Over the last couple of weeks, we've been working on the Rooftop Agility Courses, nine new training courses that will be set on the rooftops of RuneScape's towns and cities. With the mapping now almost complete, we'd like to take a moment to show you how it looks, and how it works under the hood.
Render order
Work in progress
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Standing tall
The first challenge in mapping a rooftop Agility course was to let you stand on a roof without sinking through it. Whenever there's a building in RuneScape with a sloping roof, the models of the rooftop will most likely overlap the legs of anyone who stands on it.
To get around this, we've had to create platforms above the roof, and make you stand on those instead. Then we carefully sink the height of those platforms, tile by tile, to make you appear just above the surface of the roof. We can make the platforms invisible once we're done mapping them.
This solution has worked quite well for most of the buildings, but there've been some tricky times around tall buildings. RuneScape's only got 4 vertical levels (ground floor plus 3 upper levels), and some buildings already use all of them.
One building in Falador lets players walk on 3 of its levels, with the roof mapped on the 4th level; since we couldn't put a platform above the roof, we had to find an alternative way of letting you cross it. Conveniently, the handhold obstacle from the Brimhaven arena fits quite neatly.
Canifis posed a particular challenge here. Mod Reach found that the rooftops of Canifis were already mapped on the top level. Fortunately there was nothing whatsoever on the level below, so he spent a painstaking morning moving the roof graphics down a level so that he could install invisible platforms above them.
When we set the height of our invisible platforms, it affects the height of any scenery that's too close. This often meant that roof edges would be forced vertically downwards as we set the height of the platform. To avoid breaking bits of buildings, we had to define some custom pieces of roof edging with a built-in vertical offset, restoring the visible graphic to its original height. There's a lot of this in Varrock, Falador and Rellekka due to the sticking-out bits of edging used in their roof kits.
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Render order
Back in 2004, when RS2 was first beta-tested and then launched as the main RuneScape version, it was quite a feat to have a 3D world rendered in a Java applet, running on low-spec computers. One of the tricks that made this possible was the way RuneScape didn't do depth-sorting. Let's explain...
Suppose a man stands in the middle of a large bush. In the real world, some of the bush will appear in front of the man, and the rest of the bush will appear behind him. In RuneScape, before the 2008 HD update, the game always assumes that the whole bush should appear in front of the man. This means that the game isn't doing any fiddly geometry to work out which bits of the bush to show, or which bits of the man to show, which saves a lot of processing.
To get around this sort of limitation, we basically don't let humans stand in the middle of large bushes! But for these Agility courses, we've sometimes needed the player to stand on a long tightrope. In Rellekka, there's a tightrope that's about 6 tiles long. A human standing in the middle of the large rope will be treated like the man in the bush: the scenery appears in front of the human.
Where possible, we've tried to fix this by mapping the rope on the level below where the player's standing. RuneScape assumes that things on higher levels should appear in front of things on lower vertical levels, so it shows the human in front of the rope.
Sometimes this isn't correct either; occasionally it can be a problem that RuneScape draws higher levels over lower levels.
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Work in progress
As we've mentioned, the mapping work's coming to an end now, and we've even been able to demonstrate the courses in our Thursday livestreams at www.twitch.tv/runescape. (Come and join us next week if you haven't seen these before.)
Nevertheless, there are still places where a bit more polish is necessary before it'll be fit for launch. More pressingly, we need to sort out some suitable XP rates. Our aim is not to make everyone get level 99 without effort; level 99 should remain a real achievement.
However, at the moment there are very few training courses in RuneScape, so people wind up training in the same places for much of their journey from 1 to 99. We'd like to offer a bit more variety, something worth doing at each level. Before the launch, we'll be publishing our intended XP rates so you'll have a chance to ask for changes before the courses come out.
We've also got to spawn some Marks of Grace around the rooftops so that you can save up for your weight-reducing Graceful outfit. We're not quite done programming ways to fall off the rooftops either.
If all goes to plan, we'd like to release the nine new courses and the Graceful outfit as the first update of December. The RuneScape QA team is lending us a couple of extra QA testers to help work on this project; we don't want you to wander off the rooftops and into space - this happens more easily than one might wish.
Meanwhile, Mod Mat K has been putting together some plans for a few other buildings to climb, just for the sake of having done it. They're not intended to be training features, but they might come in handy for future Achievement Diaries.
Mods Ash & Reach
Content Developers
22-Nov-2013 13:30:37
