JagexJack

JagexJack



06 Nov

Comment

Originally posted by _Manks

That scale seems to work just about perfectly with a line from the Betrayal of Falador book series, it was something along the lines of a trip on horseback from Falador to Taverly taking 2 days on horseback.

I overlayed a map of France with the map of Asgarnia and tried to roughly measure the distance from Falador to Taverly. It's just about the same distance from Blois to Alençon, 84 miles. 30-40 miles per day is manageable for horses.

I know the books are only as canon as they need to be until the game goes in a different direction, but it's still nice to see them match.

That does throw my map out of the window, it'd put Gielinor around the size of our Moon rather than the Earth. I'm assuming it needs to be that large unless the planet's Anima is keeping things similar on a smaller scale.

Yeah it's tricky. The two main factors for me are that at a European scale, the existing world is actually massive - we're talking hundreds of small towns and villages in each kingdom. It really radically changes the scale of the world and how you think about it.

On the other hand under the Heptarchy scale, the Zarosian empire (and the god wars in general) really seem like a bit of a provincial matter which gets a lot of press.

In either case we can always do a bit of a "reveal" (retcon) that there are other continents and the god wars were also taking place there, but that would be inconsistent with all existing ingame material on the subject.

Comment

Originally posted by _Manks

I've thought about that an unhealthy amount, and from my best guess roughly 4x the size of the current world map.

Basing that off the temperate regions of the map, with the North being very cold and our southernmost points being the hottest point, so that'd be the equator. Double it for Poll to Poll, then double that for both sides of the globe.

Also the map may be tilted slightly to account for Anachronia not being frozen.

I know scale theory will heavily influence it, but it seems to fit the best for a rough guide.

One of the most pervasive and fundamental, yet unanswered, lore questions we have is the rough scale of the main continent.

The early game is set up some what like the heptarchy (dark ages england, think Game of Thrones in scope) which suggests a size around the same order of magnitude as the UK. That would make a kingdom like Misthalin or Asgarnia something of the order of 20-50 thousand square kilometers, about the size of Wales or Vermont.

As the scope of the backstory expanded though and we understood the expansion and scope of the Zarosian empire, that starts to feel a bit small, and something more the size of Europe makes more sense. That would make the kingdoms something like ten times the size, each closer to France or Texas.


28 Oct

Comment

Originally posted by duke605

In the past, when given the same suggestion, they have said that they don't want agility to have any affect on combat. Tho that was QUITE SOME TIME ago... like maybe a decade ago. They insist on keeping it a useless skill

This was our policy for a while. I wouldn't consider it one anymore.


02 Sep

Comment

Originally posted by Fren-LoE

Mod Jack has actually elaborated on this very thing in a game design stream on twitch via the official runescape twitch channel. This stream would have occurred when he first assumed the role of Lead Designer for runescape 3.

TL;DR is that when increasing the spawn speed of bosses, there needs to be a tradeoff for the health of the economy. Chase items and common loot included.

The game's economy is blind to the difference of a massive damage buff to the player and the speed at which a boss respawns. These items would enter the game at a faster rate than they otherwise would have.

When presenting the idea of a rebalance to boss drop tables to accommodate a faster respawn time, as a theoretical solution, players were against this proposed solution.

He goes into depth on the subject in this post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/...

Read more

Yeah this is pretty much true. It's a complex topic, but broadly speaking if the game is in a place where the respawn timer is a major proportion of your kill time, that's already an issue. Lowering the respawn timer to "fix" that is doing much more harm than good. The stream is linked from the post you linked to.


15 Aug

Comment

Originally posted by Geoffk123

Making Useful High level ranged and magic armor that goes hand in hand with the 110 smithing update?

i guess they're implying Primal was a useful high level armor?

Yeah I didn't word that very well. The project is a way off at the moment, but the intention would be that we rethink how armour works a bit in order to make it useful, and then provide both budget and expensive (i.e. masterwork) armours for all three styles. That could involve, for example, upgrading TMW to 100.

I have to be careful what we promise in a video because now that we're trying to discuss updates that are further away, we haven't necessarily yet investigated what is feasible for the project to accomplish.


13 Aug

Comment

Originally posted by The_One_Returns

Why aren't you just making all skills 120? You can add more content over the years. Dungeoneering was 120 in 2010 and it didn't even have warped/occult floors on release.

It's just really weird and inconsistent that some are 120 and some are 110.

Comment

The theme for the new wood tier hasn't been finalised yet, but personally I'm not in favour of using the DG woods. The idea of alloying woods doesn't make as much sense (maybe for a super fancy composite bow but it's a bit of a stretch) and unlike Smithing, you don't have the same clean association between the material (wood) and the distinctive DG armours.

I never like to completely rule anything out but it's not intended to be a precedent that 110s are DG materials and items on the surface. Originally the 10 ores thing started as a joke, but we ended up kinda liking it, especially because of how it interacted with Primal.


30 Jul


23 Jul


08 Jul

Comment

Originally posted by Nolifedemon

this, literally like, why eat big bowl of dessert with small spoon?, because big spoon = food gone faster, food gone faster = sadness, so little spoon = twice as many scoops, = twice the happiness.

big spoon make big sugar

big sugar make brain happy

Comment

number go up

make brain happy


02 Jul

Comment

Doing the Lord's work.

(The Lord is Zaros.)


18 Jun

Comment

Originally posted by Hagdar

you don't need to investigate anything

200 steps to solve a slider puzzle

reduce that to half

It might be as simple as changing a variable, but it might not. This is what needs investigating.

Comment

We've had a discussion about this and there's general agreement that the huge number of steps is unnecessary. Hopefully a simple change but we'll need to investigate.

EDIT: Sorry rereading it that's vaguer than I intended. We will investigate.


01 Jun

Comment

This is great, thanks for doing this.


31 May

Comment

I don't think he's heard about second Mining & Smithing rework, Pip.


30 May

Comment

Originally posted by mistrin

Yes! I'm sorry I completely spaced on that cutscene (work has been stressful the last few days, doing a cabinet install for a client that's picky), I loved how the Necromancy intro felt more "alive" so to speak.

So that leads back into the second part of what i was (poorly) attempting to ask as a tertiary part; 2d animations? How difficult would that be? Say as an example as Death is on the rowboat making his way towards Um in the intro cutscene, animating Death to row/wade his oar through the river of souls that aren't just skips in the motions, full animation?

Complete side note; as a carpenter I do take humorous offense to some of how some tools are portrayed in game (like the table saw in Fort, I look at that thing and just think my character is likely to lose a finger to how wobbly that thing is)(The other one that kind of caught me off guard was that there was a log splitter at the Christmas decoration crafting table)

I'm not really an expert on the subject, but based on what I know I would say that if we're talking about something more ambitious than what we did in Necromancy, probably not. The added motion to give the static image a bit of energy is, as far as I know, fairly easy. Beyond that and we're in to actual 2D animation, which is a whole different kind of tech (think Flash) and much more demanding.

(Looking at how the animation movie industry seems to have just completely transitioned to 3D CGI, I would guess that 2D is even more expensive than 3D.)

Comment

Originally posted by mistrin

Honestly loving the amount of insight that you guys have been offering lately.

At the end of the day, it's hard to get people to understand how much goes into development and what kind of time tables are actually there.

Question for you to pick your brain; what about doing a 2.5d cutscenes and is it possible with the engine currently? When I say 2.5d scenes, like it's a 3d environment where you can layer different amounts of depth into it, but everything is done in 2d artwork where you're able to do panning techniques or 2d animations and not fully 3d modeled animations.

Like the Necromancy intro? This was tech that we were finally able to get in for Necromancy, but with the general feedback that 2D cutscenes suck we've ended up backing off from doing them at all.

Comment

Originally posted by LordDarthAnger

Evil Dave’s Big Day out I think?

Dave (you) turns into a woman and your mom has you do the chores. Later on Dave turns himself into his mom while his body is taken over by his mom. He has his mom locked in the basement.

It is the irony

This is the version I toned down. In the original implementation there was a lot more domestic abuse played for comedy.