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We can destroy or we can cherish...the choice is ours

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New Look Zanaris And Website Background

Mod Rob's iCould video showed a strange mix of desktop icons, Mod Fetzki's has brought along some more glimpses at future content as well as the development process.     The first thing you see is at 0:42 there is a short clip of the new-look Zanaris next to the windmill.   Facing north at the windmill...   ...and east towards the grain field   Looking closely, you'll see that the account that he's on is called 'Prepworld 5', which indicates that the testing of new content isn't all done on their 'Mod Name' accounts.   The other thing worth noting are the three lines of text next to the minimap. The middle one appears to relate to the camera position, possibly the polygon count in view, though that's simply a guess based on how the numbers change. I'm unable to get any of the text to focus so it's readable, so wondered if anybody else has had any luck.   Later on at 0:57 you see a shot of the RSOF.   A shot of the RSOF   This is different to what you may be used to in two ways.   Firstly, I don't recall seeing that background image before or have any idea what the symbols could represent. I'm sure there are others who are better at working out these things... Previous backgrounds: Mobilising Armies, Temple of Senntisten, Chosen Commander, Christmas 2009, Regular   Secondly, there are the extra icons next to the post which appear to be related to Mod-abilities.   Icons next to the post   Exciting stuff, though of course blurred and hard to see anything specific! -.-
Neo Avatars

Neo Avatars

4
 

Runescape Notifier For Chrome - Initial Release

Yesterday Jagex announced a RuneScape Game Bar - a toolbar for IE, FF and Safari. Although there's the usual problem that it's a toolbar and toolbars always take up too much space for the functionality they provide, it does provide some interesting data relating to the GE and Activities. It also spawned a number of 'y no Chrome, u fail!!!' posts.   Well, toolbars are ick and us Chrome users have no desire to have an icky toolbar ruining our minimal UI. The Jagex devs realised this, so didn't give us the silly 1.7mb of bloat. :glasses:   They did, however, provide access to the data through the authorisation system and Chrome extensions have access to it, so I've spent the last day working out how to create Chrome extensions, the result being the...   RuneScape Notifier (for Chrome, not at all finished and contains known issues) >.<   The popup window (old pic, now also includes the latest RS news)   Notifications when things update   It's a Chrome extension that allows you access to the data that Jagex has provided for the other browsers. To get started, click 'Authorise' and follow the steps to allow your browser access to the data.   I've noticed that the data can be very slow to update (half an hour to say I killed Bork, 3 hours and waiting to tell me that Maple Logs have bought), however this is a problem at Jagex's end.   The extension fetches GE data every 5 minutes and will add a notification to the icon to say if any offers have completed. It will also fetch GE and activity data when you view the popup, meaning you may get blocked by Jagex for a few minutes if you open it up too regularly (causing things to look odd).   This initial version is designed to get the new data across and not a lot more, so there will be problems. If you do encounter anything odd, or think something could do with improving / adding, please leave a comment and I'll do my best to see what can be done about it. I think auto-updating is working, but I may be wrong.   Get it now (for Chrome, not at all finished and contains known issues)
Neo Avatars

Neo Avatars

22
 

Telmomarques Getting 120 Dungeoneering

^Followed by all 1200 people running to the south-west and causing the most epic lag I've ever experienced^ -.-   (note how there are so many people that I can see nobody who isn't on the same square as me)   The below pic was taken ~10 minutes later once things had calmed down a bit, I'd picked up to 5spf (seconds per frame) and people started picking on the various JMods around (Mango, Hayley, Spider, Williams, Alena, Scorpion, Mat K).     Pic of the cape (via @yakhunta and @Steve20058)...  
Neo Avatars

Neo Avatars

8
 

Runescape Website Blue Skin Update, With Pictures

I've made another batch of updates to the Blue Runescape Website Skin, focussing on making the Adventurer's Log readable as well as a range of smaller fixes and additions. The list of latest updates describes the other changes that have been made.   Rather than blabbering on about what's been changed, here's a batch of screenshots of what various parts of the RS website look like in Chrome... :P (there are some minor differences when using Firefox or other browsers)   The homepage Old image   The Dev Blog main page, with the number of visible articles reduced so that the image isn't so huge   The Grand Exchange Database Homepage   The Hiscores rank view   The Runescape Forums Main page, with various sections collapsed   The Runescape Forums category view   Posts by a Forum Mod, regular player and a Jagex Mod (taken on 133-134-899-58872565 page 139)   The Email Registration page - all webpages have a special background   A Knowledge Base article select page   A (shortened) Knowledge Base article showing image borders and tables   Get it now for all this and more! :D http://userstyles.org/styles/16009
Neo Avatars

Neo Avatars

8
 

Soul Wars

I played that one game as a requirement for Nomad's Requiem and hated it. 600 people crammed into one place, with totally uneven teams and nobody doing what the tutorial made it clear was the most important thing in the world -burying bones. Having completed the quest, I'm determined that I'll experience enough of this game to bring me in another 30 points, so my total is 100 and I am given some bonus xp when they're cashed in.   Heading back into battle, I decided that I shouldn't try to take it at all seriously, instead accepting it for what it is - a complete joke that's made stupid by the sheer number of people, many of whom are doing nothing other than standing around spamming "join Iii Cc Iii for 3 zeal per game".   I was playing one game where there were about 400 people crowded around the obelisk in the middle, so I'm sure you can imagine the lag it created. It was, however, the most balanced game of the half dozen I've experienced, without either of the Avatars being killed until about 2 minutes were left. That's another strange thing about it - the laggier it is, the more fun it is because it shows that both teams think they can take control of the obelisk and it isn't heavily unbalanced by those in CCs.   I love the start of games - head in, pick up 28 bandages, run to the obelisk and kill off 10-15 people who are attacking me until I finally run out of bandages and die. I'm fairly sure that what I'm doing is useless in the grand scheme of things, but it's great fun and made for an interesting conversation with a couple of people IRL today who are determined that training defence is a bad thing and 'pures' are the only way to go. :P   Coming to the end of a 'long' tanking session at the start of one game   After the start, it's 15 minutes of dying, coming back, activating my 'Quick Select' Prayers (Piety and Protect from Melee), dropping down to 20hp, switching to Retribution, then giggling as my death causes 3 or 4 others to fall down dead. Totally stupid, but a great laugh.   Feel my wrath! >.<   All in all, Soul Wars is like High School Musical - a complete joke that's fantastic fun if you don't take it at all seriously. :P
Neo Avatars

Neo Avatars

3
 

Buyers And Cellars

They say first impressions count. That was a perfect example of what not to do.   I started off being unable to find the NPC needed to start the quest. First is a long speech about opening a guild (which was very good). You're then told to punch a bag or something, which you automatically run over to and do nothing other than a Yawn emote and be shouted at by the start NPC. Choosing to punch the bag and I'm given a 'You do not have permission to do that' message, so I click away and talk with the other NPC and repeat. This went on for several minutes until I bothered to 'click here to continue'.   If there's no animation to show that something's happening and you want me to continue a conversation with an NPC who's telling me to do something that I just tried to do, at least end the freaking comment with an ellipsis to show that there may be something else. This simply pissed me off and left me in a bad mood (I was going to write a quest guide, but simply screwed up the paper and deleted the screenshots I'd taken because the quest felt like it was going to be crap).   Finally managing to continue, there are more conversations with NPCs that have no obvious ending to them where you have to pray that you're not going to have to go through the chat again upon clicking an ambiguous option. [name=objective-ness][/name]My minimap had random white rectangles on it because the stupid Objective system that I don't give a damn about set the quest as my objective (it also told me the reward before I started - WHY THE HELL do I want to have that shoved in my face?).   Not too soon, the quest scroll appeared.     I then did some IDB-y stuff to try and take my mind off things before heading back to do the other parts.   The first part was From Tiny Acorns where you do some short dance in the middle of Varrock square to do with a Ruby Dragon. I'll take this time to note that Twitter Hints like that are too obscure to mean anything and are simply a waste of everybody's time. The dance itself was simple enough.   Next was Lost Her Marbles. 'Go and collect 32 items from various NPCs'. Not difficult, but if I wanted to do collection tasks like this, there are other games that I'd be playing. Whatever the story was about how the fragments went flying also seemed so OTT and out-of-place it hardly felt like it should have been used. Why the fragments don't all stack together, I don't know. Inventory space is precious and filling up half a dozen with the same item seems like a waste - it doesn't even properly tell me how many I've collected from each type of NPC because they can be sold before all are collected!   Eventually, I finished collecting these items and was given another 5k Thief xp.   I'll leave the last part for tomorrow.   -   They say first impressions count and that was terrible, simply putting me in a cynical mood for the rest of the quest. Even so, many of the conversations didn't flow at all and several had no clear end-point. The idea of creating a guild is nice, but there were so many other characters invented in the process that it felt like a wild fantasy gone wrong (like if I wrote a quest about Ignatius Vulcan and the Trimmed Skillcape). The dance around Varrock square is fun, but the rest of it is either lacking in most aspects or simply a 'gather-the-items' task.   A Guild of Our Own had better be bloody brilliant.   I'm very much looking forward to Mod Nancy's Void Knight quest.
Neo Avatars

Neo Avatars

5
 

Dragon Chain! ^_^

I've wanted one of these for soooooooooo long and finally gave in to the temptation yesterday by putting in an offer on the GE. Logging in today, it had bought. :D     It was then a case of finding an outfit that worked well with it since the Skillcapes I have (Firemaking / Farm) and the Red Nomad Cape don't look quite right. Thinking back to those early games of Castle Wars where I formed the dream, I realised that everybody was wearing a Legends' Cape with it (they were the best cape / body in-game at the time), so pulled that out of my bank.   The Whip didn't look quite right, so I headed off to BA, bought the painting options and coloured it white. The Holy Book was the right colour to go in the shield slot. Finally was the head. Unfortunately, there's a cyan Chompy Hat, but no white one so I'm left with the Greeneyellow one for the moment. I'm tempted to spend some time over the weekend Chompy Hunting to make the next couple of 5-feather hats available so the outfit can be even hawter. :D
Neo Avatars

Neo Avatars

18
 

Daemonheim - A Series Of Interlinked Broom Cupboards?

The Breakfast Topics on WoW.com can bring up some thought-provoking points and today's (tl;dr: the size of rooms in a raid need to fit the number of people present if it's going to feel epic) made me think about Daemonheim.   Daemonheim is designed for 1-5 people, so the feel of the dungeon should reflect this by being the corret size to hold this many people. Problem is, it doesn't feel right.   I've spent much of my time running dungeons solo, but even then the rooms feel... cramped. As you traverse the dungeon, rooms will have walls positioned in all sorts of directions, with a range of facilities such as Altars, Spinning Wheels and Rocks of ore filling every last corner. Because of this, many of the randomly generated rooms feel more like somebody's broom cupboard than an epic dungeon. The tiny room size is in no way aided by the fact that you need to manually click to move through every door, making even a large dungeon feel like a series of minute rooms rather than an epic entity as a whole.   When you get up to multiple people, the problem gets even worse, with the Magical Construct room being a particularly bad offender, where everybody's jammed into a tiny corner, stepping on each other's feet and generally getting in the way. Many of the other puzzle rooms are much better, with one item taking up a small fraction of the room and leaving space for everybody to complete the task at hand.   When you get to the boss fight, the room feels right for two people, not five...   Three people taking on To'Kash the Bloodchiller, the 4th warrior dead (click for larger version)   In a battle like this, you want to space yourselves out. Problem is, the room simply isn't big enough to do so and everybody finds themselves taking as much damage scratching their back against the wall as from the boss itself. To make the fight feel right for 5 people, the dimensions would need to be doubled (4x the area) so that you aren't having a group hug and killing the monster by removing it's ability to breathe.   Maybe I'm used to soloing some of the 5-mans in WoW and the fantastic settings that they have. Huge halls in Uldaman, a giant ship in the Deadmines and massive statues in the Scarlet Monastery, all providing a feeling that you're facing something much bigger than you are and making it feel more epic.   Huge halls in Uldaman   A giant ship in the Deadmines   Massive statues in the Scarlet Monastery   To me, Daemonheim has too little 'green space' in the non-puzzle rooms and the boss rooms aren't designed for more than two people. If the whole intention was for people to train in pairs, the boss rooms are great, but everywhere else you're simply competing for Oxygen and the problems become worse with more people. I love epic dungeons, but Daemonheim feels a bit too much like a series of interlinked broom cupboards.
Neo Avatars

Neo Avatars

9
 

Private Chat Colours

One of the key issues I mentioned in the first of the Colourblindness in Runescape entries was the colour of chat text. Today saw the release of a way to "choose the colour of your split [private] chat", so off I hopped into the game and had a look at what had been added.   After the release of the Notes system and the horrible colour-selection menu that has, I wasn't particularly hopeful. On the plus side, it was being worked on in January (said in one of the Q&A sessions), so this is the culmination of 4 months of work.   So, I logged into the game and found what I was looking for.     15 colours to choose from, OK, that's probably what I was expecting. OK, so nobody's logged in, but there's some 'Sample text' to look at, lets flick through the colours! ;) *4 colours are looked at, reaching the above position* ... Where in the whole of Gielinor is there a location that looks anything like that colour-wise? The chat text is going to be put against the many colours that this world has to offer, not a consistent brown colour. To me, the 'Sample text' in the above image is perfectly fine to read without problems. When, however, it's moved to the 'live' environment of actual text in the game it's painful and difficult to read. Why the background isn't transparent, I have no clue. (Fine, I do. Whoever designed it clearly isn't the intended user.)   Because of this worse-than-useless 'Sample text', I was in need for some real text to play with, so had to ask for people to PM me something that would be useful to test with. :)   Next, who's up for the new version of hunt the stick?     Yes, there is genuinely some chat text there. When playing around with this new interface there were several occasions where I'd set the colour to green and thought that there had somehow been 100 messages scroll past and pushed the PM chat out of the front of the queue because of the lack of testing (nobody would be silly enough to let that into the game with no shadow, right? There's nowhere in the game that it'd be remotely readable in the current state, even Lumbridge Bank Chest).   In total, 5 out of the 15 colours have no shadow behind the text. Even the black text should have something behind it since small 1px wide text is notoriously difficult to read. This is exactly why I mentioned that it should also be possible to change the colour of the shadow. Of the remaining 10, there are 3 that are easy to read (white, yellow and yellow - some would call the second one 'light green', but I see little difference apart from one being slightly lighter).   Beyond the colours, it's made it much slower to actually split the chat text. Previously, it was two clicks and about a second to change the settings when you wanted to alter it to take a screenshot. It's now more clicks and takes at least twice as long. There isn't even a right-click option to simply toggle the chat setting. I'm also surprised that this opportunity wasn't taken to move the position of the split chat to the right so it isn't squished against the side of the screen (so it's harder to read) when in a non-fixed window.   Overall, the current setup is a shambles and changes need to be made for it to be as useful as it should be. On top of the 15 'simple' colours, there should be an 'advanced' option that allows you to choose exactly what you want from 16.7m colours (both WYSIWYG and RGB). It'd mean an extra couple of bytes of data for those who bother to choose an 'advanced' colour, but the advantages would be massive. It's clear that storage isn't a major issue since the F2P Friends List has been expanded, which will create much more data than allowing a proper range of colours to be chosen.
It should be possible to choose the colour of the shadow.
The 'Sample text' should have a transparent background.
There should be a right-click option to toggle the Split Chat option.
After having 4 months+ to be worked on, this really isn't anywhere near as good as it should be. It's nice, but no more and full of various problems that want fixing.   This is a system made of incompetence, people who don't play the game and lots of unanswered questions about what took so long.   (I presume this release is testing before expanding to the other types of text and that the vital ability to make the chat box permanently opaque is coming soon)
Neo Avatars

Neo Avatars

5
 

How Dungeoneering Works

Because nobody's going to care about another post about election result data, here's a quote from Mod Mark about how Dungeoneering works...   GZ: How does the random content generation work with Daemonheim?  MO: The party leader makes a decision about the following options:   - How many players in the group? We can support up to five.   - What size of dungeon they want?   - How 'deep' a floor they wish to play? We have 60 floors and different themes to choose from.   - How complicated they want the experience to be? Ranging from "hack and slash, grab the gear and cleave my foes" all the way to "access to all the skills and allow me to make the most awesome gear in the world.... so I can then cleave all my foes into even smaller pieces"   - How difficult the dungeon should be? This allows players to define the combat level of the NPCs they face and the level of skills needed to complete skill challenges.   After the player defines all of that, we can effectively work out a 'budget' of how tough we can make their dungeon, and what it should be built from. If you imagine that every challenge, puzzle, NPC etc. has a points value, we can spend points equal to the budget we generated based on the options picked by the group leader. That budget can also increase as we give the player access to decent resources and gear along the way.   With that budget defined, the dungeon will be created using the following elements:   - Rooms: We have a huge library of 1000 jigsaw-style room sections, all of which are filled with 'hot spots'. These hot spots can be filled with resource points or locations such as fishing spots, anvils, altars, farming patches etc. The hot spots are weighted to the skills and levels of the party.   - Puzzles: There is a huge variety of puzzles within the dungeon including mimicry, maze and rock-paper-scissor classics. There are also more modern 'twitch game' puzzles and also more 'ferrety- oriented' challenges. Yes, that's right, I said ferrety.   - Monster types: We have a gargantuan (10,000 ) amount of monsters of varying types, styles and levels. The ones we throw at the players are appropriate to the options defined above.   - Bosses: There are currently 20 boss monsters in the game and we will be adding 20 more before the end of the year. From the current bosses, my personal favourite is the Libraromancer. Guess what he does...   - Challenges: Each dungeon is filled with keys, locked doors, treasure chests and a plethora (1000 ) of skill-based challenges to open doors. These cover the entire range of RuneScape's skills.   - Storyline: The deep plotline is unveiled via diaries, books and the mad ramblings of the cursed souls who were left behind as the dungeon dug deeper, ever deeper. Always deeper. Fragments still remain and can be found by those players interested in the back story.   - Equipment and resources: Drop tables and the resource points mentioned above give players access to thousands of new pieces of gear, many far more powerful that the gear available in the rest of RuneScape.   The areas are built room by room so we can ensure that the challenge budget described above can change rapidly and fairly. Effectively, each room is 'seeded' at the point at which the door is opened. Before then, we only have the budget we know we're going to spend on that room. That's a basic idea of how it works and why. (source)  ...and something about what Paul's working on atm... GZ: What lies in the future for Runescape?  MO: Regarding standard game updates, I'm very excited about a three-part quest we're writing on the various Orders of Knights within the game (that will be released with a new minigame), and also the quest that Paul Gower (the original creator of the RuneScape back story and the other co-founder) is writing that concludes one of our oldest storylines, called "The Ritual of the Mahjarrat". One of the glorious things about being your own publisher is that we really can look at today's news and forum feedback and say "No! We're not doing it right, let's do this instead" and take a complete 360 turn. So you can never say for sure about what lies ahead... but I know it will rock! (source)
Neo Avatars

Neo Avatars

8
 

78 Runecrafting And A 'new' Outfit

I decided to make a few Nature Runes, which I did happily for most of the morning, not seeing any 'PKers' around, then after making about 9.5k Nats, I suddenly see somebody who had managed to TB and Entangle me without me noticing. Then, in the frantic hurry to drop the Pouches so they could be retrieved, I only managed to drop 2, and only manage to repeatedly examine the others. :)   That meant that I had to spend about 15-20 minutes in the Abyss getting the Pouches back. :s   Oh well, and least it's only the seconds time it's happened. (I think :))   So, after the last 500 Nats had been made, a level appeared. :P     Why do I want 4x Earth Runes? :)   -   I then headed down to Tai Bwo Wannai and did some Village restoration, getting a couple of thousand Trading Sticks in the process. I bought Pink and Yellow Top and Bottoms, although they look ick when you wear a top and a bottom together. :/   I also bought one of every pair of Sandals, and decided that one of the pairs looks more pretteh than Desert Boots. :o     Firemaking Cape Glory Amulet Mouse Toy Guthix Book Chompy Hat Sandals   (is the hat yellow or green, and are the sandals red or brown) :) (or have I messed up totally, and they're none of those colours :/)   If anybody can think of any easy things in the outfit that could be changed to make it better within the next couple of hours, please say. :D   EDIT: I seem to like adding the Pink Villager Skirt to the above outfit, so it now looks like...     Not sure which is better though. :s
Neo Avatars

Neo Avatars

12
 

Dungeoneering

I've reached level 31 and, according to my Adventurer's Log, have raided 35+ dungeons (as well as lost progress on another half dozen), so thought it time to make some initial observations.   The first is on losing progress when you're kicked out of a dungeon when in single player. Contrary to the FAQ answer, this problem existing should have delayed the release of the entire skill because it's such a key issue. If it's not a "big enough issue", then about the only thing that could be big enough is an inability to enter the dungeon at all. Allowing this to appear without an ability to remember progress or pause part way through the dungeon so you can come back later is little short if idiotic.   After that, I'll agree completely with what troacctid said about it, so rather than me type it all out again, go and read what he wrote. :P forum.tip.it/blog/39/entry-1416-what-to-fix-in-dungeoneering-20/   As for actual experiences in the dungeon, they've been varied.   As soon as the update arrived, I was in-game trying to work out how to play. I couldn't see how you started a solo round (bad), so ended up in a 5-man random dungeon. We clearly had no idea between us what we were doing, so muddled along, with me taking the role of Mage. It was a fun couple of hours even if our levels were still single-digits by the end. Fun-wise, it was much better than Hunter (over-crowded resources) and similar to Farming (nobody having a clue what to do and trying to work it all out).   [name=dung-bad-lighting][/name]Graphics-wise, my impressions were varied. Some of the bosses looked fantastic (below), but the lighting is terrible and doesn't feel very dungeon-y. This goes for both the Frozen and Abandoned levels.   Some of the bosses look great   Eventually, people left and I worked out how to enter a solo dungeon, so have done that since.   Some of the puzzles are great fun, however if there isn't something new in every dungeon it can become tedious. There's ended up being something new every 2 or 3 dungeons, which is OK, but should really be more regular if it isn't going to become a repetitive grind.   I love some of the boss mechanics and that the death penalty involves losing ~5 minutes of work (perfect ^_^). Astea Frostweb - the first 'boss' I encountered and the Prayer-switching makes it slightly interesting, but all-in-all it's a boring fight and doesn't feel very special
Gluttonous Behemoth - the first fight I had that felt like a boss. When it randomly healed, we had no idea what to do, so somebody suggested getting in the way of the carcass. Somehow it worked and we all felt special inside (). Exciting the first time or two, but after that it's boring and doesn't hit any damage.
Icy Bones - he's evil. He hits high, takes little damage from anything and I hate him.
Luminescent Icefiend - in terms of repeatable enjoyment, this is one of the best. The special attack means that you want to keep your HP as low as possible to avoid wasting food, so each time you meet him there's an attempt to defeat him using less and less food. I've got it down to 6 pieces of food that heal 170 each, though could do better :D
Plane-Freezer Lakhrahnaz - great fun, but doesn't hit any damage and has several bugs
To'Kash the Bloodchiller - I met him once, but can't remember anything about the battle so it can't have been very special
Skeletal Horde - fun, fun, fun, fun, fun. The first time I entered the room, I had Auto-Retaliate on and died fairly quickly. Heading back in, I made sure it was turned off and had huge amounts of fun, with flashbacks to the Stairs Fight in Zul'Farrak. It's immense fun and I can see great repeatability value by doing things such as turning Auto-Retaliate on to make it more exciting.
Hobgoblin Geomancer - booooooorrrrriiiiiinnnnnggggg
Bulwark Beast - the armour is a great idea, however, like the Gluttonous Behemoth, after the first encounter I can see it becoming repetitive
The lack of integration with the rest of the game is disappointing (we can hope that there's more to come over the next couple of weeks, but it makes you wonder why more didn't appear on release).   It's buggy. I've had times where Melee combat hasn't worked at all. Plane-Freezer Lakhrahnaz likes getting stuck in positions where you can't attack him. If a boss drops an item when you have a full inventory, it doesn't appear on the floor, so the item disappears (yes, some of the bosses need no food :P). Pathfinding around doors and in the Monolith room is abysmal, with you getting stuck in stupid places. The room with 5 switches appears to be impossible to complete solo (several people have had problems).   As it is, it's a buggy mini-game that's been called a skill to justify the high dev time required to make it. Fun in parts, but with too many problems to be worth continuing with in the current state.   Further experiences can be found in the comments.
Neo Avatars

Neo Avatars

18
 

Dungeoneering Trailer

Yesterday saw the appearance of the Dungeoneering Trailer on Jagex's YouTube channel as well as the Runescape splash page.     It starts off with a hawt spinny version of 'Jagex', then straight into a flyover of the water, with graphics that we can only hope are going to appear in-game at some point soon. (everything else in the video is the same as the live game)   There's then a continuation of the flyover, heading up to the castle, with a 30 second voiceover that tells you nothing at all. If you watch various WoW Patch Trailers, you'll see that they explain both the what in terms of content and the why in terms of lore. All the voiceover in this trailer does is say 'there was an unknown power'. It would have been nice if the voiceover continued for more of the trailer, explaining some of the lore behind the content that was being shown.   Once you're into the dungeon and looking around, things move too quickly to see anything in particular and adding the voiceover would help to slow things down a bit. It's worth noting that among this quick-switching of scenes, at , the heroes are standing in a very silly position and should know better. Whatever it is, I hate the change in music at 1:10 even if it does signify the change from 'epic' to 'prep'. As for the logo at the end... *Neo Avatars wants a big copy of that downloadable as a wallpaper (logo on black) ^_^(the one in the video is slightly blurred)   The plural of 'Dungeons' in the logo and the 1-2-3-4-5 at the top of the Floor select screen in-game indicates to me that there are 4 more dungeons to come (or that nobody's reached a level where they can access the others) and we've only been given 1/5 of the skill to start with for whatever reason. A single dungeon, even with all the various puzzles, also doesn't feel like an area 60x the size of Falador.   It's certainly not a bad trailer, but, imo, it should explain the why as well as the what.   -   As for the Splash Page and update to the RS homepage, they're hawt, but the JavaScript used to switch between videos and screenshots on the Splash Page doesn't work properly on Chrome and instead forces the page to reload.
Neo Avatars

Neo Avatars

6
 

Void Mage Armour

I looked at the announcement about updating Pest Control, and realised that there was new Void Armour in the form of 3 Hats. :D There was also word around that it was easier to get points now, which would mean that getting points would be even easier than before. :o   Yesterday I got he Gloves along with about 36k Defense xp. Today came the first Hat and 15k Defense xp to get me a set of Void Mage Armour. ^_^  
Neo Avatars

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7
 

Runescape Notifier For Chrome - Updates

I've made a number of updates and improvements to the RuneScape Notifier for Chrome in the past week or so including speed improvements, news and notifications which can be seen in the comments.   Today's change brings another change, this time to the way in which the GE offers are displayed. Rather than being lines of text, it's been changed to be more visual and easier to pick things out at a glance. I'm not totally convinced about the colours myself (I've tried taking them from the in-game GE), so if anybody has any suggestions please say! <_<   The current UI - hovering over the GE status bars changes the displayed text   Notifications when it updates   Get the RuneScape Notifier for Chrome
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7
 

Is Runescape Gameplay Engaging?

I've been watching through the TotalHalibut Cataclysm videos and found them interesting. Yes, the commentary is fantastic, but the key point is that the gameplay itself is very watchable. I hadn't really picked up on this key point until watching the, rather dull, Dwarf starting zone video and the following came up in the commentary:   "I'm gonna speed up most if this and I'll let you see the little bits of storyline that are dumped in it otherwise there is nothing to watch. Use the Total Biscuit method of measuring whether or not a starting zone is any good. How much do I have to speed it up? Because if I have to speed it up a lot like this, indeed this segment right here, is a good 5 minutes or so.   If I have to speed it up that much then something is wrong with your starting zone. It is not engaging, it is repetitive and it's dull. Ideally what you'd want in a game like this is for every quest to be something that people would enjoy watching ie. it's got sufficient storyline, gimmicks or excitement to be watchable in video form. Now, of course, that's never gonna be the case, but it's something that you should aspire to."   Thinking about it, this quote is extremely true (replace 'starting zone' with 'game' to make it more generalised). Good gameplay is great to watch. It doesn't matter if you've never played a game before, good gameplay is exciting and makes you want to join in.   Looking at it from this angle, Runescape is horrendously dull. There are few who would sit through a 20 minute video of somebody doing a typical skilling activity, so it indicates that the core gameplay itself isn't as interesting as it should be. Quests and bosses, fine, they're a bit more interesting to watch, but the typical player doesn't spend the majority of their time doing these activities.   Set up a screen recorder. Log into Runescape, start doing something and record the game window until you log out. Come back the next day and watch through what you recorded. When you become bored, that's when you started grinding. Was it fun?
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11
 

Treasure Trail Update

I've been doing a few Treasure Trails since the update to check how things are and whether the update achieved everything it should have done. I've killed Bork daily and had a single level 3 clue and the Skeletal Horror has dropped nilch, meaning I've not had a chance to try the elites, so this is my experience from a few level 3s and a level 2.   First off, I love how they send you off exploring into random locations. There have been a couple of clues where I've been wandering into the Wilderness or Kharazi Jungle (I can now find my way in without a guide :)) and been going to myself "this is actually pretty awesome". The landscapes in RS aren't at all epic, but a bit of imagination takes you part of the way there. :)   Next, some of the Uri (emote) clues are silly, requiring you to wear reasonably expensive items that you don't generally have knocking around your bank. Rune Platelegs, fine, but a Rune Warhammer? Have a couple of these clues in a trail and you've probably spent half your reward on things to take up bank space. I will mention that I like how the Gnome Robes, a required item, have the colours in their name, but other items such as a 'round red and black snelm', 'purple gloves' or 'green gnome boots' are hellish when considering abysmal name choices and undescriptive examines.   If there's one thing 'good' about Emote clues it's that the GE price limits mean many items are unbuyable and you have to find out how to make things yourself. (no that isn't good, and yes I do have a Splitbark Helm in my house!)   Reward-wise, I've had a few trails which have provided alch fodder, then one with gave an Addy Helm (g) and one with a Bandos Page plus Court Summons. Giving me 14 Meerkat scrolls and saying 'you get a TTrail item every time!!!!' is silly - they're not even alch fodder and are worthy only of the floor. I understand that the market shouldn't be flooded with nice things, but even Guthix Pages at 12k a pop were more exciting than a pile of Scrolls or arrows that I'll never look at.   Looking at the new rewards, I'm of the opinion that the new Rune God Armour should have been made F2P since otherwise it's fit for little other than storing in people's Costume Rooms. The masks look nice and the Blessed Dragonhide probably looks amazing (all the old sets did, so I'll keep this thought even though I've not seen any).   The big issue is that none of these are the big problem for me. If you do TTrails for the reward rather than as a distraction or diversion, you're silly, so the reliance on luck for rewards is a bit of a non-issue. The Uri clues are a pain in the backside, but learning how to make Snelms and other random items because the GE doesn't work as it should is kinda interesting. Begging for F2P things (as a P2Per) is also fairly pointless, so what's the big problem?   You can still get the same clue multiple times in a trail! :P   It really ruins a trail when you get the same clue multiple times in a and leaving this in is plain irritating. The ability to get the same Slayer task twice in a row was removed because people complained and I really can't see how this is any less annoying. :(   Treasure Trails are kinda fun, but getting the same clue multiple times in a trail can ruin it.
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5
 

Court Cases

Today saw the release of the first Court Cases which were blogged about in November, so I headed off to Seers' Village and the court room.   Talking to the Clerk, the introduction is fairly clear and the notes are in the Drawers. They aren't too long, which is good, and the fingerprints stop it being a 'read this or else' situation. With all the information read, I headed down the stairs to prosecute the Mugger (just because the name ends in -gger, it doesn't mean he has anywhere near the same rep that Hogger does :( - pet peeve each time he gets mentioned in a news post).   I went through, reading every chat option to see if there was anything interesting. It all was. The defender then had a turn and got all the cheers from the Jury that I didn't and won. :/   Back upstairs and I decided to drop the case. I talked to the Clerk again and could choose to defend instead of prosecute. Since I'd just been shown all the correct answers, I decided to do that. Back down again and I realised that all the answers hadn't been given simply because the options you're given to choose from give no indication about what you're going to say. Because of this, I still managed to get two of the options wrong and lose.   A third try and I got all the options right, but chose the wrong jury member. Finally, I chose the correct jury member having got a clean streak and successfully defended Hogger.     It's a nice idea, but implemented horribly. You can switch from prosecution to defence and back again (I guess this is harder with the other trials since you'll need a summons).
When you summon a witness, you don't talk to them.
When you've finished with a witness, it doesn't give you the choice to summon the other. Instead, you have to talk to the Judge who goes "Whadda ya want, nub?" (or it feels like that after he's said it a dozen times).
The conversations when building a defence really don't flow at all.
When you need to choose a jury member, the judge asks which member you want to pick. There's then an anonymous message that asks the SAME THING. When the Jury panel appears, the message goes, so it's useless anyway.
The jury panel has annoying tooltips that don't help at all since they say exactly the same thing.
When you examine the citizens who are spectating, 6 of them have the same examine, then there's one which has a different examine and makes it unclear whether Seers' Village should have an apostrophe in its name. Two of the citizens also look exactly the same, down to the way they sit.
Making one mis-click means you have to re-do the whole thing, which gets tedious after the second attempt.
(and that's just what I can remember off the top of my head - there are several more individual problems I've not mentioned)   This isn't like The Chosen Commander where a few small issues relating to chat not flowing properly mean it's only 'pretty darn amazing' rather than 'epic'. This is conversations flowing so badly the content feels horribly broken and totally untested. Heck, the entire D&D is based on the idea of long conversations, so there really is no excuse. It simply doesn't work as it stands and I'm not going to be rushing back for more. :/
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7
 

Runescape Lobby

Yesterday saw the introduction of the Lobby to the login process. Nice idea, but it sure as heck wasn't ready to be released - I've sent ~20 bug reports about it so far and keep finding more problems.   [/name]The new look starts off with the most pointless, stupid, over-designed two textboxes and a button I've seen in a while, spread over two screens that require a click on one of two tiny icons to pass through...   The most pointless, stupid, over-designed two textboxes and a button I've seen in a while   As for the login itself, how much more pointless can you get?   The first screen is an advert for F2P and doesn't disappear like the proper Adverts above the game window when you last logged into a P2P account... and the login box itself does not need to be duplicated on two tabs. Logging into both F2P and P2P accounts via each tab, the only thing that the tabbed system does is allow the following error message to appear if you log into a F2P account via the P2P tab:   The reason to create even more bloat in the login process   The font here is so bad that it took me a good 10 seconds to work out what it said. It may be the same font as is used for headings on the RS homepage, but because of the way it's rendered all over the lobby it's painful to read and makes me think there's something up with my sight.   The login screen should be two textboxes - a username input and a password input, with three buttons below - Login, Password Recovery and Subscribe to Members. Like logging into the RS website, your username should be remembered and either the username or password box should have focus depending on whether a username has been remembered or not.   This bloat to the login process is annoying and will lose as many members as it will gain.   -   Next, you're in and you have an accordian to greet you. Personally, I dislike these in general, so won't comment on their use. What does bug me here is the links - they open in the default browser on your computer even if you're using a different one to play RS. If I'm playing RS in Chrome, I don't want to wait 30 seconds for Firefox to open to see the page... and there's no visual indication that the link's actually clicked, meaning you click another 3 or 4 times, simply slowing down the computer.   Links should open in the same browser that you're using, even if this isn't the default one. There should also be a visual indication when both hovering over a link and after you've clicked it, like on any webpage that's had half an ounce of design put into the mix.   -   The World Select tab is the home of the one thing that was done well with this update - if you select a favourite world, that world is visible in the main table below as well as being pinned at the top. I spent large amounts of time confused over this in the past, so I thought I had to mention the one thing that was done at all well with the introduction of the Lobby.   Of course, the pinned versions of the favourite worlds aren't perfect, with the ping value displaying as -1 rather than a dash when the value hasn't yet been determined.   As for the links to the favourite worlds...   Links to two favourite worlds, one P2P and one F2P   Nice idea, but there's no way to tell whether a world is F2P or P2P by simply looking at it. If there's no room to put 'P2P' or 'F2P' as there was before, some sort of colour coding would be better than having identical buttons.   On this point, it would make sense to have the Current World located in the top-right corner of all of the tabs in the Lobby, not just the World Select one. As it is, logging into a F2P account can be a painfully confusing process with totally unhelpful error messages and no explanation of what the problem is when you click a favourite world link to a P2P world.   -   The Clan Chat. Yeah. I feel your pain.   You start off entering the username to enter the chat:   Entering the username of the chat you want to enter   Firstly, this box is totally the wrong shape to enter a username. There's a special 'username' box found in the Report Screen, so WHY isn't it used? Secondly, the font is too small to read. Thirdly, the flashing cursor means that the text is constantly jumping from side to side, making it even harder to read the text as you're typing. Typing this up in Chrome, I'll note that the cursor will stop flashing when I'm typing, as does any textbox in any reasonable piece of software. Why doesn't this one?   This jumping text problem also exists when sending PMs.   -   Once into a CC, where do I start?   Quick Chat doesn't work. You can see QC that other people have said, but there's no reply option or way of saying anything yourself. Also, until today's update, right-clicking on any piece of Quick Chat text would make it impossible to scroll up the textbox until you logged out and back in again. On the subject of scrolling, if you scroll up and somebody says anything, the textbox will jump straight back down to the bottom, making it impossible to read previous text in a chat that moves at any pace.   If you're viewing the Clan Chat tab and are sent a PM (or visa versa), there's no way to see that this has happened - the other tab doesn't change or anything as the different tabs do in-game. This means that you either have to have Private Chat turned off or need to be constantly checking to see if anyone's said anything to you.   As for the look of the chat itself...   A comparison of 6 lines of Clan Chat text in an 'acceptable' place in-game (against the wall of the GE) and in the Lobby   I've stated before that Clan Chat is extremely hard to read in a non-fixed window, so this was a great opportunity to shine. It wasn't taken.   For some reason, the font in the Lobby is several pixels shorter despite taking up exactly the same amount of room height-wise. This is plain stupid and causes significant eye strain when attempting to read it from any distance (as I'm sure you'd expect people to be if they can't put in enough concentration to play the game, but want to keep chatting).   The text also doesn't have the black shadow that any text in-game has, meaning it's even harder to read.   The font here, in the Private Chat and on the World Select list should be the same as the font in-game - size and shadow. Until then, it's painful to use and I can't comment on whether the background is acceptable.   -   Other problems with the CC...   The chat you're in isn't remembered when logging in and out of the game, meaning you have to re-enter whatever CC you were in and any chat that occurred is lost. If you have one CC remembered in-game, but enter a different one in the lobby, you simply won't be in a CC when you next enter the game.   If you have the power to kick people, there's a random colon between 'Kick user' and their username. This colon isn't aligned with anything and simply looks ugly.   The textbox is too wide, so when chatting with people in-game, you have no idea how much of the sentence they can see. Based on a couple of test lines that I did, there's a difference of up to ~20 characters (3 or 4 words) that people in the lobby can see, but those in-game can't. If chat isn't going to wrap onto multiple lines, this is idiocy.   There are tooltips in the CC that display people's rank...   Rank tooltip   Of course, this is buggy. If somebody isn't ranked, it still says 'Rank:', but there's nothing displayed after it. The Owner of a CC is also in this category, with nothing displayed as their rank. These problems only occur if you can actually see the tooltip - for some reason it's position is based on how far you're scrolled down the list of names and the further down you scroll the further down the tooltip heads until it finally disappears. Tooltips for name changes in the Friends List are positioned in the same way, meaning you can't see previous names of anybody past position ~20 on the list.   -   I was going to make a positive note about the one other thing that was done well, unfortunately it was changed with today's System Update. This meant that when double-clicking on the 'Exit to Lobby' button, you would fully log out. Now you've got to move the mouse all the way to the 'X' in the corner of the lobby and click again to do the same thing.   -   [name=buggy-lobby-summary]...and that's merely the obvious problems, with a number of other problems that I've simply not mentioned.   Nice idea, but...   It looks like it was designed by a 4th grader, with absolutely no style to it - I could create something that looks like this, so I'm sure somebody employed to design GUIs can do better if they tried. The fonts are diabolical. The login screen is full of bloat to the point that it's counter-productive.   There are simply too many problems with it and QA completely failed at making it usable. Out of the ~20 Bug Reports I've sent so far, only one was obscure enough that I'd accept that it was missed (it involves somebody else making a display name change while both of you are logged in). This isn't 100,000 people spending 30 minutes in-game having a combined time of 6 years being more than the greatest QA team in the world when I'm finding bugs faster than I can send off the reports.   The Lobby and Login process is a prime example of sheer incompetence combined with a rushed release schedule allowing an extremely buggy piece of content into the game.   Rubbish.
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7
 

Bonus Xp Weekend Calculator

The Bonus XP Weekend Calculator   That was something fun to make yesterday evening. :D   When in-game yesterday, I noticed that a huge number of people had no idea how the multiplier over the Bonus XP Weekend will work and a large number of people who did understand it were having trouble with the numbers. These discussions made me interested in how the figures actually ended up cumulatively over time, so I started off by creating a 5000 row table in Excel with various numbers in, only to find that it couldn't do quite what I wanted.   The next step was to make a very basic calculator with the same functionality as the spreadsheet, but working as I wanted. This first version had an hour split into 100 segments, with decimals to indicate minutes. At this point, I decided that if I was going to make something basic for myself, it might as well be made slightly easier to use and available for everybody.   Next was adding a way to change the start time so that you don't have to be doing the same thing for the whole weekend. For this, I decided to split the hour and minutes into separate inputs to make it nicer to use - who knows what 47 minutes is as a decimal of an hour? (it's 0.783333333...)   I then changed the Task Length input to this Hour / Minutes format so that it was easier to do calculations with the two values. This meant that the multiplier would be calculated to the nearest minute rather than nearest 36 seconds. It was only today that I got round to reading the answers by Mod Fnord in the RSOF thread and realising that this is how it'll be calculated in-game, so go me! This also solved a problem that could crash the browser if you entered a really high value rather than decimal. :)   With the basic functionality sorted, I did some playing around with the values in the input boxes so that there's a default of '0' and it'll auto-clear when you click in it. It'll also clear any values that you enter which aren't numbers - you can't easily do calculations on 'gh' xp and I didn't see the point in making Roman Numerals work... maybe next time! I also made it possible to hit Enter to calculate the multiplier rather than having to click the button simply because I found myself attempting to do so while testing.   Next came the styling - making it look nice and ensuring various element fits the table cell that they're in. This took a couple of attempts and had to be 'redone' when I decided to add a title to the table that the calculator is in, but that's all part of the fun   With that done, I realised that it would be a lot more useful if it'd actually tell you how much xp you would get rather than simply provide the multiplier. A couple of minutes of copypasting and a small addition and that functionality was added.   Finally was writing the text to go above and below the calculator as well as a bit of final testing in various browsers with a range of values to make sure they were the same as what Excel gave.   The calculator itself took about an hour to make, with styling, testing and writing the instructions adding another hour. I'd say that's two hours well spent. :)
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5
 

Proun

Is an extremely fun 'racing' game that looks fantastic and becomes rather crazy on the higher speeds.   http://www.proun-game.com/ - pay what you want, free or up    
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4
 

A Guild Of Our Own

Having completed the other three parts of Buyers and Cellars, I was in no way impressed by what had been created because of abysmal design in the first conversation putting me in a bad mood.   I left a couple of nights to relax and made my way back to Lumbridge to complete the final part (heading via ToG to gain 9k Dungeoneering xp and skip level 47).   "You need to get me a Vial." *goes and gets you both a Vial and Vial of Water* "Noes, you need to make a potion in the Vial first."   Well, you could have said so! :D I know, I know, it's a really terrible reference to making us share the pains of the development process. It was deliberate and I was in a good mood, so there's nothing to complain about here. :D   Anyway, off to find an Onion to chop up. From the Christmas Party, I recalled that there was an Onion field to the north of Rimmington and headed there to pick a couple before heading to Edgeville to find myself a Bowl and Knife. Use Onion > Knife. Nothing interesting happens. Use Knife > Onion. Nothing interesting happens. Use Onion > Bowl > You get a bowl of Chopped Onion. Riiiiiiiiiiight.   Back to Robin with the potion, enchant it and off to Ardougne. Finding myself lost, I consulted Matej's comment on the last entry and found the Guild Registry. Into the building and there's a nice puzzle made slightly irritating by the way the building's instanced, with the screen fading each time you enter or exit. The same goes for the Thieves' Guild.   Anyway, the puzzle was fun, I got what I was there for and was back to Lumbridge to claim the final reward.     Better than the first part, but the conversations with Robin and Darren still lacked any flow and didn't feel in the slightest bit natural.   "Hi, how are you getting on with your task?" *present you with a list of options to choose when you've done everything that's needed* "I'm here to talk about my latest caper..."   Aaaaaaarrrrgggggghhhh!!!!! Other quests shove you straight into the required text when you reach key points, so why doesn't this? (I've a feeling Mod John A is particularly good at making conversations flow well - see the Cave Goblin quests)   -   Sooooooo, the Void Knight Series will be made by Mods Moltare, Nancy and Rathe. Mod Nancy (King's Ransom, Cold War, Hunt for Red Raktuber) should write the conversations. Mod Rathe (Nomad's Requiem) should create any fights. Mod Moltare (Buyers and Cellars) should create the puzzles. Split it up roughly like that, with overlap and collaboration, of course, and all three quests have a high probability of being great. Set individuals on each one and the results are likely to be... variable.
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6
 

Elemental Workshop 3

What a quest. :P   You start off by finding a book (as with the other quests in this series) and reading it. This gives you a bit of background to the Workshop as well as telling you how to make a key to pass through the Body Door.   Having passed through the door, you find yourself upstairs in a giant room with a strange contraption below. From upstairs, the room has a great feel to it that indicates that there's something powerful at work.   The room is giant and reminds me of fighting my way through Gnomeregan simply because of the giant size and mechanical feel   Having spent a while simply staring at the room below, I decided to descend the stairs and have a look around. Some counters and some levers. Fine.   I spent a couple of minutes looking around before deciding that it was probably safe to pull one of the levers. Something in the pit below moved. I pulled it again. Nothing happened. I then pulled a few more levers at random. Some of these made things move in the pit and others caused nothing interesting to happen. After around a dozen levers had been pulled, I decided to work out what was actually happening.   As it was, I couldn't easily see into the pit to keep an eye on what was going on. Looking around the screen, I noticed the 'Change view' magnifying glass which gave a much nicer view of what was happening. A couple more experimental pulls and I'd worked out how the contraption operated. Now, to work out what to do...   OK, it took about 20 seconds to work out what to do. There's one powered motor with a connection hole coming out of it, along with a load of blocks which can be moved around and have holes in them just like the one on the motor. There are then further holes in the wall at various heights that quite clearly want connecting to. There's a counter on the far side of the room with a number 50 on it by default that decreases when you make a move.   The task at hand was clear, so I reset the puzzle and worked on connecting to the first hole. 46 moves later, it was connected and a piece 2 high came down from a raised platform. I made a further 4 moves before being told it was out of power, so went and reset it again. Thankfully, the platform remains lowered upon a reset, so that was fine. Connecting to the next hole took 48 moves, but was easy enough. The third one took two attempts - my first attempt would have needed 56 moves, so I had to try again. Somewhere along the line, I made a wrong move so had to undo it. In the end, it was connected in 49 moves. :D   The bit in the middle had now descended and had 4 holes to connect to. Looking at it, the idea of connecting everything up in 50 moves didn't seem possible, but there were two counters which could be connected to... I started off by trying to connect to the southern counter, but I couldn't see how to do it in under 50 moves, so I had a go at connecting to the northern one. This worked and I was given an extra 50 moves. I could then connect to the southern one and get an infinite number of moves! :) When that counter becomes stuck, it's really distracting.   Back to connecting to the central column and it was easy enough, except I'd managed to get mixed up and put the 2-high one in the wrong place. An extra few moves and that was solved, bringing the total to around 90. The machine was now spinning, so I went upstairs and had a look around. There was a slot for a narrow bar in the building, so I had a go at using the Mind Bar I'd made earlier in the week with it. This didn't work and I actually needed a Primed Bar instead, so went upstairs and made a couple before putting one in the slot.   It seemed like I needed to raise the machine back up again now that it was spinning, so back down I went and moved the blocks into the same position as brought it down in the first place. This worked and I could now press the Big Red Button and make a Body Bar! Unfortunately, two of these were needed, so it was back downstairs to do some (slightly annoying) rearranging to bring the machine down, start it up and raise it again.   Upstairs to the main workshop and it was time to make a Body Body! I tried using it on the Workbench, but was told I needed the Battered Book, so headed across the road to pick one up before making the body!     I then smithed both an Elemental and Mind Body from the additional bars knocking around in my inventory. The whooshyness upon equipping is fantastic and something I'm glad has been continued from the other equipment from the Workshop. Of course, I also read the tome for the extra Defence and Smithing experience. This is done nicely - the defence experience is optional, so it doesn't stop pures doing the quest. Smithing xp is also nice since it's my second lowest stat. :)   This is a great quest with a fantastic puzzle. It's clear what to do by simply experimenting with the levers for 5 minutes, even if the Diagram that you can find in a crate means nothing. It's then an hour or two of pure fun playing around with this giant toy to try and connect things up.   As with the other EW quests, there's a distinct lack of plot behind what you're doing. In the whole of the trilogy as it stands, you don't talk to a single NPC and the entire series comes from a few books you find knocking around in some shelves. From these books, you're an adventurer who wants to explore and find out more about the strange Workshop. You're not being told to do something for a reward from an NPC, you're doing it because you're a great adventurer who wants to better themselves and possibly find out more about the Workshop.   The lack of plot and focus on experimenting with your environment is an amazing feature of this series and I'm left wondering what's behind the rubble to the south of the Mind and Body doors...   The quest is great fun and the self-drive required to complete it is a fantastic idea
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3
 

Icons On The Jagex Desktop

Today brought the latest iCould video from Jagex, with Mod Rob, COO at Jagex.     What I noticed almost instantly was the strange assortment of icons on the desktop in the foreground...     *starts counting the number of WoW icons on my fingers* *runs out and has to continue on my toes*   There are eleven of them!   At the end of the video, there's a zoomed in version of the top corner of the screen, which makes some of the icons slightly clearer.     Beyond WoW, I can see Firefox 3, IE 7 or 8 and Opera 10, but no Chrome. There's also Steam and Adobe Reader as well as a few random folders. The zoomed in version shows the Recycle Bin, Left 4 Dead and Notepad.   After that, my knowledge of blurred desktop icons isn't as good as it could be, so does anybody have any idea what other programs are visible on the desktop?
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I Love My Cannon

Please note that this series of four entries about Slayer, of which this is the third, happened between the 18th and 26th of February, so mentioned item prices may be slightly out of date   With Dagannoths as my Slayer task and a feeling that I wasn't going to be able to complete it in a reasonable time at the Dagannoth Kings, I decided to do it the 'proper' way - with a Cannon in the room under the Lighthouse.   I headed off to the Grand Exchange and put in an offer for a Cannon at max. It took a couple of hours for the offer to fill, but that wasn't a problem. I then started an offer to buy some Cannonballs. For as long as I can remember, these had a value of 200gp or 180gp if you were buying in huge quantities, so it was a massive shock to see that they'd set me back 400gp each - twice what I was expecting. Oh well, money is easy to come by, so I bought 5k of them.   Off to the Lighthouse I headed, then hopped worlds a couple of times to find an empty one. I set up the Cannon and off it fired.   Pwning Dagannoths with a Cannon   Fairly quickly, I noticed that they drop huge numbers of valuable Herb Seeds - Lantadyme, Dwarf Weed, Snapdragon. The only problem with these is that they're tiny and with the Dagannoths dying so rapidly, it's easy to miss one that's dropped. It was with a strange grin on my face that I right-clicked on a Snapdragon Seed, clicked to pick it up, ran over and found that it had disappeared. Maybe I can make money too easily on RS if I can let 100k disappear with little more than a 'meh'.   The task ended quickly, then I was off to fetch another one. This time it was Black Demons - those big things that take ages to kill and are horribly boring. Of course, I had my Cannon, so felt a need to use it. Looking around, it appears that all their locations outside the Chaos Tunnels are in single combat. The Cannon would still be speeding up kills, so that's a good thing.   I headed off to Taverley Dungeon and set myself up. It's still horribly tedious and I hate the task, but the kills are faster so the boredom doesn't last as long. Over the course of the task, I averaged about 10 Cannonballs per kill, not cheap, but I'd say it was worth it.   The Cannon speeds up Black Demon tasks significantly, even though it's a single combat area   A couple of tasks later and I was assigned Bloodvelds. For this, there was an option of heading to an overcrowded Slayer Tower or traversing the Meiyerditch Tunnels and finding the Mutated version to kill with a Cannon. Clearly, the latter was favourable. It's a long trek to get there, but the tunnels look great, so it isn't a problem. Once there, I managed about 3/4 of my task before running out of Prayer Potions, so had to tele out. Because of the long walk to head back, I used the Slayer Tower to finish off the task.   After a gap of a few days, I was given another task to kill 210 Bloodvelds. This time, I was determined that I wouldn't run out of supplies, so over-stocked on everything and headed in. An hour later, the task was finished. 40k Melee, 60k Range and 40k Slayer xp in a hour. Amazing speed and well worth the cost of 3k Cannonballs!   Cannoning Mutated Bloodvelds is extremely fast experience   The ammo may cost a fortune, but it is a truly amazing weapon.   I love my Cannon.
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