Jagex_Stu

That sounds like a case where the Magic requirement could probably be removed from Family Crest, if it's not a hard requirement to progress.

Don't you need to cast each of the elemental Blast spells on Chronozon, and therefore need 59 Magic for Fire Blast? How are skillers getting around that?

• How much impact would these changes have on server/game performance?

Sufficiently negligible that a player wouldn't really notice. The quest system's doing more direct calls instead of bouncing through the old achievement system, so slightly more efficient, but the quest system is far from being one of our more processing-intensive scripts.

• Are future paths on hold until the path system gets an overhaul with the new system?

Devs can and do continue using the path system (eg the Archaeology tutorial path that was added). They aren't officially on hold (though personally before doing any future big path initiatives, I'd prefer to rewrite the path system, as the new data format is considerably more elegantly data-driven).

Edited! Thanks, buddy. It'll be our little secret... nobody else on the internet will know. >.>

As communication is a hot topic at the moment, I want to give you advance notice of a tech debt project I developed for a few days while working over Christmas, which if all goes to plan should release alongside the Valentines game update in mid February.

As you may have heard, we shifted over to a new engine-cached achievement format last year. The achievement interface displays nearly 3,000 achievements and some of their conditions are very programmatically complex, as RuneScape is a strange beast.

We'd basically reached the point where the volume of complex achievement data the achievement system needed to process was hitting the limits of our scripting language, so we needed to recreate all that data in a format the game engine interprets, to be able to continue adding achievements.

Over time we intend to gradually phase out dependencies on the old achievement system, so we can retire it. And consequently be able to improve its interface.

The old...

This guy gets it.

You have my upvote!

We have a fix for this in Monday's update.

In the meantime, if you open the chapel door to the left of you, you'll have the option to skip just this section (you'll only miss about a line of dialogue) and continue with Tutorial Island. :)

Thanks so much for doing this, Rubic! Must've taken a lot of time to transcribe.

One quick clarification (I appreciate transcribing my rapid speech is a challenge!) - Raven et al defined Charos' concept for his season reveal, and I also wasn't directly involved in the design of Zamorak. I merely mentioned other people's work as anecdotes. :)

We're certainly aware of the issue. It requires implementation of a feature that was descoped from the release. (Along with a lot of other improvements we wanted to make to the achievement interface.)

Both of us are assigned to work exclusively on mobile 'til its release, so I wouldn't expect a resolution until that changes.

Wow, that certainly is a left-field question!

Not that I know of. But there's a great deal I don't know of, so don't take that as confirmation that something isn't in the works. I assume you've submitted a bug report?

Mod Jenesis (the engine developer that created the achievement engine) kindly stepped in and did the engine work to ignore skill prereqs configured on achievements, so you can boost them, last year.

Release requires a full stack engine build (as it's engine changes to both server and client). Last I heard the next one's scheduled for early February (with several client releases leading up to it).

Yeah, you pronounce TzHaar the same way as the csar of Russia, but that's probably a coincidence. ;)

It also makes TzTok-Jad quite fun to say.

Mod Jenesis (the engine developer that created the achievement engine) kindly stepped in and did the engine work to change this (ignore all skill prereqs configured on achievements so you can boost them) last year, as Mod Asherz is occupied with mobile.

I think it was somewhere around late Nov to early Dec. Or possibly October. (Lockdown has not been kind to my perception of time.)

This requires a full stack engine build to release (as it changes both server and client). Last I heard the next one's scheduled for early February (with several client releases leading up to it).

You're Guthix-damned right it is!

Whenever I hear people pronounce the T.

I wish I could say that it "riggers" me every time.

But only the T in the "Tz" syllable is silent.

Sorry not sorry.

(Though in my defence I used the pronunciation guide inherited from previous curators.)

I'm honestly really proud of the voice acting in The Brink of Extinction. Mod Mark announced on a livestream a couple of weeks before its release date that The Brink of Extinction would be fully voiced.

Which was news to me, so the audio team and I had to really scramble to get voice recorded and attached without impacting the release date.

I'm really glad we stepped up to the challenge. I think the VO adds real emotional weight to the finale, and TokHaar-Hok sounds magnificently badass.

Fortunately we only needed 4 actors, and IIRC we recorded them remotely all on the same day.

I'm glad to see this reworked cutscene has held up.

I think I may have done this in TAPP? Presumably shortly after DoD when we had the new skeletal Zemouregal.

Originally Paul Gower made this scene as an overlay interface with model components.

An approach that was used sometimes in the early days for cinematics (layering animated models of fire on an interface was more viable than a 3D scene back then), but ultimately this inventive approach didn't adapt well to Runescape's platform upgrades over the years.

Eg environment lighting & dynamic shadows don't apply to interface models, so they look quite flat, and they were built for a specific resolution. Most were made for the fixed-screen window, as devs at the time had no idea how advanced the then software-rendered, procedurally-textured Java browser thin client would become.

(I remember replacing another interface cutscene - Arrav's reveal - later in the quest around the same time, as we h...

Technically that's correct (the best kind of correct).

You've completed the old version of Death Plateau, but you can still complete the reworked version of Death Plateau.

When Death Plateau, Druidic Ritual and Wolf Whistle were reworked for the Troll Warzone tutorial, they decided to make it so if you completed the old version of the quests, they still counted as complete so you wouldn't have to complete the new version.

Which is understandably confusing and breaks certain things (eg the adventurer's log webmodule doesn't support that branching logic), so I'd recommend taking the five minutes to complete the reworked quest.

But you should still be able to Trollheim Teleport to GWD if you've completed Eadgar's Ruse. (And have the skill req to pass the Boulder of Doom.)

Out of curiousity, what's your Slayer task? There might be somewhere easier to access than GWD that contains that monster.

<3

Yeah, that's why Bar Crawl isn't currently listed as a requirement. :) The requirements listed for a quest are what you have to complete in order to get past the quest accept screen.

While Bar Crawl is currently something you need to complete the quest, but you don't need it to start the quest.

But certainly could make Bar Crawl required to start Horror from the Deep if that's preferred.

Technically Larrissa tells the player about Gunjornn at a stage during Horror from the Deep, so you'd never get that dialogue if Bar Crawl was a hard requirement. But if you're okay with that, sure.

Please could you submit those two items as separate bug reports, if you haven't already?

In order to fix live issues, we need to have a bug report to track through QA and release.

I'll keep an eye out for those bug reports the next time I'm allowed a bugfixing day. (Which'll be in the new year.)

I'm glad I was able to help and I hope it provides some reassurance.

I also hope you have a merry festive season! Once the holidays are behind us and we're back to full capacity, I'm sure January will fly by. Thank you for your patience in the meantime. :)