Q&A Sessions

Jagex had two Q&A sessions on the forums yesterday. One with the Game Engine Team, which was voted for back in February, and one with the Runespan and new Fremennik Saga developers.

Game Engine Q&A
Developer Q&A

As these Q&A sessions always go, there's a lot of repeat questions and stuff that they reply saying they can't answer. For those of you who don't want to wade through the whole thing, here's some stuff I thought was interesting:

Runespan questions (Click to View)

Will training in the Runespan be comparable to training say Ivy or mining at the lava flow when it comes to Runecrafting? Or will it be more like playing a mini-game/ livid farm type activity?
Hmm, it's closer to lava flow but then make it 12 times bigger and then throw in some agility arena gameplay...yea..that's what it's like. Confused?

Any chance you could tell us on whether RuneSpan will require essence at all?
It will require rune essence, but perhaps not yours.....

Is it going to be better XP than ZMI rcing?
Yes.

Is there any specific storyline behind RuneSpan? If so, what is it? - if you're allowed to say!
Yes, Wizard Finix is claiming that he has found proof that the runecrafting altars will run out one day and become unusable. Whether this is true or not is of huge debate in the Runecrafting Guild but regardless, if he is correct this is of huge concern to all wizards in RuneScape. Fortunatly, Wizard Finix has found a new way to make runes and that is trainable in The Runespan. What is this method? Why do the Runecrafting Wizards not believe him? Why does Wizard Finix believe this? Well, you'll have to wait and see

Runespan is supposed to be the next big runecrafting training method that focuses on exp more than cash, however does it compete with current runecrafting methods? At level 19 its possible to obtain 30k exp per hour via steam runes with profit...towards higher level its possible to obtain around 60k exp per hour with zmi-altar. Will the runespan be able to match these because if not then the content I feel could be outdated to most players once the rewards have been unlocked.
The content has been balanced over the whole range of levels, 1-99. I've also looked at making it scale nicer. Currently runecrafting XP/hr plateaus quite early. I like a nice smooth XP curve

Secondly, this next runecrafting pouch! I am soooo excited for it however, it holds 18 essence, it has to have a higher requirement than 75 runecrafting due to the last pouch...will it degrade extremely quick? I know we can however boost its lifespan via repair pouch spell.
The requirement is high yes. The degrading will also work differently, if you follow the degrade time from med pouch through to giant pouch, this pouch would degrade so fast that it would just be annoying. So we've conjured some other way for it to degrade for you

Engine questions (Click to View)

1) When will there be a fix to prevent the loss of chat history when switching to or from instanced worlds, the lobby and the game world.
Chat history is lost because we don't want to risk giving your private chat history to someone else atfer you logout. We can alter this for instance world transfers and lobby-game transfers however, you make a good point.

"Would you be able to give an explanation as to why untradable items can not be noted? We've been told it's due to technical reasons, but I'm very curious about what they are specifically (and perhaps how difficult they would be to overcome). If the answer is too complicated I'd be happy with some sort of analogy ."
Sure - at the moment all tradable items get noted version generated automatically, but untradable ones don't. In fact, we are have already changed this in our development version so that all items can be noted, so you may well see this one in an update in the near future

People tend to get very low fps in crowded area no matter how good their pc is, what is the cause and how will you improve it?
- Turn off 'idle anims: all', other than that it's because of our animation architecture. We know it sucks and plan to improve it!

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?
Our obfuscation software inevitably introduces inefficiency into the client code base. Optimus will improve this.

Why a lot of people including me have trouble to log in world 77?
World 77 contains a lot of instanced content (dungeoneering). This means that all of the NPCs get replicated many times, and each one needs some processing time. As it is also a very busy world, this means that it can't really keep up very much. Basically, I would suggest dungeoneering elsewhere... As a long-term fix, we would probably want to make dungeoneering use instance shards, so that the load is spread more effectively.

Other (Click to View)

Any word on if and when we will see a ten year Veteran cape?
It's coming, it's awesome.

Can smithing and mining get a use again, runecraft was outdated training wise but smithing and mining have no applicable use. Mining rune is only useful due to alch values, it’s outdated money source tbh. Flasks was a step for mining but one niche use does not a skill make.
We are aware of the problem and are looking into it. Updating a whole skill takes a lot of time and there is a lot to think about as a skill ties into a huge area of the game. No ETA for you but we are aware of it and hope to work on it for you

Can you please make it possible to see these broadcast announcements even if your game filter is on filtered, either by making another option on the game tab or by simply allowing it in the filtered mode.
We are aware of this and it is being looked into.

Thanks for posting the briefs

I really find the runespan questions very interesting, can't wait to try it out

Same here. No update this upcoming week though. Future updates says we're getting a technical update to prepare for future content.

There was a lack of info about the new sagas in the Q&A, though. Not for a lack of questions, but they seemed like they wanted to avoid giving too much away.

Wow thanks for this Dave, was some nice stuff.
I am really excited for Runspan, since it sounds way less boring than regular runecrafting and it clearly said this has better rates than ZMI!

Nice to see they're not forgetting about a few of the aspects of the game I was unsure of if they had. Runespan sounds awesome, will be fun to test it out for the xp rate. Also it's nice to hear a reasoning for the lag in game. Cheers Dave

In retrospect I missed something fairly important. They say that the current game engine doesn't utilize hardware graphic capabilities as well as it could because it wasn't built with that in mind and those options were added in later. And they say that a RuneTek 7 engine is in the planning stages, which will come with much better support for hardware graphics.

Thanks for doing this Dave! I gave up reading them yesterday because they were so long. This was the perfect solution, thank you!