Mod Nin - Old School Engine, Sailing Mechanics, Game-Breaking Updates, UIM | Sae Bae Cast 231

Just a quick note before we jump into the episode: there's been some confusion over the exclusive episodes that I've been publishing. I am experimenting currently with how to go about bonus content, and I've gotten some great feedback from you guys. My plan is to just publish one exclusive episode per month on average, and I'll still be publishing the regular 50-plus completely free episodes a year. I also want to make it very clear that Jodcasts will never be paywalled, and I'm also trying my very best to just keep the bonus episodes for repeat guests.

I also want to just thank the now over 300 members that we have across YouTube, Patreon, and Spotify. Your support really does make it possible for this podcast to continue for years to come, so thank you guys so much. And now, here's my conversation with Mod Nin.

All right, welcome to the SE cast number 231 with Mod Nin. Mod Nin, how are you doing today?

Hey, I'm doing well, thanks. How are you?

Pretty good. I'm uh really looking forward to this because you are the first J-mod that I've had on that works directly with the old school engine, which uh, I mean, we always hear as the community, everything you know, like it takes engine work or oh, the engine can't handle that, or you know, that's for the engine team to deal with. So yeah, and you've probably heard it a lot. It it feels like you're more, I don't know, behind the scenes a little bit. I feel like anybody that's working on the engine really is just in the thick of it, really trying to figure out how to make this game smoother. And now, with sailing coming out very, very soon, I mean, I can't even imagine the workload that you've been under. I mean, just just sailing movement, I feel like, is so different to what we're used to, and obviously we're going to jump into a bunch of different sailing questions. I gathered some on Twitter, and I just I'm just fascinated by the whole thing. So I guess I want to start this off by just kind of asking about your history with Runescape and maybe even just how you landed at Jagex.

Sure, yeah. So I think I first played Runescape, I was shown it in like year four, so I was like 10. Um, so that was, yeah, back when it was kind of big back in the day. Uh, obviously being 10, I knew like absolutely nothing. Uh, I fished lobsters at Karamja. Uh, I had a friend take me all the way to Castle Wars, and I just spent like hours and hours at Castle Wars. Oh yeah. Um, but I was never like, you know, I never got to like any bosses. I I never like finished all the quests or anything like that. Um, but you know, I kind of played on and off uh as it evolved into what's now Runescape 3. Um, and then during university, uh, I was looking for for internships and found one at Jagex. They were doing one uh, got really, really lucky and ended up joining as an intern on the the Runescape 3 C++ client, which at that time was like pretty fresh. I think it had come out less than a year before I joined. Um, and that was a really interesting project to work on, and that was kind of my, obviously the first professional thing that I worked on. Um, really enjoyed it, and then as um as we kind of approach 2020, uh, Old School Runescape is also looking to rewrite its client in C++, uh, which is like kind of the same thing that Runescape did. Um, they needed a couple of engineers to to join that project, so I I hopped on over to Old School. Uh, I started like playing Old School properly in about 2019, so like I'm, you know, that that doesn't sound like it's too long ago um compared to quite a lot of other people that play. Uh, but man, I got really into it. Um, and yeah, now I work on the Old School Runescape team since about 2020. Uh, I main an Ultimate Iron Man. I don't have any other account; that's like my only account.

Wait, so you didn't even start with like a normal main in Old School? It was just straight to UIM? Is that what you're saying? In Old School?

No, yeah, yeah, straight into UIM. Something about it just kind of, cuz I played, well, I hadn't like played, played Runescape, but you know, I'd done it all back in like 2005, whatever. Um, but something about Ultimate Iron Man just like, "All right, what if you didn't have a bank?" Oh, that's, you know, there's some interesting questions that come out of that, uh, interesting ways you need to approach problems that just really kind of appealed to me.

Were you always sort of like a hardcore gamer? I feel like there's certain gamers that really will always play on the most difficult setting with games, or they'll do the hardcore version, or they'll do just whatever is the most difficult or the most obscene, they'll do that. Are you consider yourself a player like that, or are you just this just happened to be what you enjoy?

Absolutely not. I am like, if if a game is stressful, I I generally like don't enjoy it. But the thing about Runescape is it really like isn't stressful. Like Ultimate Iron Man, you have to play differently, but you're not doing anything like difficult. The the most stressful like part of it is like, oh, I need to do the the peer the sear bit in like Fman Trials, so I need to go and like dump all of my worldly possessions on a table upstairs in a house and hope nobody stumbles across it, go and do that bit of the quest, and then run back and pick my stuff up. Uh, but for like the longest time, I didn't use death piles, or death piles were like different back then, I think. Uh, didn't use a looting bag. Um, so was just kind of like getting by on these weird like, oh, I need to go to um Introna, well, better go and like stuff all my stuff upstairs in Portim somewhere.

Oh my gosh, make it quick. That is stressful to me. I've I've never, I started a UIM, I I chopped an inventory of logs, tried to bank them, and then I logged out and I was like, just not for me. Um, but who who knows, maybe one day I'll I'll give it a legitimate go. But yeah, it's it's good fun. It's good fun. It's a different way to play the game for sure.

Am I allowed to ask what uh what your RSN is, or is that kind of like?

Oh no, I just don't want, don't don't want that being leaked.

I don't mind. It's It's Nin, same as my mod name.

Oh, okay. It's Nin, so without the mod on front. Okay, I'm looking, so you can look at my stats and and

Oh, okay. Okay, so you actually play? This is a

Yeah, yeah, no, I'm not kidding. 2114 total. Uh, yeah, a decent chunk of PVM on it as well. I did the corrupted gauntlet grind up until like 550 KC or something.

Oh, that is. Yeah, okay. You've you've put in, you've put in some hours on this. I'm impressed. I'm actually impressed.

Yeah, so like, you know, even though I'm like, I only started properly playing in 2019, I have played, I love this game. That's so cool. See, that I feel like that is the best spot to be in, working for a game you genuinely enjoy and love to play.

Now, this is a question I bring up, uh, I've brought up on other J-modcasts where I feel like the more you maybe work on the game, or the more you actually understand the game from a developer's point of view or from an engine dev's point of view, it's just I feel like the magic can be diluted, or the magic just doesn't exist anymore because you're directly working on the game. Has that happened to you at all?

So maybe to like a small extent, but the the difference between where I am and where someone like say Mod Husco, Mod Del, is is I've like never written actual game content. I've never been like, "All right, here's a boss, here's a here's a mini-game, here's a quest," any of that. So if I'm playing a piece of content, I won't be intimately familiar with it from a developer standpoint. Um, I will be able to go and enjoy it with fresh eyes. You know, I might have had to fix a bug or two on it or kind of investigate things, but um, I haven't kind of had that, you know, I need to test this over and over and make sure that that that it's coming out right. Um, that's a little bit different with sailing, cuz I'm actually pretty heavily involved in the development of sailing at the moment. Um, so I'm curious to see if that's going to be any different, if I'm going to have that kind of a feeling towards leveling it up.

Yeah, that's going to be interesting. So how much uh have you been working on sailing over the past couple years? Is that like you've been your full-time sort of thing, or are you always just seeing what's going on across the game with uh updates?

Probably since since sailing started, so I I had a a handful of months like outside of Jagex in the middle of it all, but um from about somewhere in the middle of 2023, which is when the the kind of lock and pull was, um, I then had a bit of a break after that, but when I came back to Jagex, it was like all in on sailing. It was like, "All right, I've I've rejoined the team." And they kind of joked like, "Oh, what's a good ticket to give like a, you know, a good piece of work to give to a new starter?" And they gave me the most complicated job that they possibly could have, and then it's just been non-stop sailing since then really.

Oh, man, okay. So let me just ask one of these questions that um I had brought up uh in our DMs, which was taken from Twitter, and it's basically, what's something the engine has worked in your favor or the team was able to overcome/implement for the benefit of sailing, and what's a limitation that you've had to design around?

Uh, that's kind of interesting. So one, okay, the the thing with the Old School Runescape engine is it's it's very good at doing one particular thing, and that one particular thing is uh Old School Runescape. You know, you look at engines like Unreal or or Unity and these kind of general-purpose game engines, uh, they have all the kind of functionality and the APIs and the tooling to let you make basically any game you want. Um, the Old School Runescape engine is really rigid; it wants you to make Old School Runescape, and that is it. You have a character; it is on a tile; uh, it moves every tick 600 milliseconds. Um, so that's good and bad in some ways. It's good in a sense that it constrains you to make something that is more likely to fit with the game. You know, if if you made a new uh if you made a new mechanic and it didn't exist on like a 600 millisecond tick uh or it didn't exist kind of like on the grid, then it's less likely to kind of fit; it's less likely to feel like it's it's at home in the game, at least that's what I think.

Oh, 100%, yeah, that would be very jarring.

Yeah. So so these kind of constraints, they really help to kind of like, it's almost a cheat; it's like you you don't have to think really hard about how to make something fit Old School; it has to fit Old School, so so it better like, or else you can't do it. Um, from a from a limitation perspective, um, I'm I'm not really too sure. It's the these constraints kind of, I guess you could call them limits; it's just another word for limit, right? Uh, they kind of have forced us to do things in a way that uh we don't really end up with too many of these limitations that might, that sounds kind of strange now that I'm saying it out loud. Uh, but yeah, the obviously the kind of main one is like, all right, we need to keep the game running; we need to give everyone, you know, let's say we give everyone a boat; there's 2,000 people on a server, and you give everyone a boat. From a a technical side of things, we need to consider uh we have limited bandwidth on the network side, um so we can only transmit so much data about these boats. Um, we have limited memory on the the hardware side, like the actual the servers, so we need to make the boats like cheap enough memory-wise, that all just comes down to to optimization, and that's always kind of a fun engineering challenge to tackle. So I'm not really sure how to how to really draw a conclusion from that.

Well, one of the, so I I just have a bunch of things floating through my head now, um, different branches we can go off of, and one of the questions I actually asked Mod Lena, this is kind of regarding optimization, what you're talking about, and I asked her about like what's the what's the uh deal with bankspace, you know, it felt like for a long period of time we were kind of capped at like this 800 threshold because of engine limitations or optimization limitations, and then all of a sudden, oh, wait, actually we can give you guys a little bit more if you do this account security stuff, and now we have additional bank slots if you want to pay GP for it, and now we have up to like, you know, 1240 or whatever if you really want to go full out. And so I just asked the question, I'm like, when are we just going to get like 2,000 bank slots? And uh, her response was basically like that is really just a matter of optimization. As soon as you start giving players more data, it just it lags the server potentially, and she she's saying potentially, we don't actually know how much of an effect that would have, but theoretically, if all players now had a larger bank to render every single time, that might cause some server overload. So optimization-wise, like, do you know, you know, one one of the questions is just the bank question, sort of like, are we going to get larger banks? On on top of that, like to like on a broader point, how much does this kind of stuff affect performance in the game?

Yeah, I mean, it might be good to take a take a step back and kind of like define what the the engine is really like doing. Um, so you know, you're talking about uh the bank; the bank is not a concept that the engine has. Um, the to the bank to the engine is just like this big collection of items. Um, and the engine doesn't even know what an item is, really. An item to the engine is just like a small collection of data; it's like what what's the ID of this item and and how many are there. Um, so what the engine does is basically it takes these these game concepts uh that are written by the content developers, well, this is one of the engine's responsibilities; it takes these concepts that the content developers write in in Runescript, um, and has to translate them into something that like a computer can understand. Uh, the example just now, what is an what is an item? An item is an ID and a and a number, the the count of the item that you have. Uh, so I'm looking at my my screen right now; I have 374,000 feathers in my inventory. That's that's two numbers, and each of those numbers is going to be uh let's say four bytes each. Um, four four bytes each for 2,000 items comes out to a big number whose math I can't do right now. Um, 80,000 bytes or something.

So uh, is that right? Yeah, 80 kilobytes for one player's bank for 2,000 items in it. Um, this data needs to uh one exist at runtime, so it's using the RAM in the server, 80 kilobytes per player, 2,000 players, you know, that's a some number of megabytes, not a huge amount of of memory. This data also needs to be um saved on in your players' save game and stored somewhere. Um, and if you imagine how many players we have playing the game, like total accounts that exist, you know, you multiply that that number by how many accounts exist. Now we need like a ton of storage capacity, um, that kind of exists outside of of my realm; that's where the the engine hands off to more of the kind of backend systems. Um, and then also you have a runtime; this data needs to be transmitted from the server to your your game client, uh, so that's another like, okay, there's some network bandwidth there that's going to impact like your connection potentially. Ultimately, like these numbers and and limits, um, are kind of historical more than anything. Um, you know, this was, okay, you have dial-up internet; we need to transmit you your your inventory um or your bank from the server to the client; that's going to take up some of the network bandwidth that you have. Uh, but these days, obviously network bandwidth is hugely, hugely like more free than it was back in 2004. Um, but the the storage side, I think, is still quite a big concern. Um, the amount of data that we have to store in the back end, I I can't really say for for certain because I don't work quite in that area.

Would you say that the storage, um, so this would have nothing to do with the actual like game optimization; it's just simply a limit of storage capacity, but it wouldn't actually cause any like server instability? Is that kind of where I'm standing correctly?

Oh, we could dig into this rabbit hole for quite a while. Okay, I'm I mean, I mean, I'm here for it. So

Okay, so we have we have the items in your bank; they need to take up memory at runtime; they need to take up storage space when you're not online; they need to uh be transmitted over the network. For each of these uh bank spaces, for each bank space that you have, um, there's also going to be some some script behind it that's either like drawing it in your bank um or setting up something to some kind of communication between the server and network. So like, there there's the data problem, and then there's like a little bit of performance overhead for like what what do we actually do with this data? You know, when we process this data to show it to you, what does that mean? When you close your bank and we try and we have to like take out all of the empty slots in your bank, uh, the bigger your bank is, the more kind of processing power that's going to take, the longer that's going to take. Um, so there's like, you know, it it seems pretty innocuous, increasing this one number from 2,000 to 5,000, uh, but the knock-on effects of it, you have to consider so many little different things that it can affect. Um, so it's not like it's not as trivial a change as it sounds, uh, and it just really needs like a a mindful eye whenever making those changes. I'm sure there are some other limitations as well. One one of the things that the Runescape engine is really, really good at is imposing fairly arbitrary limitations on things. Like there's a I don't know, there's some like the maximum number of players is is 2,000; that's less of an arbitrary limitation that, well, it is kind of an arbitrary limitation; you can only have 2,000 players on a server. The reason for 2,000 is fairly arbitrary; it was really to do with performance at the time. Um, there's like uh terrain, different types of terrain, and for the longest time the entire game could only have like 100 different types of terrain, completely arbitrary, the number 100 in that case. Um, and these limits exist like all over the engine, but what they do is keep the game really stable because everything is everything historically was designed to adhere exactly to these limitations, and if you try and push the game past those limitations, it just won't let you; it will error you; you won't be able to build the game. Um, so you have to adhere to these limitations, and we don't go back and change them all too often, largely because uh we don't know where they all are, largely because we don't really need to ever. Um, but every now and again, we we do have to go back and change them.

Okay, so what what is happening exactly? This was something I used to deal with years back, so I don't know if you have an answer for this, or but I feel like the total level worlds in Runescape have like notoriously been really laggy, even at low player population. So I have two questions: one of them is, is there a reason why like in particular those total worlds just seem to be much more inconsistent than other worlds? Not not every single one; think some of the 1500 worlds are pretty good, but I think when the 2200s and even the 2K worlds came out uh initially, they were just, I mean, you would have these random lag spikes like every 15 minutes where it would just like kind of stall for a few ticks, and it seemed like no other world was having those issues. And then I also want to ask about just world population in general; why is it that as soon as you pass like that 1,000 players, I mean, everything starts seeming much more sluggish?

Yeah, okay. So on the total level worlds, there is a reason. Uh, I don't think I should share it, okay, but there there is a reason for it. Um, as far as like the you were talking about like worlds getting these kind of these lag spikes every 15 minutes or so, um, and I remember a few years ago, probably like 2021, 2022, that was like really common on every single world, um, and it was like becoming a massive problem. You'd be in the middle of, yeah, you know, hydro or whatever, and the the whole world would just like freeze for 5 seconds, and usually when that happens, that means like your internet's gone out, and your character will do that kind of like really quick run to catch up to where they actually are, but these weren't that. When the server resumed, you didn't do that quick run that you the game then just like progressed from when it paused, and that was like a like proper lag that wasn't just happening on those total level worlds; um, it was happening on every world. Um, so we did a really big concerted effort across like multiple facets of the the game technology to improve that. Uh, we did tons of runtime optimizations so that the servers were running faster. Um, we found places where a lot of this like boils down to like really boring Java stuff; it's like the if if you know about Java, then you know it's like it's a garbage-collected; it's it's a memory-managed language, which means it runs garbage collection, um, and the the issue that we were having was the garbage collection was taking a long time. Um, so we did a ton of optimizations on the the software side. Uh, we updated the hardware; we had like a complete hardware refresh. Um, and yeah, the optimizations that we did were like so successful, I think that uh it gave us like a ton of overhead, but that was my that was something that I was looking into for a good number of months was just like, okay, how do we make the servers run faster, find all those little pain points. Um, so yeah, when a when a world gets to a high population, uh, the thing that makes it sluggish really is just that it's processing more people. If you're on a a world with 300 people, uh, actually, let's break this down; you have a game tick, and that game tick is 600 milliseconds, right?

Yep.

So it would make sense that if the server can process everything it needs to within 600 milliseconds, then the game is running fine, but that's not the case, uh, because what happens is the way that the the the server runs is at the start of a game tick; it will process all of the the messages that it's received from all the clients or every player in the past game tick; it will then process them all, and then it it tells the client what's changed. We could rewind a little bit further and and actually just kind of explain the role of the the client and the server if if you think that would help.

Yeah, yeah, let's hear it.

All right, so the game client is the thing that you download on your machine; you're probably aware of that; you download the Runescape game client, Runlight, official client, mobile client, whatever. Uh, your client is really dumb; it doesn't know anything; all

It knows how to do is show you a title screen and show you a world; that's all it knows. It doesn't know where anything is, uh, who anyone is, uh, what any red click will do. You know, you click on a tree to chop the tree; your client doesn't know what that click is doing. All your client is doing is telling the server, "Hey, I just clicked, uh, I just clicked a thing on this tile, uh, just letting you know." And the server is the thing that actually goes and makes your character path to the tree, chop the tree down, yada yada. What the server then does: so you click on a tree, your message goes to the server from your client. The server, on the next tick, will process that message; they'll say, "Oh, this guy clicked on a tree; I'm going to start running you towards the tree." At the end of that tick, the server is then telling your client, "Uh, by the way, you've moved like two tiles to the west." And then your client receives that message and goes, "Oh, I've moved two tiles to the west." And then and then it starts animating your guy running two tiles to the west. Um, so your client's really dumb; the server knows everything.

Uh, so the reason that the game gets really sluggish is because the time between the server receiving your message and the server sending you a result back takes longer. Um, I don't want to go into too much detail cuz that starts to kind of reveal a little bit about the general like architecture of the server, um, but that's basically it. The more players that are online, the longer it's going to take between the server receiving your message and the server sending you back a fully updated state of the world. Okay, uh, so yeah, our our job, one of our jobs on the engine team, is to make that time as short as possible and and do whatever we can to speed up cuz you know, in that time we need to process all of the messages from all of the players; we need to process the movement and behavior of like 30,000 NPCs, um, and a bunch of other stuff as well, uh, and that just takes time. It there's just like a lot of code running between those two points.

So you know, you you mentioned the 30,000 NPCs that have to move. This was, um, I'm pretty sure this was already fully revealed how it works, but I still just find it so charming and interesting. You know how like they say, uh, does a tree that falls in the forest when nobody's around make a noise? It's kind of like if nobody's in the God Wars dungeon area, as soon as you enter there, like what were they, were they already fighting each other before you entered down there? Have they been fighting internally, or is it as soon as that first person lands, like, "Oh crap, everyone resume fight," like Toy Story? They, I think currently they, they are, there is some behavior in the engine that lets them kind of go dormant, um, but I think the God Wars ones actually do keep fighting each other even when no one's around. Same with the same with the the lizard men on the the Shayzien battlefield. Oh, they're just always fighting. Yeah, so you you know, we we can we can boot up a completely empty world, um, and look at, okay, what scripts are taking a really long time, uh, what like behavior is being run, and yeah, you better believe right at the top, Shayzien Battlefield, those guys just, it's just a red zone for like a heat map, just like, "This is taking so much energy." Almost it's not, it's not really a lot like that's on on a completely empty world, like the the amount of time that those those guys are taken up is pretty minuscule. It's probably something we should go back and and actually make them stop when no one's around, um, but the the actual benefit for doing so is pretty negligible in the grand scheme of things.

How about like animations going on, like a torch with a flame that's actually moving? Like, does does that eventually add up, like those kind of like flickering animations? Like, is is that as much, would you say, um, data as like an NPC moving around? Do you guys try to limit any bit of like atmospheric, um, ambience or noise kind of going on? Do you try to like limit those in certain areas? I, I mean, one place in particular that I don't think it really has anything to do with necessarily like flame animations or anything, but whenever I load up into Catherby, or Artis, like it always feels like it takes an extra tick for everything to kind of load, or not not even quite a full tick, but it's like it just takes a bit to like just land there, even after it's been loaded up several other times in that same. Yeah, so yeah, this is where this is where the line gets drawn between what the server is doing and what the client's doing. The, you know, you're talking about a torch that has a flickering animation, uh, the server is the server's running a simulation of the world, right? It's it knows where all the NPCs are; it's making them walk around; it's making your player walk around; it's running the script, the the server is is simulating this world, but the server doesn't care at all about what a torch looks like or what your player looks like. It it has no need to know any of that; it only needs to know like, okay, this torch has like this like configuration ID, and your player's helmet is like this item ID. It doesn't know that uh the torch is flickering; it doesn't know that that this item ID's model is like a a Zamorakian helm; it only knows like the bare minimum that it needs to. It then offloads all of that data to your client because that the animation of a torch doesn't have any impact on the the state of the world uh that the server is simulating. So that's where, you know, an animating torch has literally zero impact on the performance of the server; that will only have an impact on the performance of your client. So when you're loading into a place like like Catherby, that is a newer area with just like generally more polygons and and more like models, I think I'd have to check for for sure, but it's just an area of the game that has more data for your client to load so that your client can then draw it for you as opposed to the server taking any longer.

So along those lines, uh, when it comes to like loading up an area, this is a question I always had, and I've always been, I I actually was quite impressed that there was a change made that actually made POHs uh substantially faster. So it used to be if you had different floors in your POH, or if your POH was larger than like a a 6x6 total area, like land mass, it would just start taking extra ticks to load up, and then there was an update that just made it so every single house, regardless of its size, has a two-tick load. And one of the questions I always had was, is there any possibility for that to be cut even shorter, to one tick or even zero tick, or is that just a complete impossibility and to just stop even imagining the beauty of a of an update like that? Um, I'm fairly certain it could be one tick already, uh, I don't know for sure, um, I'd be sad to lose the loading screen, the the Home Sweet Home loading screen. Oh really? I see. Yeah, maybe I would, maybe I just don't understand, maybe I'm just seeing the positives without, you know, weighing and potential loss of that charm, but yeah, it it's always it always feels good to shave some ticks off of like whatever training method you're doing, so you know, I definitely understand the appeal. Um, that's actually an update that was done in part to help uh sailing, um, the ability for us, so your your player-owned house, obviously, you know, you build everything inside of it; that's not a static map; that's a that's a map that has a bunch of things like dynamically added to it, um, and in this case the server does need to know that, the server does need to know if you have, say, a uh treasure chest in your costume room, built or not built, because the server needs to know whether or not you can interact with it. Um, so when you're loading into a player-owned house, the server is doing quite a bit of work to uh understand what exists and then make it exist in its own like simulation of the world, and then it needs to tell the client, all right, you're not loading like a normal map; you're loading this dynamic map, and here's everything that's gone inside of it. Uh, so for really large player-owned houses, um, we just like didn't have a mechanism to tell your client every single thing that was in that player-owned house right away, um, we only had a me, the same mechanism as the normal world, which is we'll tell you we'll tell you all the things about like an area nearby, but if your house is too big then you're not near to some of it. Um, so this needed to change for boats, for some reason that I forget, um, and as a test, uh, was done to the player house as well, so to speed up the the loading, which is pretty neat. Yeah, it was it was a really nice update. It uh there was always this, uh, I can't even remember, I mean, people eventually solved, like, okay, if you want the fastest two-tick load, you have to make a house like this; you got to make sure it's centered, but so so you say it might already be possible to do a one-tick load; is it even possible to do a zero-tick load, just like any other teleport, or is that out of the question? Like, theoretically, I guess not, like you guys would do it, but theoretically, with with a lot of the stuff that we've done recently for to kind of work out to, you know, optimize sailing a bit.

Mhm. Uh, yeah, I feel like it could be; I don't want to promise anything, um, but from from an engine perspective, nothing's immediately jumping out as to why why that couldn't now work. Actually, I love that answer; like I I honestly like seeing things get snappier and speedier; I'm just such a huge fan of, I I probably am like the creator, at least I would even argue, player that cares the most about the feel for the game, even things such as, um, I think most people can actually agree with this, uh, whether or not they really think about it too much, but there's something really satisfying about like an animation delay, for example, like shooting a crossbow and your guy kind of stalls there for a little bit, but you've already started moving, and then he starts like kind of zipping forward. You know, there's something nice about that that feel. Yeah, it's kind of punchy, I feel like, um, is it is it spindle that, or whatever the word in a spider bus is called, I forget. Yeah, spindle actually uses that that that mechanic of like it animation stalls itself so that it can like kind of run faster towards you. That might have just been like a development thing, or is that because I feel like Seren almost has that, but maybe not, may I think I can't remember whether whether this actually ended up in the final product, but there was a there was a bit of time when like the the world boss rework was happening that like, okay, oh, I've animation animation stalled Venator so that when it finishes this animation, it scuttles really quickly towards you, like way quicker than you're expecting. Um, it was a cool effect, uh, it's Yeah, it's one of those like things that I wouldn't want a gameplay uh feature to like depend on, but like I totally get it. It It's It's part of the old school feel for sure, because um, I know Kalphite Queen has that kind of going on; it'll do a roar, and then it'll stall while it's roaring, but you could if you have its true tile marked, you'll see it start moving up to you while it's still roaring in place. So I think that was just on the on the play around house thing really quickly.

Mhm. From an engine perspective, there might not be a reason that there needs to be a loading screen; from like a a a game system perspective, like the actual bit of the game script that sets up your house, there could well be a reason, so please don't beg us to actually remove that load. Yeah, yeah, no, that's I'm I'm curious on it. I mean, I will say I think the vast majority of players will probably just not care. These these are the little tiny optimizations. This is after, you know, playing Old School RuneScape for 20,000 hours; I'm just that nerdy guy. No, if you can if you can shave like one tick off every mahogany homes run, that is going to add up to like maybe an hour on the way to 99, like that that means something insane. No, I mean, I remember, you know, these little tiny optimizations don't mean much, but I remember going into the math just behind doing Corp to completion, which is like 7,94 kills on average to fully green log Corp, and I remember everybody was just doing the POH hit the pool, go to the jewelry box, go back to Corp, and then when the Ardougne teleport kind of became a thing and you're just like crafting games necklaces, I started calculating, you know, how many times you're doing those three dragon warhammers into the 20 archetypes for just using the D, and and that was including making and enchanting all the games necklaces; the time thrown into all of that, it still ended up saving a 100 hours on the way to Green Lock Corp just by not going to your POH every single teleport. It's insane how those like just few trickle ticks here and there add up to just hundreds of hours potentially.

Okay, I I had a question actually about dead clicks, which seemed to be fully resolved, uh, seemingly there might still be maybe a few issues here and there, but I feel like it was around Vorago release when people really started getting irritated with dead clicks, where like you're clicking on something and it just wouldn't register, and I felt like that was a more prominent issue years back, um, has that been basically resolved? Do do you know the um how that exactly got resolved? The dead clicking, I don't know if you I mean, I guess technically you weren't really around at that point; this is like 2017, 18, or something when it was kind of getting fixed. Yeah, I'm not too sure I have an answer for you there; it's definitely a problem that's like reared its head a few times, especially when we were developing the C++ client, um, but yeah, I don't really know. I mean, it it got fixed really easily; it seemed like it seemed like they just addressed it, and then, okay, there we go. Yeah, I mean, a lot of the times, a lot of the times, so we uh, you know how the game updates weekly, um, the engine updates probably closer to every like month or two months, um, and the thing about changing the engine is it's kind of the foundations for everything, like the all of the game content is built upon the rules that are set by the game engine, and and a lot of assumptions about how the game engine works. So you know, every when we put out one of these engine updates every couple of months, we need to like really monitor it, because we could well have like made a fairly like innocuous-looking change that like some really like corner-case piece of tech, like like game, um, uh, strat, whatever, is like relying on that, and we see this all the time with Barbarian Assault of all things. The the Barbarian Assault speedrun community have found so many uh little funny like corner cases in the way that the engine works that we can like go in and fix something or like think that we're fixing something, and nope, we've just like ruined BA speedrunning, whoops, again for like the fifth time. Yep, and we've kind of over the years just got like more and more resistant to actually like trying to fix anything; like we now like don't fix things, which that sounds bad, but like if a if a piece of the engine has been one way for like years and years and years.

Mhm. And has always worked, has always been fine, then we really shouldn't be touching it, because there is like 20 years worth of stuff that depends on it working a very particular way, and in in that 20 years of stuff there could well be something that like actually is depending on that, and now you've broken it. Um, sometimes we need to make changes, and uh, it does have an impact, and we just kind of have to hope that it's not too uh impactful. Um, there was a change we did recently that broke BA speedrunning once again, um, that we haven't gone back on; that was related to like the the mechanic that they were kind of exploiting was like where your instance gets created; depending on where your instance gets created, if you have like a pending like yellow click, like walk here, then your character will walk one way instead of another way, um, which is like super, it's like so corner case, and we really like, you know, the the change we made, we really needed to make, and I'm sorry to the BA speedrunning community, but uh, you we try and fix everything else of yours that we break. No, I mean, is the other one you're right about, just the like the knock-on effect. Um, I don't know if you had something else to say before I jump in; was there something else? I give I just have a couple more examples, so let's hear it. Okay, red clicks, like like the the red X methods, we have like accidentally fixed those like two or three times, and we like don't mean to, um, to to the point where like now uh now we we understand them entirely; we understand like why it's happening entirely, and we also have automated like tests that run every single time we build the engine that like puts you in Serb, puts you under Serb red Xes, the poor colors, make sure that you don't move; we have a very specific thing that runs automatically now to make sure that we don't ever break red Xing again, uh, because you know, you can argue whether it should be whether it should be in the game or not, but it is in the game, and we're not we don't want to change it without having like that proper conversation, um, so that one we've accidentally fixed a few times, uh, and the other one was uh NPC stacking in, you know, in Slayer, doing like Dust Devils or something.

Yep, yep, yep. Uh, we accidentally fixed that one time; like they couldn't stack, they couldn't stack. Yeah, they were just like not, and yeah, so you know, when that one we've been getting a lot better over the years, um, of understanding all of the metas and all of the things that that uh knowing where, okay, if I make this change, it's actually going to break this meta, and it really is just a case of us being aware of all of them, um, and we've got a lot better at that over the years. That We're aware of like tons and tons of things, like at at the time that we accidentally fixed NPC stacking, I had not got to like any barrage tasks yet in Slayer; I like hadn't got there yet, and now that I have, I know I know that it's like you get it. Yeah, so the Yeah, we have to be careful with the engine updates, but like we can't anticipate like absolutely everything. So on this point, um, I can't remember, maybe a couple of years ago or something, there was some game-breaking bugs kind of that had kind of spawned in randomly some update, and one of those things was items were just being dropped; it it seemed like if you held Shift at some point that Shift would, it was like you if you held Shift and then you went to like your prayer tab using an F key and then went back after having released Shift, everything would still be shifted in a way; it was like some weird thing, and that got fixed, but one of the things that never actually got fixed, and it's not even necessarily a problem, but if you drag an item down, so like I'm chopping yew logs right now, if I drag one of the yew logs down a tile and then I right-click immediately where it was, it'll have like a nulled, it'll it'll it'll say, "Choose option: use, drop, examine, null." What? So what is that? I mean, it doesn't feel like there's any actual like negative to that because most people will just never notice, but is there a reason why that happens in the first place? Uh, I guess the explanation would be that like you, so when you uh when you drag an item from one slot in your inventory to another, uh, this is another part where like your client is dumb; your client doesn't know that you've just tried to drag or that you just tried to move that item from one slot to another; all it knows is that you've dragged that item over a different slot, and it then tells the server, "Hey, I just dragged this item over a different slot; what happens?" And then the server is going to process it and be like, "Oh, that that item has just moved to that slot." And then your client will receive that message that the server will say, "Here's the new state of your inventory." And the client will um update it accordingly; that's why there's kind of like a lag to it. Okay, um, same if you're like Shift-dropping like tons of items; they drop in like clumps of five, um, so that's the reason why there's like a lag, and the reason why you're seeing this null item, I would guess, is that the client tries to kind of predict what the server is going to say. So you've you've dragged your yew log to a new inventory slot; your client is going to assume that uh like something else swapped with it almost, right? Yeah, it's going to assume what the change is going to be, and then the server a tick later will kind of confirm that, um, but in the meantime, it looks like the way that we uh like handle the last place that that item was, we just haven't cleared it up properly, and so there's your client still thinks there's an item there, but it just like doesn't have any data associated with it, so that's why you're saying the the null. Okay, I'm sure it'd be an easy thing to clear clear up. Go ahead. Well, this is a sort of separate thing, um, when it comes to like you know your your game not really registering what's going on; I feel like a few years ago again, this is all around like that early like 2020 time, it feels like there was an update that landed where it used to be as soon as you exited your bank you could immediately do like a knife log and start fletching again; like let's just say you were doing like a bankstanding thing or like you know using your uh glass blowing thing on a piece of glass or whatever, it's like you would almost be able to instantly do that. Nowadays, you know, if you try to do things too quick, or it's not on like the proper tick timing right after you've closed the bank, nothing registers. So I'll close the bank, I'll I'll hit the knife, I'll hit the log, and then just nothing happens, and that used to not be a thing; now it is, and I just wonder, was that for like stability, just like, okay, there was maybe some issues arising, or this was just like an unforeseen consequence that's now just in the game forever? Yeah, so I guess without getting too much into it, there's the the engine is like generally agnostic to anything going on in the game; like the engine doesn't know that you've just closed your bank; it knows that you've closed an interface, but it doesn't know like what interface that was, and then you try and do like knife log, and it's like, okay, it's it's you've used this item on that item; I don't know what they are, but I'm going to run the associated scripts with them, um, so there's this kind of separation between what the server like knows, like has concepts about, and then what the game content has concepts about. So in a case like this, the the server has like a ton of, not a ton, just like rules about the order in which scripts run and timings of things that uh sometimes mean that

Scripts can and can't run. It's kind of complicated and kind of hard to explain, but basically, like the timings and the orderings of things that happen within a tick, cuz everything happens sequentially in a tick. If you're familiar with how programs run, everything happens kind of sequentially. Um, so the timing and the order of everything is really important.

Um, I guess it would be around 2021, we had to change some of that ordering, um, in response to various exploits that were happening around the time, uh, to stop those exploits. But we had to be really careful about doing it because the ordering and timing of this stuff is like really critical. It's kind of like what I was saying earlier, how like changing one thing could like change the behavior of something that we're not expecting it to. Um, this was like, okay, we're changing like a really fundamental rule about how the game works, the order in which things happen, uh, and we need to do it in a way that doesn't break like everything. Because they did the same thing back in like 2009, 2010, uh, they changed the order of things happening to prevent like basically the same exploits, uh, and they broke everything. Like you couldn't like, if you ate food, you stopped running; if you like, you couldn't like uh make potions like while walking. Like they kind of broke all the timings of everything in the game and then went and fixed them up manually. Whereas these days, players are so aware of all the timings that they're expecting; like it's the muscle memory is ingrained. It's like things happen exactly this way, and we need to make sure to be really careful to never change that. In this case, we had to change it to prevent these exploits from happening.

I see, uh, and maybe that had a knock-on effect with the bank, or it could be something completely different. Maybe, maybe the bank like now has an extra script that the server is just processing, and the engine doesn't really care; it's just doing another script, but maybe that's kind of getting in the way of the knife log. I don't know.

Yeah, yeah. Whatever it is, it just seems like now the bank needs to be closed for a full tick before you can really start interacting with things. It, it almost feels as if, at least what I was hearing from you, in my head, it was just almost imagining if you close the bank too quick and immediately knife, maybe the game still thinks, oh, you're in the bank interface cuz you just closed it, you know, within this tick, and it's just maybe that ordering has, maybe that ordering matters in that case. Um, maybe it doesn't; maybe it could be something else. This is the kind of thing that like you get, you'll tell me, and I will get like completely nerd sniped and go and find out why exactly that's happening. But it, it's like a three-hour investigation.

Yeah, yeah. It's one of those things where, again, like you nailed it, where players now have so much muscle memory and uh, so much just, I mean, our, our, just humans in general can recognize patterns so easily, and if something all of a sudden isn't right, it, you just intuitit, it, it's just like, okay, something's off, and then you do your investigation. Like I'll do my investigation; like I'll be like, what is going on here?

So there's two more things. One of the things that you had mentioned was, um, you know, the fact that you'll start running, and if you try to start fletching something or doing anything, your guy will just stall, and we, we've seen that, and it gets fixed pretty quickly. You know, the high-level skillers, all of a sudden you can't fletch while running. Sephiller, I think something was happening, and that got fixed pretty quickly. One of the nice things you guys have done is actually smoothed out Bones to Peaches. So Bones to Peaches used to have a stall effect, like it just, like you cast it, and if you were running, you're going to stop. Um, that has all been cleaned up, and it's really great. I've been doing Zilliana, and uh, Bones to Peaches feels really smooth. Um, Telegrab has become absolutely just a dream to use; that was just so nice. I, I, I can't imagine that was the simplest fix to do, but I'm really glad that that got changed. Did, were you working on that directly, or was that uh out of your area?

I'll be entirely honest; I'm not even sure any of that's engine-related. I think that might have just been like these, these things were implemented differently in the game content. Okay.

Um, yeah, the line between game content and game engine is often a little bit of a fuzzy one, especially with Runescape. Um, so yeah, I don't really know.

Okay, well, uh, a couple more things before we jump more into the sailing aspect, because obviously there's a lot of questions regarding sailing, but um, yeah, sure. First thing is, I, I just have to cross this by you; it doesn't sound like it's going to be your problem to deal with, because just again with the bones to peaches thing, like that's a separate thing, but I have seen this just happened in the past like 2 weeks or something like that now. When you're running and preloading like a high alchemy, so let's just say you're running rooftops or something, and normally what you would do, at least what I would do, is, you know, high al something, and then immediately if I know I'm running a far enough distance, you know, at least five more ticks away, I'll just preload an al, and it would register as long as I'm doing nothing else on my game, you know, it will preload it, but now you can't do that. Um, you have to do it within the next three ticks instead of the next five ticks. So if you try to cast it four or five ticks earlier, it just, it'll cancel it out.

Yeah, I'm familiar with this. What's happening? It's, well, I don't know for sure; I'm familiar with it in the sense of like it's annoying that I can't really al when I'm running, but um, as for what's really happening, man, I don't know. That's, you're just, you're just coming at me like, "Hey, here's a bug; can you go fix it? Can you go investigate and fix it?" I just wonder like, "Yeah, yeah, I could, but you know, I'd probably like be sat in front of a laptop for like 2 hours trying to work out like what exactly is going on." I think, you know, I've got a rough idea in my head. When you, when you work with this engine for, for long enough, someone will say something, and like something will click in your head, and you'll just be like, I know exactly why that's happening. Yeah, and I can't explain it to you right now because it like doesn't make any sense, but like I know.

Okay, well, I would love it if that somehow got addressed, because one of the scary things, and like you said, like every single update in this game might have a knock-on effect with something else that nobody even really notices, and then it's too late because like we've built other things on top of this foundation, so I just feel like I need to call it like as soon as it kind of happens just to see if it could be addressed before more things stack on top of it, and it's like, well, we're not going to reverse it now; we just kind of got to deal with it. So.

Mhm. Um, okay, last thing I want to touch on, which actually sort of ties into sailing a little bit, and then we're going to ask some of these sailing questions, um, loading chunks. So this is something where I understand has a big part to play in this; I was talking to Elena about this as well, um, where RuneLite is just, it's like pre-rendering things, so you can see like much farther away than you would on a vanilla client, um, and I'm wondering, in the future with sailing releasing and with the HD client kind of coming out, are you guys going to have more seamless loads with these chunks? Cuz it seems like in a lot of areas—I'm just going to throw out one area in particular—if I'm running from East Ardougne into West Ardougne, and I'm coming near that gate behind the castle, I mean, I swear I have to be like within 10 ticks to even be able to register that red click on that door, because it's like the chunk load; you have to get so close to that gate, even if I can clearly see the gate from far away, I just, I, I'm continually yellow clicking it until I'm just so close, and I'm wondering is that a system that can ever be really cleaned up where like if you see something, you can most likely click it. Obviously, not NPCs are going to be loaded, but just objects and banks and other things like that.

Yeah, this is, this is kind of like the bread and butter of like how the client works. Um, like we touched on the server quite a bit; the client is the thing that's like loading everything in and showing it to you. Uh, I think so RuneLite has the extended render distance; um, you can see things from ages away in RuneLite, uh, but I think they, they hard cap the distance from which you can red click things. I might be completely wrong on this, but they might hard cap the distance you can red X things or red click on things, um, simply to remain to, uh, what's the word, keep fairness with, yeah, the other clients. Um, but as far as like actually loading the map in a better way, having no, none of these like loading lines and things like that, uh, I don't think there's anything I can really like confirm at the moment, um, but it's ultimately just a, it's just down to like processing data. Um, you know, the reason the game pauses when you cross a loading line is because it is loading a bunch of data off disk and then building it into a map and then trans, you know, updating everything, so now it's in the new map. Um, it's totally not like a far-fetched idea to just like process that data differently, do it in a more modern way, you know, get some, get some worker threads involved so that you don't have to do it on the main thread and pause the game, uh, make it go faster, make it do it seamlessly. Like it's nowhere near outside the realm of possibility. RuneLite do it, you know, RuneLite have, uh, like I'm not sure how much they've overhauled the like map loading, but they've done a lot of work on it to make it as smooth as it is on RuneLite. Um, so yeah, that is my answer, I guess.

Okay, well, that, that would be a phenomenal change. It'll be one of those things that people won't even fully, I, I'll appreciate it personally, but I think people might not even notice it, but I, I just imagine how much work that would take to really go in and, yeah, clean it up. Did you, did you play Runescape around the time that their NXT client like came out? Uh, like Runescape 3?

No, no. So the Runescape 3 C++ client came out, and it did like the same thing basically where it increased the draw distance from like the default Java draw distance to, I'm sure the, it was actually higher than the obstacle one at that point, um, but they increased it to like you can now see like 100, maybe even 200 tiles away, um, and things looked like that was the point at which they had to be like, "All right guys, Karamja is too close to the mainland because you can just see Karamja off the coast of, of Al Kharid." Um, and it looked like really silly, and that's when they added, they have this system called impostor maps; I think there's a blog about it at some point where they just kind of cover up Karamja with C unless you're stood on it, in which case they cover everything else up with C.

Oh, that is hilarious. Yeah, which is kind of funny, but like it works, uh, and I'm not sure whether we'd need to do the same thing in Old School. One of the things that's interesting about that change is the NXT client had a different field of view to the Java client, and if you look at Old School, um, if you like zoom really far out in Old School, you know, you get this kind of fisheye effect.

Oh, yeah. If you zoom out super far, yep, yeah, yeah. You zoom out super far, and it's like everything starts stretch warping at the edge of the screen and and looks like weird. I think that really like works in its favor, like when you increase that map loading distance, uh, even though everything's really close together, that fisheye effect that you get when you zoom, cuz the, the zoom—spoiler alert—the zoom in Old School isn't a zoom; it just changes the FOV of the camera, which is like crazy, but that's how it works. [Music] Um, actually kind of makes the extended draw distance not feel too cramped, like the fact that you can see Al Kharid from Lumbridge Castle with the fisheye effect, it actually still kind of looks far away, even though in reality it's not. Um, so you know, if, if and when we do get around to increasing the draw distance and and having this kind of like really seamless map loading and massive draw distances, I'm hoping that it doesn't kind of necessitate that same thing that Runescape had to do.

Yeah, I, I mean, I feel like as well, I mean, we're playing Old School version of Runescape where there is some element of charm and just quirkiness. I mean, just the fact that we're all going to be on the sea very soon with people just running into each other, and we just turn into shadows and stuff like that's just going to look really silly, and I feel like if it was more of an RS3 approach, they'd be like, "Okay, this doesn't look too good for a more like modern kind of style game," you know, they really were trying to go down that modern route where they would definitely find different avenues to go about it, but we as an Old School community, we're just like, dude, just send it; who cares if we're seeing Karamja?

Yeah, part of Old School, part of keeping Old School Old School is really like embracing the, the weird hacky ways it's done, like everything. Yeah.

Um, actually, it's so random, and then we'll get to the sailing questions, just because we're loading up um maps and stuff, is it, I doubt you guys would even be interested in this, nor would the player base, but I'm just curious, is there potential to also load up players and NPCs much further, or was that just going to take way too much on the server? Do you think there'd be, obviously in PvP that would be crazy as well if you can just see people really, really far away in the wilderness, um, but just in theory, is that a possibility?

Yeah, for sure. Um, I'm not sure why we haven't done it yet; there's, there's some performance cost associated with it, um, and obviously the PvP thing that you mentioned, um, I'm absolutely not going to commit to doing that. Uh, I'm sure there are reasons, you know, more of those limits I was talking about earlier that kind of exist for certain reasons. Yeah. Um, but it's already, it already kind of exists if you go into somewhere like the fight caves. Uh, I think within the past like 2 years, we made it so that all the NPCs in the fight caves, you can see them from much further away than normal.

Yes, that was essential, so that, that's good to do. Yeah, so that mechanism already exists; we just don't use it in the main world. Okay.

Um, yeah, who knows; it might change at some point. Interesting. Yeah, that would be uh cool, cuz the other thing is just um with text above people's heads, it feels like you can actually see people from its, from its furthest distance, you know, however far a person can be away. I don't know how many tiles it is, maybe like 15 or something, maybe further, but um, it feels like there is a shorter distance where you can actually see people's text above their heads. I feel like you can still see a player but not actually be able to read them; it's like on the very outskirts.

Yeah, I think you're correct about that. Uh, I know if you stand at like Tempoross, you can't chat with people on the other side of the Tempoross pool, or maybe you just about can; I can't remember.

Yeah, that, that would be cool to clean up a little bit too. I think if you could, if you should, if you could see a person, I feel like you should be able to hear them as well.

Yeah, yeah. I, I agree. Okay, so let's uh go to these questions. These were offered on Twitter, and I just pasted them here, so sorry to not credit the uh original poster, but hopefully you guys will appreciate the questions being asked. So this was from someone; they say, "I was curious about collision; how much of an issue was getting stuck in places, and was it hard to implement properly, and also the challenges of switching water and land around for boats, uh, in parenthesis, water is traversible now and the land isn't. Um, I'm just wondering if maybe like, so taking a step back a little bit, um, yo, I just hit 91 fletching; can I get a—"

Oh, jeez. Thank you. Huge, huge gz.

Um, yeah, I kind, I almost want to take a step back on, on the, the boat stuff, cuz boats are a kind, they're, they're a new feature of the engine effectively, um, where, so if you take a look at your, your game screen right now, you're like woodcutting, yep, um, and you can see that you have some terrain below you, yep, you have scenery, the trees, houses, maybe something like that, you have your player, you'll have NPCs, and you probably have a stack of logs on the ground underneath, underneath you. You've got—

I'm banking them; I'm, I'm in, I'm in Ardougne right now. We got two utries outside of a bank; it's great, and I'm getting those crescent moon keys.

Oh, nice. Um, but that's like, so what I've just described is like everything you have in the world: you have terrain, you have players, NPCs, items, and scenery. Yeah, that's like everything that you have in the world. Um, a boat is something that we're calling a world entity where the boat itself has all of those things that we've just said in, in it, and then it itself is inside of the world, so it's kind of like a world nested within the world. A boat can have players, NPCs, items, scenery, and terrain, and that itself is all packaged up into one entity and says, and we say this is a boat. Um, so I guess on the topic of collision, this world that the boat is has a size and a shape. Um, the way that collision works on everything else at the moment is it's just like a, you, you, when we walk your player from one tile to another, we just check, can I enter this tile? Yes or no? Is there, is there a wall in the way? Is there something on that tile that I can't go into? Can I enter? Yes or no. Um, if we were to do the same thing for boats, we might need to rewind; we, we might need to zoom out like quite, quite a ways away with, with the boats. Do you want to just do like a boats 101?

Yeah, let's do it.

All right, all right. So I explained how a boat is just kind of like a world. Boats uh move in a way that players don't move, and NPCs don't move. The way the players and NPCs move is identical; the way the boats move is different. Um, and it's different because we tried a ton of stuff to, to until we settled on something that both one felt fun and intuitive and two felt old school. Um, so the way the boats move now is they're on a grid that's like a quarter of the size of the normal grid, and they can move at one of 16 directions. Um, and the reason that we did that was to kind of keep it feeling old school and predictable in a, in the same kind of way that movement currently isn't old school. If you click on a tile and you're very familiar with the movement system and the way that your player moves, you can predict exactly where your play is going to go, so you can path them properly, you know, like soap maze and things like that.

Mhm.

Um, boats, we found, because they're so big, don't like suit that style of movement, like the exact movement that players do. Uh, they, it feels wrong; the boats kind of like whip around too quickly when they, when they turn. You know, you imagine you replace your player with a boat; the way that your player moves, it just didn't feel good at all.

Yeah, just being able to instantly go backwards the same speed, even just back and forth, yeah, be weird. Uh, and, and like because boats are long as well, they're not, your player is like kind of symmetrical in terms of it, yeah, it's a square. Um, a boat is long, and seeing like a boat turn really quickly, its extremities move so fast when it's just like turning on the spot as a player would, and then when you reach your destination, it doesn't generally matter when you reach a destination as a player whether you're facing like north or northeast, like whether your last movement was diagonal or whether your last movement was Lewis Cardinal.

Mhm.

Uh, for a boat, that does matter because your boat is long. Um, it, it matters quite a bit like which way your boat ends up facing. So we did tons of experimenting with the way that boats move, uh, and how to get it best feeling like it could fit in Old School. We settled on this, it, grid that's a quarter of the size of the normal one and 16 directions, cuz that gives you uh the same or at least a similar level of predictability that the player movement system does. You know, we're not taking you completely off the grid, and we're not giving you infinite directions; we're, we're still constraining it to something that your player effectively can run in 16 directions if you include L movements as a direction each. So boats moving 16 directions is nothing new; boats moving on a quarter of a, on the a grid that's a quarter of the size, that is new, and that was so that we could give you some varying levels of speed rather than just like you can move one tile a tick or two tiles a tick or three tiles a tick, because that's not enough granularity to do something interesting.

Mhm.

So for boats, we gave them, you can move at half tile speed or a full tile speed or one and a half tile speed, and to do it that properly, we had to divide the grid into four. Um, so that's how we, we ended up with the boat movement that we have, and when it came to doing collision, uh, one thing that I really wanted to do was keep it simple. Um, I wanted to, well, I really was hoping that we could get away with giving the boat the same kind of square collision box that, that like a big NPC would have, um, but in practice it didn't feel good at all. Like if we put a square around your boat, it just doesn't feel right; it looks like you should be able to go through a gap, and you can't, or if you make it too small, your boat can like go up onto the land and and look weird. Um, so we had to do something a little bit more precise with the boat collision, um, and implemented something that's kind of a little bit closer to like a real collision system where your boat has a box, and we, we test that box against like whether it can enter or exit a tile, and that box can be rotated at different angles. Um, so yeah, the collision was definitely, I think we've got it in a really good spot. We did see in the public alpha recently that boats can get stuck; we plenty of people sent us screenshots of their boat in a place, and it says, I'm stuck. Um, and that has been literally this last week what I've been looking at, uh, solving. Um, so I guess to the, to the question, how much of an issue was it? Well, it is. Um, I'd say the collisions, like the collision's really robust, but obviously we don't want players getting stuck, um, and we're, yeah, we're working on a solution for it. I think I've like finally cracked it basically. M, so hopefully in the, you know, from, I guess to...

Speak as an engineer on the Runescape engine. I don't want to leave the collision of boats in a place where you can get stuck, or where a future developer comes along, makes a new piece of content, and that new piece of content has a place where you can get stuck, and they don't know about it. I want to make the engine just this kind of robust—fundamentally, you cannot get stuck, and you don't have to worry about it ever, because that just makes the game maintainable for the long term. It's not something you ever have to worry about again; that would be the move. So, it—I think I heard maybe a rumor or something that they were going to go into all the certain positions and fix the thing—but you're trying to make a more fundamental change that you feel like is getting close.

Yeah, cuz okay, yeah. If you make a new map, and now you need to find out all the places where you can get stuck, and you need to do that for every like different sized boat that you have, that's just—it's not a maintainable thing to do.

Mhm. It's something that is just now going to be like this weird issue that plagues the game forever. Um, so getting it right now is like critically important, and we can—and we're—we're basically there with it.

So, two questions. One is, you mentioned, you know, your player normally—your player when—wherever he is, it doesn't actually matter what position he's facing. In fact, you'll log into a world after just having logged out, and you'll notice people are facing different ways, but it doesn't really matter because they're just there. Now, is that the same case with a boat? Like, if you were to log out and log in, are you going to see other people's boats misaligned? Like, you know, it's not just a square, so is—is there a loading of where they're actually facing, or is it all of a sudden just going to be like, boom, snap, now they're facing a different way, but it was just pre-rendered if they were still on the boat that it was facing a different way?

So, for boats, because they're long—because they're not square and they can rotate and they're long—the direction they're facing is more important. Okay, so they will be facing the right way; they'll be facing the right way when—when you log in. If you log in on a boat, that boat will be facing the right way. As soon as you see a boat for the first time, it will be facing the right way.

Nice. Because it's—because it's important. The player facing direction arguably is important in some instances, but barely—hasn't been important enough for us to fix that when you see a player for the first time.

I guess, yeah. Okay. Um, and then the other thing I wanted to touch on was boat speed. You said there was like a 0.5 tick speed, a one tick speed, and a 1.5 tick speed. Is that going to continually increase? This is obviously something I'm going to talk with Mod Husky and Lenny about as well later this week, but just curious on boat speeds, and why is it the 1.5 tiles—or sorry, is it—Yeah, it is 1.5 tiles per tick—is—is that the maximum speed at the moment? Just default. That's not the—No, no, no. Oh, that's just a speed. Yeah, so from as far as the engine's concerned, you can set that speed to whatever you want. Okay, it could go up to like 10 tiles a tick, which would be kind of—kind of crazy.

You're just skipping over islands, running them over. Yeah, we—we wanted to give you at least that level of granularity in your movement speed so that we could offer like meaningful progression through the skill, like a—you know, as you level up, the most obvious thing to give you is a faster boat. Um, that's the most obvious, clear way that you can say, "I'm a better sailor; I can go faster."

Yeah, okay. Cool to hear. So that's the—that was the reason that we wanted to have those extra speeds, that extra granularity with the speeds. Uh, there's going to be a min and a max, I'm sure. You know, with the level 99 boat, will probably have a sensible max speed, but like when we were—we were play testing like a ton of different movement methods—I could go into this a little bit later, but we—we remade—we like remade the kind of core game engine, like really bare bones in Unity, so that we could test a bunch of different things without the constraints of the old school engine. Um, and as part of that, I added a slider to this Unity demo that like let you just whip the boat speed up to like crazy numbers, and we gave it to people, and like they put the slider up to like five tiles per tick, and we're like, "I'm having so much fun; I'm going so fast!"

Okay, so you know, it—it feels good; it feels fun to—to go fast.

Yes, so it's nice that we have it.

Okay, yeah. That—that's really exciting because that was my number one gripe with the sailing alpha was just it felt sluggish, and I know we're like level one sailing on this little log basically, but that is—that's amazing to hear that you have that freedom to pump up the speeds if need be.

Yeah, some of the decisions we made—made in the alpha were—were kind of interesting as far as that goes. Uh, the demo obviously was levels 1 to 30; the alpha that we—we had. Um, and right at the start, the raft that you get after you complete the tutorial quest, we initially had that at moving one tile per tick, like—like walk speed, uh, because it is a shitty little log raft that probably can't go very fast. And as the kind of, you know, it's the equivalent of hitting a goblin with like a bronze sword at one attack, like that is slow and boring.

Yeah. And—but—but like that's how it should start, probably, because—because you are a bad sailor; you don't know how to sail yet, and you have like a shitty raft. You are a bad warrior, and you have a shitty bronze sword. Um, but knowing that the alpha is going to be a first impression, and that we need people to like it, we shouldn't show that off; we should show off something that's like a little bit more fun, because we know that going slow is boring, and we know that going fast is fun. So we did bump the speed of the raft up; we didn't bump the speed of the boat up—the bigger boat that—that stayed the same—but you can imagine that as you get to the higher levels, your boat—you'll feel this real sense of progression as your boat gets faster and faster.

That's exciting to hear, and—you're—you're totally right. I mean, I even made that point in some of my videos is just saying like, if you were to literally throw an alpha into any skill, one to 30, it would be the most painful thing you've experienced in this game, arguably. We could have gone like even further with it; arguably, we could have—we could have made the alpha more representative of like level 50 to 60 than of 1 to 30, yeah, just to kind of really show off its best side.

Well, that's cool to know that it's only better from here on out, and uh—that's—that's really good to know. So the potential for floating islands was brought up during the earliest development phases of sailing. Is this possible now due to the engine work you've already done to create the boat dimension, or would further engine work be required to develop floating islands?

Hell yeah. Okay, so you know how earlier I was talking about how a boat is actually just a—a world inside of a world?

Yeah, that is so exciting as just like a general feature of the engine, to be able to put a boat—be able to put a world inside of a world. Doesn't have to be a boat; this could be an island out at sea that moves; it could be—um, like one of the boats from Port Sarim. That's kind of where this all started was like, "Can I make a boat from Port Sarim move?" Um, it could be like some massive dragon that's like flying over the landscape that you're on the back of and like actively attacking, like kind of—what's the game—Shadow of the Colossus style? Probably not; that's probably a little bit ambitious, but you know, using this kind of—having a world inside of a world, we could have like battles that take place on the—on the backs of like two trains that are like moving next to each other; crazy boss fights that take place in like minecarts across—Yeah, I don't know; I'm—I'm just thinking of—Lord of the Rings where Legolas jumps up on an Oliphaunt and starts like shooting it in the back, and it just—that would be—you're on horseback on your own little world on a horse or something. Again, I'm not trying to bring out horses into Old School, but—but then you jump onto an Oliphaunt and kill it there, like that would be epic.

That would be sick.

Yeah, yeah. There's—there's definitely stuff—effects. Airships would be a cool one; like dwarven airships. Could you imagine that? That might be—that might be escaping the Runescape fantasy a little bit. I mean, we could do the gnome gliders; we could be on gnome gliders and then jump onto a dragon from the gnome glider, just do something crazy like that.

Yeah, you're going crazy now. Need the flying skill. Yeah, the—the—the tech that we've made for sailing—for—for the way that the boats work—we've been really careful to make sure that—that it's really boat agnostic. So nothing to do with—like the engine doesn't know what a boat is; the engine knows what a world is, and it knows how to put a world inside of another world, and it knows how to—it knows how to make an interaction work between two different worlds. So if I'm on a boat and there's a goblin on the shore, and I click the goblin and I'm holding a range weapon, I should be able to shoot the goblin as—as like a player, as an adventurer, as like the—the, you know, in the fantasy world, I am an adventurer trying to shoot a goblin on land; I should be able to—the world simulation should let me do that. Uh, and we've been really careful to make sure that that can happen, that—that is something that is doable according to like the laws of physics that the engine provides. Um, so the possibilities are like kind of endless, even—even like as benign things as like, "Oh, you can have like moving platforms now; you can have an elevator."

Yep. You know, you could make agility courses a little bit more interesting.

Yes, please. But yeah, no, this—this I'm really hoping that we get to use it for quite a lot of things in the future to make just very cool things.

That's really exciting. Um, this was—something I actually wanted to bring up a little bit earlier, just along the lines of sort of dead clicks as well, but I don't know if you've been in—Mount Karu, going to your worms task or something, and it's like the—the edges of the path can't be even yellow-clicked, and it can be extremely frustrating because almost every—almost everywhere else in the game, there's other instances—uh, like the underneath the quarry, that little camel place that you go under—like a lot of the areas that aren't actually a clickable like walking path—like it just becomes unclickable, so it doesn't even try to yellow-click to the nearest tile that you clicked out of the actual area. I'm really struggling to explain this, but hopefully you know what I'm talking about. But—um—I'm—I'm actually not—I could run over to [ __ ] macar right now.

Yeah, if you go over there, go down the elevator, and just—just if you take the western path over to the worms, you'll notice in most places, even if you click off of the actual beaten path, it'll still yellow-click, and it'll just take you to the nearest tile. I mean, this was one of the cases with Zuk—when you're actually at the Zuk fight, it used to be the case that you would actually have to click on the actual tiles, and if you misclicked sort of in that healer margin where like the healers are about to spawn, it—it just like wouldn't register the click because it's not actually a clickable thing, but nowadays, even if you click outside of it, it'll still yellow-click to the nearest tile, so you're not just going to stand still. Um, so if you're—if you go down there and you just start noticing—you just kind of click a little bit off of the actual path, it just will not click anything; there's no yellow click; there's no red click; there's nothing.

All right, we're doing some live bug hunting, guys.

Yeah, it—it's—I don't even bug hunt; I think it's just—It depends on the area you're at. You can't yellow-click the—uh—you can't yellow-click like anything around the path. That's crazy, and Mount Karu is the worst offender with it, um, because it's an actual area you're in, hitting stuff and moving, and it can just be—just—it's just jarring; it just doesn't feel right; like something's off, and it's clear that's the thing that's off. And then—and there's some other instances—again, you weren't trying to kill me for not wearing Boots of Stone, right?

I was trying to—this is—this is all a ploy to get you to—yeah—die on the UI wipe. Don't worry.

Yeah, okay. Um, but yeah, there—there if that's—was something that's a simple fix or not.

Yeah, this is one of those things where like, you know, earlier I was saying—I—you see something, and I know exactly what's going on, and I explain why it's happening, but I know exactly why it's happening.

Okay, I know exactly why this is happening.

That's good to know. Is that something that you feel like needs to be addressed? Cuz I feel like it's just the standardization of the game in vast majority of cases, even if you're clicking outside of the world, you're still going to be pathing somewhere relative to where you clicked, and that feels good.

Yeah, Runescape is such a weird game, right? Cuz it's got all of these rules and assumptions that you make, like this one—like if I click somewhere that's not exactly the path, the game is going to take me as close as it can.

Mhm. Um, and yeah, every time that we break these rules, even if they're not—even if they're not explicitly written anywhere—anytime the game breaks that rule, it feels weird; it feels like, "Oh, it's doing something wrong." So, you know, I would advocate for this getting fixed for sure.

That would be nice. It's quite minor in the grand scheme of things; it really is. This is not something I think about. I just wonder—I mean, just the fact that you weren't quite sure of this even being a thing—I think it—it's seen it before. I always take the shortcut, and I—I feel like there's probably a lot of people that don't know about it. Um, but it's just one of those things where it's like, I feel like as soon as it's addressed and like an actual thing, then future updates won't have this issue because we'll just be like, "Oh, yeah, let's not go down that route again."

Yeah, I mean, a lot of the time with—with basically the entire like game development—we'll make a mistake once, and then we learn from it, and we don't do it again. Maybe we're not so good at going back and fixing them when we do make them the first time.

I think you guys are pretty good with it, honestly. This game is massive, so we're always going to pinpoint the little teeny things.

Yeah, I mean, the fact that you're pointing out this as opposed to like some actual—some other like crazy, really annoying thing is—

Yeah, yeah. And that's honestly the fact that like this is the thing that we're—we're nitpicking about—um—we—we in the—in the engine team really—like to kind of laugh about a lot of the old code because it's—all the variable names are short, and it's hard to read, and it's doing things in—in weird ways. Um, but it's like such a solid foundation; it's—everything generally works exactly how it says it's going to work, and if it's not going to work the way that you want it to, there's a limitation that won't let you do that, or if you want to make the engine do something that it's not made to, you can't, because these—these limits are set in place, and these constraints are set in place, and it's just made the game so robust over the part—like I know it kind of looks like we make bugs happen all the time—um, but really—the game stops us from writing bugs a lot of the time, and that—a lot of that is down to just the rules that the engine is—has put in place.

Mhm. And that's why, you know, I just wanted to highlight that since like the thing that you're—the thing that you have just questioned me about with this—the [ __ ] lava in the Karu Slayer cave is like so hilariously minor—uh, that it makes me happy that—that's like the thing that—that we're nitpicking.

Yeah, no, it makes me happy too, and I'm—I'm totally aware of these tiny little things, and that's—I—I—I really do try my best in videos and other things just to truly like give credit where it's due. This game is great; I mean, we're in such a good spot, and the nitpicks that you hear from me and other creators and players, they're the tiniest things in the grand scheme of things—like we're—we're still in the golden age.

It's kind of funny as well because you—you mentioned how like, "Oh, this is inconsistent; like if I click on the ground here, it's inconsistent"—the whole game is inconsistent; like you—you can take two things that you think should work exactly the same, and they don't. Why on earth, when I'm given an elite clue scroll—that like a—a puzzle clue that I have to give an answer to—why on earth do I interact with the clue to give that answer, whereas when I'm doing a hard clue scroll, I interact with the NPC to give that answer? There shouldn't be any difference because they should just be the same system, but for some reason they're not, because that's just like Runescape; it's just weird and inconsistent for no reason.

Yeah, I—I wonder if—there's a clue update on that note—if—things will get standardized. I hate that; I hate that; it's so annoying. It—the thing that—that's funny is there's some of the elite clue vibe that I actually enjoy, so like—elite clues—people generally think, "Oh, elite clues are things that need to be abolished"—like the—the way those mechanics work—but there's actually some elements of the elite clue that I really like, which is—Sherlock—when you complete a Sherlock step on an elite—when you click Sherlock after completing the step, you insta get the casket or the next clue step, whereas a master, you actually have to click space one time, and I actually like the more instant approach. Um, and then with masters—because some people want everything to be standardized—for like masters, for example—but it—masters have this kind of annoyance where like if you go to a certain NPC, sometimes you need to click space a couple times just to get the puzzle box, whereas hards is just immediate, and everything is just kind of like chaotic. Once you start really nitpicking, doing thousands of clues, you're like, okay, you start getting like what actually feels the best, and uh—it would be—it would be nice to have a standardized thing, though.

It's really funny from the perspective of a—a programmer—like when you're doing software engineering, you're always looking for like, "All right, I'm going to make this system that takes some inputs and gives you an output, and then—and is generally agnostic to like everything else." In the case of like a system that could handle these clues, I would give it the clue—that system then has some mechanism for letting me give an answer, and then it will give me the reward back. That system doesn't exist; it's been re—it's been written like three different times for some reason that—that no one can probably give you an answer for except like one developer was maybe feeling cocky about it; I don't know—like, "Oh, I can write a better system," and now you have two systems, and then a third developer comes along and says, "I can write a better system," and now you have three systems. It's like—it's just funny—why—like how the game has ended up this way—but there—there's something about it that like fits the personality of Old School.

Yeah, no, it's true. There—we got—we got something great here, and honestly, the little charming glitches and weird things are part of what make it interesting. Um, this is—actually something related to clues, so you know how in clue boxes—um—or like in the puzzle boxes, you start clicking the slide puzzle, and everything registers every tick, so you're just spamming things, and then every tick it's updating where it is. There was a—there was a puzzle that you guys actually implemented into a—a recent quest that disobeyed that tick system, and you—you would instantly see the movements, similar to like clicking items from your bank where it's like you—you—it's like an—it's like a—an—an instant thing—you're seeing—it's not registering every single click—or sorry, every single tick. I wonder is that a possibility to allow those slide puzzles to be instantaneously giving you that feedback, cuz that would be—that would be wonderful.

Yeah, so what you're describing is something called client prediction that I mentioned earlier with the dragging things around in your inventory.

Mhm. Uh, client prediction is like a standard now of online multiplayer games; every single game that you play has client prediction of some degree, um, where your client will kind of make an assumption as to what's—to happen and will then wait for the server to kind of either verify that, in which case you don't need to do anything, or the server will tell you that you got it wrong, in which case you need to rewind. Um, there's a really good talk from the guys who made Overwatch—like the engineers on Overwatch—um, about how their client prediction rollback system works. Uh, that's the kind of thing that should be like a feature of the engine so that lots of different systems can all build their own predictions. Um, but Old School doesn't have a system for that in the engine, so anytime that you see your client updating immediately, that is—100% bespoke—some kindhearted developer has gone in to that system and said, "Oh, when you click a prayer, I'm going to make the light come on immediately, even though it then waits for the next tick to know if it actually is on," and that's why when like you—uh—when you kind of click your prayers on and off fast, they will then kind of like flash.

Yeah, they do the little flickering afterward if it's not on like the exact timing of a tick, but it does light up instantaneously.

Yeah, it lights up instantaneously, but it might flash on and off depending on like what the server says because the—the prediction behind the—the prayers is pretty rudimentary.

Interesting. So yeah, the—you know, we could update all slide puzzles to be respond instantly to—to your clicks, um, but Runescape's just like not the kind of game that's built for it; Runescape is built to be as server authoritative as it can be—it prevents cheating if everything has to go through the server.

Yeah, so that's kind of the reason why it does it. Um, and that's just kind of the rules of the game.

Okay. Well, uh—it's pretty nice—um—to kind of get that sort of insight. That's interesting. So do you think, though—like it sounds like, you know, for the most part, this is all kind of preventative measures for cheating and other things, and it just keeps everything simple and clean—is there—I mean, is this like a hard thing to do? I mean, with something as menial as a—a slide puzzle, like do you think like that could be done quickly, or is that just something you guys will just be like, "Eh, whatever; it's fine?"

We don't need to deal with it, uh, client prediction and roll back is a pretty complicated kind of system to do. I see, um, not saying that as an excuse not to do it, uh, but there's probably a bigger fish to fry. Totally, as far as, as far as development old school goes, um, I think what one of the things that you just said was, was keeping things simple. Um, like everything going through the server keeps it simple. Um, the, the negative of that is that, uh, your slide puzzle looks laggy, uh, when you click through it, which isn't a great user experience, and the user experience probably should be a priority. But on the other hand, it keeps things simple, and that goes back to a point I was making earlier about maintainability. No one ever has to go and fix the, um, the slide puzzles; you never have to go and fix them because they're simple and they don't break. You might want to go and update them so that you know they do update more, uh, more quickly, more instantly when you when you click on them.

Mhm, uh, but like they're never going to break ever because they're dead simple, and that's something that, that's another reason I think why, uh, old school is such like a stable—is that the word I want to use? Yeah, I would agree with that. No, I mean, and, and we're playing in my terms, Patchcape; it's just you have so many devs that are just working, and it's just patching, overlaying, patching on this game, just patch after patch after patch, and it's just like you can't, I mean, you would have to do this insane cleanup job. I mean, something on the realm of what Mod Ash did with like the P, and just especially if you wanted it, if you wanted it to be like consistent across the whole game, it's like, "Oh, okay, we've updated, uh, we've updated slide puzzles to now respond instantaneously." Is this like a standard that we should now be holding ourselves to with like every single interface in the game? Yep, cuz once we're going to all be wanting it for everything else. Yeah, so now you've increased the amount of dev work to hit our standard of quality; things will happen a bit slower.

Um, I remember, uh, Mod Kieran at one point was like, "We are the wardens of the game at the moment; like it isn't our game, we're just like maintaining it and updating it and, and kind of trying to keep it alive, uh, and and thriving." Um, so from an engineering perspective, that means keeping it maintainable and patching any bits that aren't maintainable to be maintainable so that, uh, the two decades of work that have already gone into this game, uh, don't constantly need like fixing up and can generally be left untouched. Yeah, so that's kind of, that's, that's part of like my philosophy towards developing things and with, you know, with sailing, it's like very important that we get it right and we get it robust and we, you know, maybe even follow this kind of philosophy of setting hard limits on things so that you can't break the engine, so that the you can be more confident that that what you're trying to do with sailing and with these, these world inside worlds, uh, isn't something that like is difficult to work with or is going to break.

Yeah, so this is a question regarding sailing and regarding, uh, like the pathing of stuff. I am so curious because this game is being min-maxed on every level; um, just people want the efficient route, and what I'm imagining once sailing comes out—I mean, we didn't see it with the alpha—but I'm imagining people are going to turn on their true tile, so now we know exactly where the true tile is of the boat, and we're also going to start tile marking the sea, so there's going to be, we're just, we're going to just overly just simplify everything where we're just clicking on things. And of course, Barracuda Trials has some random elements to it, you know, gusts of wind and other random, uh, traps that you don't want to land in, but what I imagine is there will be guides coming out where it's like, "Okay, mark this tile on the sea, mark this tile on the sea, click here after this amount of ticks."

Um, yeah, I mean, we should always anticipate it because that is the way that players play at the moment—that you, you mark the best tiles to to click on depending on what activity you're doing. Um, I remember watching, I think it was Attie and his stream where he was doing Barracuda Trials and he was like wrapping up afterwards and he was like, "Right now this is like a reactive game that I'm playing, but, uh, there's no randomness to it." So it is entirely predictable. Well, there's randomness in like the lightning clouds, I think, but they're quite minor, so it is entirely predictable. You could, but like even those you could, um, have a tile marker for like a true tile for so you can really just be able to avoid it. Yeah, but you know, he, he was saying that like, okay, yeah, you could analyze that first Barracuda trial and make a best route that like goes the fastest as long as you turn on all of these specific like ticks and turn this much and change your speed here and blah blah blah, then you could have like a tick-perfect run of Barracuda Trials, and I think that's just like, that's just the game, that's just like what it, what it do, uh, and and I think that's what people want. I mean, I want that; I like things—I mean, who knows, one day maybe they'll update Rogue's Den. I'm saying they—I mean, you're just somebody at on the team. I think will update Rogues—Rogues Den's one of those actual, in my opinion, kind of a fun piece of content, but nobody really enjoys it because it's kind of like, I just got to do this for my Rogue's outfit, and the XP is crappy, and you know, maybe I, I only did it for a little bit, but as soon as you do it for a while, I mean, that just becomes instantaneous, and it's just like everything is solved; you know exactly where to stand if you have the plugin on, and there's something about that that is actually quite charming long term instead of this constant reactionary thing.

I mean, even Mod Arcane brought it up on, um, like the Runefest where he's talking with Josh Strife Hayes about Yama coming out and and knowing now what he didn't know about ToA, which was like, players want an experience that becomes brain-off to some extent. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, and the, the great thing I like about the Barracuda Trials as far as like brain-off goes—let's say you have all these tiles marked and you're just like going around it—and I like mess up one of the turns, there's like an instant reset button, and I can go again. It gives like a lot of—those you ever play Trackmania? No, I've heard of it though. Yeah, it's just like a game where you, you go forwards in a car along a track and try and get the best time, um, and it's the kind of thing that's like, oh, you like slightly missed that turn, you slightly messed up that turn, reset; oh, I didn't accelerate fast enough, reset. I'm not like a Trackmania buff, but like I get that same kind of feel from Barracuda Trials where it's like, I crash into a rock, reset; you can just like go over and over, and it's like, it's so much fun. Have you ever played Geometry Dash? No, I've seen it. Okay, well, that's, that was one of those really popular games on the phone where, I mean, you die, and it, I mean, it's not even like a two-second reset; I mean, it is instantaneous. When you die, you're already going again; like you're just zipping from the get-go, and I think there's, uh, if you guys land execute that well—I actually didn't get to Barracuda Trials, and I, I can't remember watching, you know, the several hours I did of other creators doing it—if it was like an instant, you're already moving as soon as you reset, cuz that, that is so satisfying—like you reset and your boat's already at a default speed like going, you don't have to like do the slow movement into it; it's just reset, reset, reset. I think that's great. Yeah, I think you're stationary when you start, so you do have to accelerate into it. I'm not going to lie, if you guys were to touch that and make it so you're already moving, there's something quite satisfying about that. Yeah, I did see your, I saw your video where you were like, "Oh, can you just make it so the boat accelerates really fast?" Like, I get to top speed immediately and like, Yeah, probably like, let's say, let's make it an upgrade maybe. Yeah, like not too high level, you get an upgrade that like your boat now accelerates like three times faster, and and you're just like going, and your sail does this like really massive like animation where it just catches like this huge gulp of wind and suddenly you're like rocketing down the ocean. That could be, you know, that could feel really good. It could, and the best part about this game is we have the skill called magic. I mean, just imagine you just chuck a wind surge. Yeah, anything like that, and you just blasted on it, and you're just instant moving. I mean, that makes perfect thematic sense, I mean, because a lot of, a lot of the criticism was, it was, it's just like, okay, that's, that's not what would happen in real life; you know, a boat, you can't just start moving really fast, but I don't know, every single game I've played game, it's no magic where, where you're playing a game like, even, you know, I, and because you heard that video, you probably heard the just example of like Mario Kart where it's like, you start and you, if you press it right on the timing, you get a speed boost when you start. Yeah, it's a great example. Yeah, the, the whole like casting a wind spell into your sails thing has, has come up like several times, and every time it does, we're like, yeah, yeah, that just makes sense, doesn't it? Yeah, sick; maybe that's what we can use it for; maybe it's like, oh, you get on a boat and you just like, you got to remember to bring wind blast to your Barracuda tri so that you can just hit the ground running. I don't know. Yeah, and even have just one of your, uh, crew mates, uh, just have a magic level decent enough to just get him to do it, you know. Yeah, maybe for caveat here, I'm not a, a designer at all.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't make any of these decisions, but you do play the game, which is so you actually—this is going to be, you know, not engine related at this point—but I, I do have a few questions just because you are a gamer; you got a UIM that's pimped out. Um, is there going to be—again, this is just kind of a broad thing; I, I, I doubt you even know the answer to this—but like, do you imagine UIM are going to have a lot of the nice benefits that most players are going to have for sailing or, uh, like are, do you think they're going to go about it in a way where like UIM are don't have like all these restraints with it? Um, I hope so. Um, I, there's a lot of different opinions in the, in the UIM community as to like what is and isn't right for the game mode. Um, I personally would be fine with—so you have the cargo hold in the ship, right, and that can store some items, but at the moment it stores a white list of items, so it can only store like the salvage or the port task crates or things like that; it can't just store arbitrary items at random. Um, I would be super down for like, let's say you get a really big cargo hold that can hold some number, dozens of items. Um, I would be super down if you could get like, I don't know, a cargo hold that can hold like 300 items, and fish are on the white list—like you can have like raw shark on the white list, and then you can go out fish up—let's say there's some fishing at the sea—go out fish up like 300 raw sharks, store them in your boat, and then they're there anytime you want to like get a little bit of food for a PVM trip or something like that. To me, sounds like a perfectly like UIM, what's the word—it's the kind of thing—like to me, to me perfectly like fits the, the UIM mentality of like, well, I don't have a bank, but, uh, I can store like 300 sharks on my boat, and that's where I can like keep a handful so that I can go and do like, I don't know, 20 PVM trips. People might have different opinions to that, but that's kind of where, where I lie on the, on that.

Yeah, it seems like, I mean, there are always going to be those like super, super purists with UIM, but it feels like vast majority of the UIM community love the quality of life updates that we've gotten with, uh—I mean, when you look at—I've got some—I don't know, I think I'm a little bit more on the purist side of, of, of UIM. Okay, what, what did you think about the decanting potions? I mean, that was one of the things where it felt like, at the time—this was years back; I don't even know if you were even—this might have even been before actually you started your UIM; it might have been; I might have also just like not had potions yet. Okay. Yeah, but that, that was a complete game changer for UIM. Yeah, I mean, to me, to me that kind of like unlocked PVM for UIM; like before that, uh, it was like just kind of difficult to—I, I don't know, cuz I wasn't playing at the time, but it felt like maybe it was just kind of difficult at that time to do any PVM period unless you were like, I have a, I have a stack of noted Renars and a stack of noted snake grass so that I can make prayer potions when I need them to go and do PVM. Um, maybe that's how they did it back then; I don't know, uh, but being able to just note the potions, it's definitely like a massive buff to the game mode; like rare potions are now one slot instead of two slots. Yeah, but it seems like a more of a quality of life—again, it depends on how you view the game mode—if you just wanted like that hardcore, just like, nah, but I feel like vast majority of people are like, this is good. Yeah, the, the one that I think was the most contentious—well, I don't know—was the, the player-owned house rework with the like magic wardrobe and things like that. Mhm. Where it used to be you could only store a full set of something in, in those wardrobes, so if you wanted to store ancestral, you had to go and get full ancestral first. Yep, uh, in order to store it. Now it's still the case that you need the full set to like retrieve it; you, there's, there's now this like arbitrary—not arbitrary—but there is an exception where, to, for UIM only, where you can only withdraw items from your wardrobe if you have the full set in your wardrobe currently, and you also can't store any duplicates in your wardrobe, and these are like rules that only exist for ultimates that, uh, I think it was voted on; I think, I think there was like a UIM only poll maybe, or maybe they just kind of got a, you know, community feel on it; I don't remember, um, about like how they should, how exactly they should implement it, and it, it was done to kind of like keep the spirit of the game mode. Mhm, um, like if this is just going to, if letting you withdraw items from your wardrobe, uh, one by one is going to just like ruin the game mode, then we shouldn't do that, so they, I think they did ask the community what do you want.

Um, yeah, it, it felt like in that particular case, it almost felt like a, a stepping stone; this is how I kind of see the game—maybe it's a more like cynical thing; I, I see it as—but it's like, okay, we can't go the full way; like I almost feel like Jagex in some element, in some way, they're seeing this as like, okay, we eventually want to just give them all the quality of life, but we have to do it like step by step, so it's like, we can't do everything at once, so let's just make it so they can dump every individual item, which I remember one, one UIM in particular, his name was Liquor Grain, filled out the entire vestment, uh, robes with the old system, meaning he had to get the entire six-piece set to store it, and he did it with all of them, which was just nuts, but, uh, and so I think it was just like, okay, let's not devalue his thing too much, so you can only withdraw it, uh, when you get the full set, and but I don't know, it's now I'm, I'm speaking like purely as a player here, not as like, not as Jagex employee, uh, it almost feels like UIM should never have been an official game mode in the same way that Chunkman isn't an official game mode; there's a Chunkman community, and they get to set all of the rules, and they get to decide among themselves what is healthiest for their game mode. Um, whereas with UIM, because Jagex is in charge of like applying those rules, um, it's less down, it's less up to that community like every little detail about the game mode. Yeah, that might be a, you know, it might be a spicy take to say that UIM shouldn't have been an official game mode. I love that it is; I, you know, I like having my little white helmet so that people can bully me. No, it is, it is a spicy take, but it, it relates to so many things in this game; like for me, I love official modes; like I love when it becomes official; as soon as it's not official, I'm just not going to take it as seriously. If Iron Man was never official, you know, there'd be some people doing Iron Man, but I, I just want those actual physical restraints where it's like, I, I cannot trade anybody; I can't pick up an item. Um, yeah, which feels good, and then beyond that, I mean, we have systems like you, you know, saying, you know, maybe UIM shouldn't have even been a game mode in the first place; it's kind of how I feel occasionally about the Max Cape—like maybe we should have just never had a Max Cape, at least with perks—because now it's what it's done is it's kind of forced people—in a way, not forced, but you know what I mean—just in overly incentivize people that would have had no, um, desire to skill now to skill because they're going to get the super powerful item, whereas, I mean, you saw in the beginning of old school—I mean, I wasn't playing until 2015—but people just got their combat up and started pking at the beginning of old school; you just had the, the really, um, you know, small minority of people that were skilling and trying to go for max when there was no max cape; there wasn't even perks to skill capes; it was just like, you got a 99, oh cool, you got your skill cape, and you know, getting any more than that just felt silly because there's no reward, but at the same time, there, it really felt more like a sandbox experience where there weren't all these structures placed. Now we have so much structuring with this game where I feel like overall most of it has more pros than cons, but there are a big list of cons that come with these systems. Yeah, there, yeah, there's just so many different ways to play the, the game, and you know, if you're talking about like, uh, you could maybe call like Piers—like you could maybe call that a game mode in that there is some restriction on your account, but that restriction kind of makes sense because you get a tangible benefit from it in the, the like wilderness level bracket that you, you fit into. Yeah, um, so, so like, you know, you're saying like, I'd love—I'm not going to touch a mode until it's official; there's like Piers isn't like an official game mode really, but like it is a mode that you could be incentivized to play beyond just like saying I have a Snowflake account. Mhm. Yeah, it's, it's really interesting; I, I'm, you know, I feel, I feel similarly; like I would love playing a junk account because I'm weird like that, but, uh, but because I have no way to like kind of hold myself to it and also like, uh, prove—Yeah—like you—that my account is a Chunkman account. Yeah, yeah. I'm, I'm just a, I'm a vanity player, dude. I actually, a lot of people are. I mean, can you imagine this game being totally single player where you really could just mod out the game? I mean, nobody would take their accomplishments seriously though; I mean, there would still be a reason to play it, but people would not take it to the extremes that we do because there's this element of the flex that keeps people like going for super long-term goals that would just be so silly to do on a normal single-player game that's offline. Yeah, 100%. So I mean, there, there's no way I would have progressed my main Iron Man account to the point it did if it wasn't for like just continually, you know, being seen by my like peers that are playing as like, oh, I'm a little bit more like elite of a player; you know, I've done this and this and this, you know, but it's, it's that official sort of feeling of it where it's like, there was no way to cheese this; I had to do this, you know; it just, there's something special about—and I feel like, I feel like this is kind of one of the reasons why Ultimate Iron Man stuck out to me is because it's like, there's like no reason for, for Jagex to support this game mode; the, the player base is like small. Mhm, and the like effort to maintain it is not zero; it's like, okay, now, now you have to make this consideration every time you're making a piece of content, uh, what, you know, does that impact Ultimate Iron Man? You already kind of have that with like, does this impact pers, and you know, with like sailing, every now and again will be like, oh, but chunk accounts, and and then we realize that like, oh, actually there's hardly any of them, and they are already holding themselves to their own rule set, and so they will find the best way to incorporate it, and that it we should like be considerate about it, but, uh, not like make necessarily make specific decisions for them. It, it is true; I mean, as much as—Yeah, yeah, something else. Well, I was just going to say, if they did come out with an official Chunkman mode, it's like, where would you even, where would you draw the arbitrary lines everywhere? I mean, as much as it sounds cool in theory to just be able to like choose, choose your starting zone, and then you know, you're actually blocked out from getting to the next chunk—like it's just, it's an invisible wall; you just actually can't go to—there's something cool about that because you're really held to this thing until you achieve all these collection logs or whatever you've set the parameters to, but it's like, who is deciding this? Yeah, it's these, these kind of conversations really just kind of highlight that like the, the community is the thing that is like the most important. Okay, well, let me, uh, let, let's wrap things up, and, uh, I want to ask you just one last thing, I guess. Um, what are your goals for your, uh, UIM right now? Right now, I'm doing fletching and pest control. Oh god, pest, pest control for prayer, fletching for fletching. Um, I don't know; I'm kind of, he's kind of idle at the moment; my, my ultimate, uh, I'm geared up to do raids; I've not yet got a raids unique; I've done about 35 chambers and a handful of ToA, um, but yeah, I don't really know; he's, I think just like increasing my total level at the moment; I'm pivoting away from PVM more into, more into just skilling, you know, the, the only way to like really store an assembler is in the max cape, so if I

Max, I can store like a va head, yeah. Maxing on a UIM seems like the most over—I mean, it's already overpowered for every other game mode, but for UIM, it's just—what is going on? This thing is used every time. The the construction cape is like the number one—I saw that. I thought you had 99 Con.

Yeah, it's the best gift you can give yourself as an ultimate iron man is to get the construction cape, cuz that's where all your stuff is. It's in your house. No, did—did you do the uh cranes method? I know a lot of you I am do that. That sounds horrible. No, no, I think the cranes method—I don't know if it was known at the time. No, I did mahogany homes, okay, before all of the quality of life improvements to it, obviously.

Yeah, of course. Yeah, they have made some great changes. That—that. Well, cool. So it's kind of like you're slowly inching to max, and then you'd probably want to jump back on the PVM arc. I'm not sure I'll ever max, but I do like seeing my total level go up, and I will get—get back to PVM. All right, I want some cool uniques. Yeah. Um, a couple more questions. Favorite skill? What was that—uh, favorite skill? I kind of have a soft spot for construction just because the cape's so good.

Mhm. That's a really bad excuse for why it's my favorite skill, but man, that cape's so good. Uh, yeah, right. I'll lock that in. That's my answer. I think that—I mean, that's a pretty good answer. You're really wrapping it all up like the reward on top of—I mean, Mahogany Homes is pretty chill. I don't know. How did you do like PRF into Mahogany Homes? I know like UIM sometimes do that, like they chop the teaks or something at a—

Yeah, yeah. No, that—that was exactly it, I think. Okay, you can get noted planks from a handful of places, um, but I don't think I had any. And then uh, what's uh the current plans after uh sailing drops with uh in regards to what you're doing at Jagex? I mean, do you think you're going to continually make more adjustments to the engine in—in sailing for the next years, or are you going to be able to like jump into other kind of aspects of the engine? There's—there's so much that I'd like to do that—that is not sailing.

Um, I absolutely love working on sailing, uh, so I'm really looking forward to—to continuing that until it—until it drops. Um, the other stuff that I want to do is like kind of more boring technical stuff, just kind of generally incre—like doing maintenance work on like XYZ to make it a bit nicer. A lot of the times programmers really want to just like spend ages reprogramming something so that it works better, but then that has like no user-facing effect at all. Uh, so yeah, nothing to share really that would be public facing. Just—I just want to keep uh maintaining things and making them better for us selfishly.

Yeah. No, that's perfect. I mean, it's so cool to hear you also play the game, so this isn't just, "Oh, I got to make a random update for this game that I don't even play." Uh, let's—

Yeah, no, that's—that's one of the things that's like, honestly, I—Yeah, I—I care about this game a lot, and so maintaining it and—and—and getting to add really cool things to it and—and kind of understanding really how it works top to bottom uh is like—I'm happy. I—I like this. Well, cool. Well, as Mod Kieran told you guys, I mean, you are the wardens of this game, and I consider you a warden of the engine at the moment, so you know, you're carrying the torch onto the next generation of the uh engine. There is a whole team; it's not just me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But uh, you—you are definitely playing a a pivotal part, so thank you for all that you're doing with the game. Super uh honored to get to speak with you today. This was great, and uh I'm wishing you the best of luck, and hopefully, you know, as much criticism as I've given sailing, I am still very optimistic about the release of it and uh seeing how that lands and just the future of Old School just seems like it's in—it's in really good hands. So uh thank you for your time today.

Awesome. Yeah, thanks for having me. Okay. Well, uh, for those still listening, I'm going to have um Modn's uh links down below. I think maybe it's just Twitter; I'll ask you after the call, and I'll have it all thrown down in the description, um, but uh next Wednesday we are going to be having Mod Lenny and Mod Husky on, talking about sailing. Should be an absolute goated cast. I'm very excited for that one. And then the following week we're going to have Mod Knox on, and so uh look forward to those, and that's it for me. So uh thank you again, Mod Nin, and we will catch you guys in the next one. Peace.