Tensorflow

Hello (again), everyone!

I'm Dave, a maxed Ironman from way back - had to take a break from Alora due to finishing up graduate degree and relocating back to the US. I have a great new job, and time to kill after work, so I'm looking forward to jumping back into the action.

Goals: finish up my 200M RC xp, and eventually get back into maxing my UIM (ScikitLearn) once I'm back in a groove.

Good to see you all again.

- Tensorflow

Episode 1 of a series I'll be doing.

See Topic 44434 to make a suggestion about something you want to learn about in a future episode.

EDIT: Episode 2 is coming soon, still ironing out exactly what will be talked about. However, figured I'd leave this here - here's a time lapse of a coding stream I did on the last server I worked on. This was about 3 weeks into development on the Araxxor boss from RS3, adapted to legacy style combat. A couple of months after this stream the boss went up for beta testing... Was a great project to work on. Hopefully you enjoy a look into the dev life on a late night!

My first 200m skill I'll be going for is 200m runecrafting. I think it's a super chill skill when doing Soul runes, contrary to popular belief.

I do occasionally try-hard death runes, and bind a ridiculous amount of ess/hr, but I just finished up the last of the pure ess I've gotten from PvM, so I'll be doing souls the rest of the way (that's IF I don't break to kill zulrah if I want to do some death rc'ing). My goal is going to be between 3-5m xp per day at least, with grindy days being closer to 8-9m xp. Keep in mind I'll still be doing farm runs / playing my uim so I might not be super efficient.

Here's the current state of affairs:

Update 2:

Okay I've been going super try-hard this weekend @ soul altar... ~40m xp gained.

Good evening, everyone.

Every time I get invested in a RSPS in any capacity, either as a player, administrator, or developer/co-owner (all roles I have actively participated in on numerous servers), I enjoy sharing my knowledge about the underlying aspects of private server development. I am a software developer by trade, so I feel I can offer a unique take on the private server community in general - especially the development side of things.

Alora has been one of the most receptive, awesome communities I've had the chance to be a part of, and I don't see myself playing another server for quite a while. So, I'd like to share some knowledge, experiences, and opinions I have regarding developing servers, and perhaps alter your perspective on how content is actually added to the game.

What I'm considering doing is an intro to private server development from a high level, non-instructional point of view. What I mean by that is, I'll dig up key parts of an old source I worked on as a developer (of which the server name will remain unannounced) and explain the inner workings of the game. However, this time, before making the video, I'd like some community input on what specifically they'd like to see in the code, and what they'd like to be explained.

What are you guys interested in? Is there anything you'd like explained? It can be high level abstract stuff, like instancing a region of the map for a private fight, or even specific little game interactions, like picking flax and adding the item to the inventory.

Unless you're very familiar with Java and/or object oriented programming languages, the code is going to be completely foreign to you - but I hope to illustrate how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. Is this something you all would be interested in, or is it a waste of time? It'll probably take a decent amount of effort to make, so I want to be sure people will actually find value in it.

Again, just to reiterate - I'm not going to be doing a video "HOW TO GET YOUR DANK PRIVATE SERVER UP AND RUNNING IN 3 HOURS" - this is for general education purposes only, and will in no way promote moving to other servers, or branching away from Alora to compete. In fact, the source I'll be using is a 718 revision server - nothing like OSRS.

Cheers, and looking forward to hearing from you all.

Best,
Tensorflow (Dave)

Alora has a great feature that I've never personally seen on other servers, being the npc drop table lookup. It's an excellent interface, and I use it at least once a day.

However, I and many others could possibly benefit greatly from a similar interface that accepts an item lookup key (item name) and fetches the NPCs that drop the queried item. Implementing this is not as trivial as simply displaying a single NPC's drop table, and has a few more roadblocks in development. One limitation I see to implementing this in game would be if there are a large number of monsters that drop a particular item. The length of the full list of NPCs might exceed the number interface slots. Furthermore, how do you handle trivial item cases (bones, ashes, etc)?

This is of course only a minor QoL update that doesn't take priority over important bug fixes and large-scale content pushes. Furthermore, the effort it would take to A) find a new interface to support the full list of NPCs or B ) design a new interface might outweigh the added value to the game.

All of that being said, this feature can certainly be developed successfully and elegantly if some time is put into it.  If an in-game admin+ has access to a drop table file, I'd be happy to develop an out-of-game application that accomplishes this suggestion and make it accessible to the community, awaiting its eventual integration (or non-integration) into the game. I of course understand if there is hesitance to distribute the file to 'unknown' sources, althought I don't believe an NPC drop table file is anything too proprietary. If this suggestion interests anyone, and if an admin/developer sees this, I would of course be open to a discussion/vetting procedure.

The tool I envision is a simple lookup interface that takes an item key (item name), and returns the list of NPCs that drop the item, along with the corresponding drop rate.

Cheers,

Dave (Tensorflow)

PS My apologies if this is already an open suggestion - I quickly thought of it in passing and decided to just make a post before bed.