RuneScape Forum Archive | Game Engine & CM Answers!

Mod Jane

Jagex Moderator Forum Profile Posts by user

@Mod Jane

This isn't much a question, but more a statement...

My rubber chicken over-rules yours.

Now you know that is not true!

Mod Jane - Community & Events Director
Follow me on Twitter - @JagexJane

13-Apr-2012 18:00:55

Mod Chris E

Jagex Moderator Forum Profile Posts by user

Does the Runescape currently take full advantage of computers with multi core processors? And if not, are there any restrictions preventing you doing so?
And do you have any plans to use OpenCL (or similar software such as CUDA) in the future?

- No, yes, and see previous answer about the RT5 architecture. Not enough people have decent OpenCL support to make it worthwhile yet, sorry!

13-Apr-2012 18:01:38

Mod Chris E

Jagex Moderator Forum Profile Posts by user

As a retired programmer with decades of realtime experience, it seems to me that the high rates of lag and CPU usage are almost certainly due to a defect in the user end of the game engine code. It appears to be a bad model of polling for transaction events.

I have noted 98% of my CPU cycles being used by either of the Jagex client or Firefox in the game, when the game is relatively idle. Yesterday, the Jagex client was consuming 42% of the CPU cycles from the lobby, while not in a world! What are you doing to analyze and reduce this lag?

-

See previous answers about obfuscation and the cluster flutterer, and Optimus. We don't program to be slow - but it's an unfortunate side effect of having to protect our software from cheaters.

13-Apr-2012 18:02:38

Mod Chris E

Jagex Moderator Forum Profile Posts by user

My questions for the team:

1: What are your plans for the next RuneTek Engine? It's been three years since RuneTek 5 was released (AKA: SD/HD Combo update) and two years ago you released a early preview of it in one of your trailers, so we must be due for it soon.

- RT 6 is the TU engine. RT 7 (for RS) is being designed at the moment.

2: What are the estimated performance boosts expected for Optimus? How many frames will we be able to claw back?

- I don't have exact figures, but hopefully back to around where we were pre-nuke.

13-Apr-2012 18:04:13

Mod Michael

Jagex Moderator Forum Profile Posts by user

Hi Rook:

"The Great Orb Project activity utilizes a player's knowledge of angles around the altar to score orbs as fast they can. Unfortunately the last game engine update affected the consistency of angles around the altar (Runetek5?). The angles which were consistent all around the altar now do not behave this way. The lack of consistency around the altars means it takes new players longer to "learn" the game or they might even give up because the game doesn't make sense to them.

Can this be fixed or is this simply the cost of using a new game engine?"

We actually look at fixes regarding angles in the game to make them more consistent - so if something in-game has become less predictable/consistent, we'd certainly be interested to know. Best thing to do is submit a bug report so our QA guys can have a play with it, and then we can work with them to see what could be going wrong.

13-Apr-2012 18:04:26

Mod Chris E

Jagex Moderator Forum Profile Posts by user

@ any mod that can answer any of these questions to the best of their abilities.

1. When will the pet baby dragons be updated to look like their monster counterparts I mean cmon when the thzaar update came out and that jad was updated after a week that pet jad was changed.

- You'll need to ask the content team, sorry.

2. Has the bloom and AA working together still being looked at

- It's know about, but not a priority to fix at the moment.

3. Are the FPS issues still being worked on some people are still lagging every now and then even after the first Bot nuke and was made even worse with the burthrope update.

- Yep, we're still working on it!

4.Temple trekking when the armour was graphically changed on players and level up fireworks why were they not changed for the people we have to help travel through the swamps.

- Again, please direct towards the content team.

13-Apr-2012 18:05:24

Mod Philip

Jagex Moderator Forum Profile Posts by user

Sithaph:

"What was it about the Botnuke in October that caused the FPS lag? Have you identified the cause of it yet, and how do you intend to fix it? How soon can we expect a fix?

These questions were bound to be asked, so I figured I'd be first to do so!"

===

We introduced some obfuscation that made it much harder for the bot makers to analyse our code. This had the unfortunate side-effect of making everything that happens in the game very slightly slower. Sadly, the graphics engine is a bit inefficient for historical reasons*, and so the slight decrease in performance was amplified in the graphics engine.

We are working on some different changes to the obfuscation that shouldn't have the same slowdown, but should still have the same effect on the botters. The reason we have left it in so far is that it gives a high entry-cost for people starting to write a new bot, making it harder for anyone other than the people who already have a working bot to write one.

===

* The graphics engine was originally written to work purely in software (the 'safe mode'), and it wasn't really designed for working with OpenGL and DirectX from the ground up. Grafting these in has made things a lot nicer graphically, but has not given us the performance improvements you would expect from moving to hardware graphics. For the technically minded, there are a lot of JNI calls to render a frame (which are expensive), and the batching is not very good (along with a few other problems...)

Technical Director

13-Apr-2012 18:06:15

Mod Chris E

Jagex Moderator Forum Profile Posts by user

With a lot of things having been done in quests and other content already do you try to make new mechanics etc available fairly often or do you wait for a request before trying to enable something?

-

Normally we respond to requests from the content teams, however sometimes we drive the ideas, but these tend to be bigger projects that provide massive content upgrades (skills etc).

13-Apr-2012 18:06:45

Mod Chris E

Jagex Moderator Forum Profile Posts by user

Hey guys

Some questions I assume can be for game engine team:
Do you know what's happening when DirectX with bloom activated disables anti-aliasing?

- We know about it, but aren't prioritising a fix at the moment, sorry.

Will we ever get the healing splats in dungeoneering to show outside of Daemonheim?

- You'll have to ask content about this one!

Also, have you experimented with WASD movement?

- Yes

13-Apr-2012 18:07:34

Mod Stevew

Jagex Moderator Forum Profile Posts by user

Mod Stevew,

Would you please tell me how accurate my in-game reports are? I would just like to know if I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing in order to help keep the game a better place. If not up to par, what can I change? Also, I apologize if these questions don’t pertain to this Q&A, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to ask. Thank you very much for your time

.

===

We still have some system maintenance running so I can't actually look at that right now - sorry.

When it comes to reporting it's probably best to just try and decide if something is either 'a bit annoying, not the end of the world and hey it is the internet' - in which case the ignore list rather than reporting is a good option, or if it's more serious then pop a report in - but either way if you have any doubt you can report it - we'll decide what needs doing (if anything).

All we ask is that people don't just report for the sake of it - every report we receive which isn't rule breaking just keeps us a bit longer from getting to the serious rule breaking that needs our attention.

Steve

13-Apr-2012 18:07:39

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