Jagex_Stu

Interesting question! Responding somewhat cynically, the cut-off tends to be when we get a strong negative reaction from players that a change has gone too far (it no longer matches the silhouette of a character), and are forced to revert back or put in a toggle. ;)

Though I'd boldly suggest we're a lot more mindful of being conservative where it matters the most nowadays.

So far from your feedback it's sounding like fairies are one of those sharp edges where it's best to wait 'til there's a library of fairy assets available to at least retain the most memorable elements, given they're largely self-contained to Zanaris.

Fortunately there's plenty of overworld mobs like the city guards that in the short term can provide a far-reaching visual upgrade with minimal loss of distinct character.

Not that I'm aware of that are ready to ship and wouldn't require artistic finessing to get up to modern standards.

The Seers' Village rework really didn't get far enough to have salvageable assets I could drop into game now. Most of what you recall with fondness didn't get very far past concept art and placeholder scene blocking, IIRC.

Environmental reworks are best left to environment artists. They can do a miles better job with their eye for detail than a developer substituting models in configs and tweaking the map where necessary. True artists. :)

Fortunately there's plenty of models created for specific projects that could get greater value by being applied to more of the game, with minimal artistic intervention.

Yeah, giant rat's on the list! (At least the most common one that the new base model would suit. There's a surprising number of giant rat variants, so FutureScape retextures ahoy.)

Welcome to my brain. Edge cases. Edge cases everywhere.

Oh no, what have we done?

Mod Daze and I recently created tasks on our backlog for each of the known Yak Track models that hadn't been applied to the rest of the game, and according to our outsource manager are signed-off for us to use. That included the unicorn and bear models.

We don't have any artistic resource in our team, though, so as content developers we can only go as far as the assets that are already available.

(So eg can currently update white unicorn mobs, but there isn't currently an adult black unicorn skin or spirit stallion variant, and wacky fringe cases like the unicorn getting squished by a rock in Underground Pass probably aren't compatible. So those'd have to be considered in another pass when an artist is available.)

(And similarly right now we only have the base used for Bjorn the lightning bear, so I can update grizzly bears, but black bears or bear cubs or oddities like the rage bears in A Soul's Bane probably would have to go into the system as art requests...

In terms of a long term plan, yes. (But a plan, much like a traitor, is only a plan until it's executed.)

In terms of immediately available opportunities, we have precisely one fairy model available in the new format (the Yak Track fairy pet named, amusingly enough, Snowflake).

The newly modeled and animated base for that fairy means a big part of the work for a character & animator is done (modeling various fairy hairstyles, outfits, props, etc, is comparably lower than the formidable cost of a whole new species rig), but an artist would still need to model all the variant appearances for each of the unique fairies we want to retain before we could paritively update all the fairies.

So as a content developer, right now my only option available would be to make every fairy look like Snowflake (and disable calls to any old fairy animations that can't be substituted by one of Snowflake's new animations).

In some respects, that scorched-earth homogenous...

Applying the outfits provided by Yak to Basics to Varrock guards is also in the works. The Lumbridge guards and dark wizards were ready sooner, so we released them ASAP.

It's been a while, but I think you might need to finish a conversation with Sir Owen first.

If you check your quest journal, it should have an objective of what to do next, to work out your current state.

It's not a Magic level requirement to use the grimoire, don't worry - Owen just has some info that'll be pertinent before starting the ritual.

Honestly I love my team and weirdly enough the isolation of lockdown has only brought us closer together. Jagex takes a commendably supportive and compassionate approach.

If you fancy a career change, we're hiring for content developers, plus a variety of other roles!

...

From what I've made out from the Reaper code so far, technically that sounds possible. But my goal this week was to get back the functionality that'd been lost.

Beatsmaster Dirtbag and Yamaharu (musical raids when?) were intentionally excluded from Reaper (including the Reaper's Choice list), so I made sure that came back. Particularly as some players were less than impressed to be assigned raids bosses this week.

I suspect it would be one of those situations that needs its own toggle, as some players may be willing to fight group bosses, but not to get a 10 person team together to do a raid, and resent having to lose a reroll to it.

There'd probably need to be some reward tuning too, even if it's only 1 kill, given it's a longer-form objective.

To answer your second question, last week I did some tech debt reduction on how boss requirements are defined for Reaper assignments and to display their requirements in the Beasts tab, while doing some player-facing QoL to consolidate how the activity tracker and Slayer counter display Reaper/Slayer task information.

Requirements for bosses had been defined in about 4 different ways over time, as the needs of individual bosses developed - some requirements were data-driven on a config defining the boss' attributes, some as embedded cases in the Beasts requirements but with those requirements not being visible to Reaper assignments, some that were both, some in a different method that overrode the data and substituted alternate requirement text, etc.

I consolidated those boss requirements into a consistent data-driven approach to minimise the steps to define the requirements for a boss and centralise their requirement data, with the aim of simplifying the process of...

Sure!

So our development process is we create content in version controlled parallel streams (whether that's a whole project like the Nodon front, a biggie expansion like Menaphos, or isolated patches).

That in-development layer could be thought of as WIP (Work In Progress).

Because historically all developers worked in one dev "stream" called WIP (before we had parallel Perforce VC streams). Which was as crazy as it sounds and didn't scale particularly well as we hired more devs.

Quality Assurance testers attached to those projects test what content/tech developers create in those streams when they're functional. Historically known as "WIP testing".

That's also where we peer code review and implement feedback.

The dev adds release notes to the JIRA ticket that tracks that issue, attaches repro steps and any debugprocs or helpers they've created to assist in testing, and address any bugs or feedback raised by QA or stakeholders.

Yep, bronze dragons on a dragon cluster task is the same issue. Killing any dragon in the cluster should still count.

Hi! Just as a heads-up, this issue first occurred on Monday, and I submitted a fix for it this afternoon - once we got Reaper requirements refactor (that's fun to say if you roll your "R"s!) into RC.

I'm pretty sure the cookie tax for that ask is already off the charts, and this fix is currently in WIP QA, so I strongly suspect it won't make it into this Monday's patch notes.

With one working day to the end of the week, we're long past the RC cutoff. (News post has been written, localisation's underway, etc.)

But as noted, it's a visual bug in the Slayer counter/tracker - the cluster tasks are merely pulling the name of the first creature in the cluster instead of the cluster name. So in the meantime, it doesn't impact gameplay.

Thank you! A lovely weekend to you too. Happy Scaping! :)

Credit where it's due, our lovely upload manager Mod Easty put this together, off his own back.

We can only hotfix server script into the live game (and my logic error in the Reaper's Choice interface is client script).

So this was a very clever solution on Easty's part to generate a temporary interface server-side that emulates the core function of Reaper's Choice, to ride out the rest of the week and weekend. Hurray for general-use prompts!

Another reason to love Easty and the Release Candidate team - they accepted the Reaper/Beasts boss requirements refactor I've been developing since Tuesday into RC, despite it completing WIP testing Thursday noon, which is usually past the cutoff for RC requests.

Mad props to Mod Spyro for a very intense QA session to sign it off lunchtime, and to Mod Daze and Mod Asherz who dropped their work to code review it. What a team! <3

Also, just to note - Death rolling raids/ED bosses (other th...

Looks like Reaper skill requirements have always checked your base skill level. I didn't break that. :p

FWIW, one of my colleagues asked an engine developer about hitboxes this morning. Here's the verbatim response:

"920-2 had some changes to make picking better on things with large triangles (like the collision meshes for the vine bridge shortcuts in anachronia), but it had the side-effect of making picking on very small triangles less precise.

Should be fixed in 921-1"

921-1 engine release is currently scheduled for "late this month".

(As always, any statements referencing future, present and occasionally past events are highly subject to change, so please don't take this as an official confirmation.

In fact, if you could go ahead and pretend I didn't say anything, and also pretend that I didn't big-bada-boom Reaper for a week, that'd be grayyyyt.)

Rolling raids bosses is unfortunately a related issue. I'm fixing that at the same time so they'll be packaged together, but similarly I don't think we will be able to release it any sooner than a Monday game update.