Can You Increase Runescape Draw Distance

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NXT Closed Beta Weekends update post header.jpg

This is the first in a series of Dev Blogs coming your way in the run-up to the launch of NXT - our all-new RuneScape client.

Look out for more dev blogs like these in the coming weeks, and for news of the upcoming NXT Beta Weekends.

Read on as Modernistic Philip tells us more than about the challenges the team faced in bringing you NXT's spectacular vistas.

In the new customer for RuneScape, you can see a lot farther than in the existing Java client. This ways that nosotros can brand Gielinor look ameliorate than information technology e'er has before, only it brings with it some issues for us to solve. When the game was starting time designed, information technology was never intended that players would be able to see so far. This has led to some 'interesting' decisions equally to where things accept been put in the game earth.

The offset issue is that certain places in the game globe look closer than they should, thematically speaking. This is by and large the case with islands such as Karamja, which now await as if you could get to them with a quick swim, rather than a lengthy voyage.

It is very difficult for united states of america to actually move an island like Karamja. In that location are a lot of places in the game that reference the verbal co-ordinates of places on the isle, and practise and so in means that are not hands detected and automatically updated. It would take a lot of effort to actually move places like that on the surface earth, and then nosotros've come upwardly with another solution.

First, we've subconscious the island from view when you are non on the island (and hidden the rest of the world when yous are on the island), and then replaced it with something else.

To achieve this, nosotros've added a characteristic to tag the world every bit different areas. This allows united states of america to make those areas visible or invisible in relation to each other – and to attribute them with other backdrop in the futurity.

Each colour below represents an area – there may be more than you'd expect!


1. Beneath the Surface World	4. RuneScape Surface World
2. Dungeons	5. Association Citadels
three. Dungeoneering

The second part uses the area tags to add 'impostor' bits of map into the globe in place of the bits we have removed. We can build a bit of map that has some sea on it (for case), and replace the now-invisible island with it. This means that wherever yous are, you will only see the parts of the world that you should.

Using this to hibernate islands (and to hibernate the mainland from them), is something we have not really done much of yet, but we have used the area tagging organisation to deal with another case where the increased draw distance has meant you can encounter things you shouldn't.

Non-instanced dungeons are mapped out into the aforementioned co-ordinate space every bit the over-world in RuneScape, along with the templates that we've used to create bits of instanced content (that is, copied so that dissimilar people or groups of people can play in the aforementioned area without seeing or interfering with each other). Since we never idea we'd be able to run into far enough for it to be a problem, a lot of these dungeons/templates are quite shut to each other, and look a bit jarring when you visit those areas!

We had done some piece of work previously to characterization all of these areas (or at least a lot of them), and so that they tin can exist shown on different map images on the earth map. We couldn't merely take that information and apply it to hide the unlike areas from each other automatically though, since at that place are several places where you lot tin walk from ane place to another quite legitimately, even though they're in unlike areas. This would be a problem if you couldn't run into where you were walking to!

The safest affair for united states to do was to programmatically prevent areas from being divers if they could be walked between by players or NPCs in the game. We and so wrote a tool that took the information about world maps (as seen in the map in-game) and automatically generated the image of which areas should be seen from which, placing downwards invisible walls to prevent anything from walking between them.

This might audio a bit unsafe… and information technology was! We already knew that there were some places where this would cause previously traversable routes to be cutting in half, but we constitute a lot more when we really tried information technology.

After quite a bit of back and forth with Mod Helen (who was doing about of the hard work tweaking the maps), I added an output to the tool that gave a map of everything with the new walls highlighted in magenta, so information technology would be easier to meet where this approach had failed.

Days of adjustments later, and the dungeons and instance templates were separated from each other (well, generally). In that location were a couple of bugs when nosotros launched the changes where bits of the world were still separated that shouldn't have been, only they were all sorted out pretty hands.

Another case where the increased describe distance has acquired issues is in instances themselves. When instances resemble something in the open up world, they are usually set upwards so y'all can't become shut plenty the border to see the nothingness that lies beyond. In the new client this is not really the example any more.

However, nosotros can put something around the border to mask this. In instanced content, the earth is built up out of whatever the server tells information technology to be, and so this is technically quite simple to do. There are a lot of instanced bits of content in the world, though, so there are not many places where this feature has nevertheless been used.

At that place are also places where dissimilar parts of the aforementioned case should not exist visible from each other: for case, the aquarium in a histrion-owned house. We haven't still put anything in identify to deal with this, just using the techniques already described, it should be quite simple to resolve.

All of these solutions require manual effort: going through the game, finding the places that demand this sort of intervention and fixing them. Nosotros'll prioritise the biggest, most obvious places, but it's a massive task. Nosotros'll need your help once NXT hits beta to mop up everything that's left!

When we increased the describe distance, we also increased the distance to which nosotros transmit other players to game clients, equally it was a bit odd to accept other players and NPCs popping in and out of view when they are actually quite shut to your thespian. This was great, except that in some PvP situations we felt it might cause some game residual problems. To gainsay that (pun intended), we added to the existing lawmaking that turns off cosmetic overrides in some PvP situations where that might cause a problem, returning the altitude at which players appear to the same as the Java client.

All of this piece of work has certainly been worth it. Being able to see further across Gielinor has been pretty awesome. No more than fog right next to the camera for me!

Modernistic Philip

Technical Director