 10% of the enemy's level. After this, it will drain 1% of the enemy's original level from the current level on each proc, up until the enemy has been drained by 20%. I made them have a 1 in 30 chance to proc both on hit and while combating (even when you have attack delay).



For the Leech curses, they start by giving you the 5% boost on activation just like regular prayers. Upon the first proc on a target, they will drain the initial 10% of the enemy's level, and add 2% to the boost to your level. After this, it will drain 5% of the enemy's original level from the enemy's current level, while adding 1% to your boost. It will no longer drain the enemy when they have been drained the full 25%, and won't boost you when you have reached the full 10%. The boosts gained from draining the enemy last 1 minute before they are removed. You do not lose the extra boosts if you turn off the prayer/run out of prayer points (I noticed this in several youtube vid). I made them have a 1 in 30 chance to proc both on hit and while combating (even when you have attack delay).

I am not sure if the enemy's stats were restored every minute when the boost is lost, but I would imagine they aren't. It is honestly impossible to tell from youtube videos though.



If you know more than me about these curses feel free to correct me on them. Wish there was more information available...

I plan to make the run energy/spec leech and the special sap soon, as well as the deflect curses.

Sorry for not updating for a bit, was just a bit busy.

Updated the first post of the page to better reflect my current goals. I will learn how to add links to posts in the thread at some point.

Update 1/4/2019:

So once again I have gone back to rewrite GodWars because it is my favorite content and I want it to be perfect. I like to go back and rewrite things or improve them when I learn something new.

The first thing I needed to change was the Knight and the object that you attach ropes to, because before I didn't know what varbits were and I would make the player spawn a new object LMAO.

Now instead I have it send varbits to make the dead knight object appear and the ropes to appear/objects have a rope on them. As for the alive Knight NPC, after you have entered Godwars I just made it skip him in the NPC update.

The main thing I wanted to improve this time was the bosses' mechanics and the minion behavior.

I created a list for each Boss room, and made the player get added to the list when they enter the boss room.

The player is removed from the list if they teleport with the altar, die, log out, teleport with a spell etc.

This way I can easily loop through players instead of looping through the region or the world and send loot messages in addition to checking for possible targets the NPC can have.

As for the bosses themselves, I made the boss create a list when it is spawned. When a player attacks the boss, they are added to the list of players who have attacked the boss. They are removed from the list after a certain amount of time, based on the attack speed of their weapon + 1.

The minions use this list to pick their target. It is randomly selected from the list.

The minions will only try to get a new target after they attack so that they don't switch while or before they attack.

I attempted to recreate their behavior the best I could:

The Bandos Minions pick their own separate targets.

The Zamorak, Saradomin and Armadyl minions pick the same target.

Once the boss is dead, the minions no longer pick targets since the list is empty.

The Bandos minions all target the player who got the last hit on the boss, while the other factions simply stop switching targets.

Aviansie have a strange mechanic where they set their target to the player when they attempt to attack, meaning when the attack packet is first sent. Kree and his minions also follow this rule.

I also added a lastAttackedBy Entity variable. This is set to the player or npc that applied a hit to the npc. I needed to add this for the bosses, but it was also important for regular npcs too. I used a second variable to track when the NPC had last attacked the player, which is set to 10000 + the current time upon a successful attack.

If the NPC isn't able to hit its current target for 10 seconds, it will switch to the lastAttackedBy Entity.

For the God Wars minions, I also needed to make them properly respawn with the boss.

At first, I made it so that the boss is the one that respawns the minions when it respawns. But I ran into a bug where if you killed the minion at the same time the boss was respawning, it would respawn the minion twice.

I decided to make the minions respawn themselves instead. I neeed to do it this way anyway, because if you kill a minion while the boss is still alive, it will respawn in 30 seconds.

I ended up doing it like this:

If a minion dies while the boss is still alive, it creates a timer task to respawn in 30 seconds.

Upon triggering the task, it checks to see if the boss is alive. If it is not....

When the boss dies, it sets a variable to the time in ms.

If a minion dies or tries to respawn when the boss isn't alive it calculates when it should respawn by subtracting the time in ms by the time the boss died at, then subtracts that from 90000, which is 1 minute 30 seconds in ms.

If the boss is dying while the minion is dying, I made it so that if it makes it to the method to calculate its respawn time with the boss but the time to respawn at is less than 0, it will respawn in 1 minute in 30 seconds. I encountered this problem while testing.

I also added a game message for when the boss is within 10 seconds of respawning, since I don't know how to make a boss timer interface yet.

The GodWars boss I am going to show off today is Kree'arra.

Kree is a weird boss but I tried to make him as accurate as possible.

Kree's magic and range attacks hit everyone in the room, but when he launches an attack he will choose between magic and range for each target, if there are multiple.

If Kree's list of players attacking him is empty, he will then gain the ability to roll his melee attack. He will not instantly roll it all the time, so if you stop attacking him he can still range/mage you.

Once he rolls his melee attack if he is not on range of his primary target he will stop attacking and get on range of the target. If a player attempts to attack Kree by clicking him, he will stop and attack normally rolling between his Range and Magic attack.

However, once he gets on range he will roll his attack again and may not roll melee right away.

According to Mod Ash, Kree's Magic attack rolls off of your Effective Range Defence, and his Melee attack rolls off of your Effective Magic Defence.

Kree also has a chance to teleport his target on attack. I didn't know how often it occurs so I just said 1 in 4.

Kree teleports you within a 3 by 3 area of your location and will not teleport to a tile that isn't in the Boss room or underneath him.

I encountered a bug when I ran underneath Kree when he was against a wall where it got caught in an infinite loop and crashed the server. I fixed it by making sure it stops if it cannot teleport you anywhere.

Lastly, Kree and his minions have an accurate drop table. The unique drops are 100% accurate drop rate since they were released, but I had to guess on the rate of the other drops. I got it pretty close when I simulated 1000 kills and compared it to Mod Matt K's 1000 kill Kree'arra stream back in 2014



Thanks for reading, will show off the other bosses later on.

Update 1/21/2019:

Hi sorry it's been a while. After I finished up the GodWars tweaks I decided to make some quests.

As I said before I want to recreate all of the important quests. I decided I was going to recreate was the Plague series. I plan to recreate to the point where you unlock Dark Beasts at the start of Mourning's End Part II. Fuck creating that quest or anything beyond it.

So I started out with creating Plague City. This quest was very simple, just a lot of dialogue. As I have stated before I like recreating everything 100% so I try to add all the dialogue, even options not related directly to the quest.

Overall I didn't really learn anything new from this quest, but I at least was able to put some of what I had learned into practice. Such as NPC Updating, so that if the player has gotten to a certain stage in the quest, the client will not display the NPC for that player. An example would be Edmond will not appear in his garden and only in the sewer/ Elena won't appear in her house until you have freed her.

Unfortunately I haven't decided to try and make a cut scene system yet, so I skipped the cut scene in this quest. However, I do plan to go back and make all of the cut scenes that I have skipped.



Next up I recreated Biohazard. This quest doesn't have anything too advanced in it, but I am happy with how it turned out. I thought it was interesting how the birds that you release on the tower are graphics that you send as projectiles. It was quite annoying that Jagex didn't make the rope ladder that Omart throws over the wall so you can cross a Client Varbit. I guess it was I really early quest so they didn't have this, although the mud pile in plague city is one, so maybe that was updated later.

I didn't spawn any of the West Ardy NPCs besides the necessary ones for the quest. I probably will later on, but for now I don't see a reason to waste the time.

I encountered a bug while creating this quest, but it was actually on Oldschool itself. When you enter the East Varrock gate, there is an issue with the guard. He is supposed to confiscate your vials of Ethenea, Liquid Honey, and Broline. He does, but only the first one in your inventory. If you have multiple copies, you will be allowed to bring them in. This doesn't affect the quest too much though, since you need to talk to the chemist to get touch paper anyway and he will only talk to you if you have the plague sample in your inventory. I made sure not to replicate this bug.

I also attempted to combine the Hops, Chancy and Da Vinci dialogues into one unlike jagex. With the use of ternarys, I was able to do it neatly. Overall I am happy with how this quest turned out. I will need to make it so that the Plague vial disintegrates when teleporting when I make the Magic skill.



Then I decided I was going to do it. Make the biggest quest I've probably ever made. Underground Pass. I know many people hate this quest, but I find it very nostalgic and the game isn't the same without it.

This quest took me a week to make. It has so many object, npc and item interactions. But I feel it turned out well.

For the rocks that you jump over, I made one method to handle them all based on the direction the player moves to.

I used an enum to handle the creation of all fire arrows.

Shooting the bridge rope took some time to create, I had to figure out how to make the route finder take you to the position to shoot the arrows at the rope, in addition to the timings of despawning the objects.

I was surprised to find that they had changed the rope swing. I never did this quest in Pre-Eoc because I completed it back in 2004-2005. Not really a fan of the change, but it wasn't too hard to make.

Next comes the grid. This was tricky because I am terrible at math and have never done anything like this before. What I ended up doing was using an enum that had every 4 by 4 square in it, with the ones it was touching and its coordinates

Code:

TEN(10, 2471, 2472, 9673, 9674, new int[] { 11, 15 }),

This way I was able to randomly generate a set path and ensure it was going to be connected. Then I just checked the player's position with the coordinates from the enum, and if the player hadn't rolled that square on the grid then they would fall.

I made the portullis open and close. It was an object animation that was really fun to find.

Same with the log trap object and traps, I hate finding object animations.

The Unicorn room was annoying to make. Since this is a very very old quest (2003) they didn't have the ability to make it appear differently with a varbit I guess, so they made two separate rooms. This makes it annoying because you have to make the obstacle pipe take you to the new room after you've gotten to that stage.

I made a method to handle every single infamous object that you jump on the platform. I made the fail rate 10 in your agility level. if (getRandom(agilitylevel) <= 9). This might be too common though.

The witch's cat was another interesting one. In Oldschool it seemed to just despawn the NPC and respawn it after a few seconds when you pick it up. With my knowledge of how to do NPC updating, I made it so that if you have the cat in your inventory or return the cat to the witch, it will not appear on the platform. I also spawned a different cat in the witch's house and made it appear once you return it.

Iban was interesting to make. Every tick for 8 ticks he sends out 5 tendrils that randomly spawn in a tile in the room. I couldn't figure out exactly how jagex was determining it. But I made them pick a tile for the 5 tendrils for that game tick to spawn in proximity to. If you are in the same tile, you are knocked back to the entrance and hit for 60-100 damage (6-10).

However, once again with my knowledge of NPC updating it improved on the RS/OSRS version. When you kill Iban in the actual game, he will briefly disappear and you can still see his tendrils. When you return to the area after the quest/ during Regicide, you can see him before you enter and go to the other room after the quest. I made it so that he isn't rendered in the client and his tendrils are not shown by saying that if the source of the graphics and iban and the player has completed the quest, don't show them for that player.

Lastly there was 1 issue I encountered that I need to fix. The two obstacles in the rat pits area of the pass are ignored by the path finding and the player runs through them. This happens with other agility objects such as log balance, so I need to fix it. I was told it is probably an issue with the object definitions.

Overall, I am very proud of this quest. But after spending two weeks making these quests I am going to take a break from making them for a few weeks.

I know the pass video is long. If you're interested just speed it up to 2x or watch the last part of the quest.



Sorry for not posting for a bit but I thought I would just wait till I had these quests done.

Thanks for reading.

Originally Posted by Callum

This progress is incredible, best of luck with moving it further!

Would love to see a final version one day, favourite revision of all time.

Thanks man. And you will... I don't plan to stop till I am done. It will just take me a while.