About RSC+
RSC+ was first released in January of 2016 during the last official reopening of RuneScape Classic. Influenced by OSBuddy paving the way for "legit" third-party clients, RSC+ was released to make playing RSC on modern computers with their massive 1920x1080 resolutions more enjoyable, to provide quality of life updates, and to provide a level playing field for players whose only alternative to the aging 512x346 locked official client was a closed source bot client (which by the way, did not have resizable mode until about a week after RSC+ released with the feature).
Everything was happy with RSC+ for a couple years and thanks to its open source nature, many quality of life features were added to the client including: an XP tracker, various chat commands, a ground item overlay, the ability to see what herbs you were trading with bot users who already knew what herbs they were trading to you, inventory count overlay, fatigue/chat notifications, etc.
But then one day, May 23rd 2018, Jagex announced that RuneScape Classic would be shutting down.
Somehow we didn't see it coming; we just thought RSC would be up forever. It'd been up for nearly 18 years, why stop? In the week before this announcement, we had 4 active contributors to the project. RSC+ was in kind of a renaissance period of fast development. Think about the ratio of 4 active developers on a client with an active playerbase of only 50 players online at any given time (of which, yes, about 70 to 90% were botting). I remember feeling distinctly optimistic and proud of our work right before Jagex announced they'd be yanking the rug out from under us in about 3 months.
So... what good is a client without a server? Would our work over the last 2 years go to waste? What happened to RSC+? Well, the first thing we did when we heard the announcement was, to add a sad little countdown to the end on the login screen. We fixed resizable mode on Mac OS X , finishing up loose ends we had started. But then we realized, actually, that RSC+ could keep going.
Applying an approach similar to one used in console emulation, we realized that if we could record all the network traffic coming from Jagex's RSC servers, and save it to disk, we could find a way to feed it back into the client, and make RSC+ a tool for software preservation. Using our momentum from the previous week's renaissance of RSC+ development, multiple developers of RSC+ worked together to very quickly prototype RSC Replays, creating the first playable archive of decryptable RSC server data only one day after Jagex's announcement. We would release RSC+ replays to the general public as "stable" on May 29th.
Over the next 70 days, a dozen or so dedicated players recorded RSC+ replays and attempted to document every interaction with the server possible. We documented the crap out of the game. We killed every monster, watched them respawn, picked up every item, watched them respawn, did every quest with heavy scrutiny to find dialogue that no one had bothered to write down before, and we trained every skill. To make sure that RSC is not forgotten or misremembered, we have released these archives freely here.
Perhaps one day, RSC+ will again be used to play RuneScape.
Did you know?
- You can turn every setting off at once to return RSC+ to a pristine state, like the original client. Hit <CTRL-O> and use the presets tab!
- You can drag-and-drop a replay folder directly onto the game window to play it instead of using the login screen dialogue!
- There's a way to queue replays to play one after another: just drag more replays onto the game window at any time!
- You can view the queue by pressing <CTRL-Q>, or using the gui button at the bottom right while a replay is playing. A music-player inspired gui was created to help manage the queue.
- One of the best features of RSC+ is often overlooked — its console window! All text that normally appears at the bottom left is colourized and logged in the commandline interface, which is a lot easier to read, and you can copy and paste from it. Use
java -jar rscplus.jar
or the included "rsc-console.exe" executable to enable this feature. - RSC+ is an industry leader in "amount of keyboard shortcuts". In fact, CTRL combined with any letter of the alphabet will toggle some setting...! We ran out of letters, so, some symbols have been used too, and CTRL-ALT has had to have been used. To see all keybindings, or to reassign them, hit <CTRL-O> and switch to the "Keybindings" tab.
Related Projects
Open RSC
Began in June 2018 after the announcement that RSC would be shutdown,
Open RSC is an open source game that aims to replicate the original Jagex game of RuneScape Classic. The code is open for anyone that wants to inspect it, or wants to contribute to its development. The server can even be downloaded and ran on your own computer. We are a large community of developers, collaborators, content creators, and players.
RSC+ replays are used frequently to ensure that the server is an accurate replication of the original game. The Open RSC server is now authentic enough that the RSC+ client can connect to the server and play the game again! More information on how to connect is here.
RSC Preservation
This discord server was created after the game was announced to be closed as an effort to organize preservation of RSC.
It still exists now, and holds a lot of interesting information about the game, including links to old fansites and other archeological finds.
RSCMinus
RSCMinus is two things:
- RSCMinus is a proof-of-concept 235 protocol compatible private server core. There is very little "game" in the server, but RSC+ can connect to it and it feels right.
- RSCMinus has an RSC+ replay scraper feature. Using this feature, the complete replay archive can be processed all at once to retrieve data efficiently, without a human having to find things themselves.
RSCMinus is mostly used to quickly find answers for questions that are stuck somewhere in the thousands of hours of replays. RSCMinus is still in development.
/r/RSC Discord
This discord server was created as a way for users of the /r/rsc subreddit to communicate using discord.
Two main features of the discord server are #rsc-discussion, which is limited to only discussion about Jagex's RSC, and #private-server-discussion where users from all private servers can communicate and share things they're working on.
There is also the #private-server-information channel where representatives from all major private servers have given a description of their server, so that users new to RSC Private Servers can know what's out there.
Supplementary Files & Materials
This collection of replays is all of them that have been publicly released, excluding those that have been processed to have private chat removed for privacy.
This supplement package is kept separate from the rest of the replays because they have been processed by RSC Minus to remove private chat that the authors of the replays did not want public.
Frequently Asked Questions about Replays
Here's the answers for a few common questions about replays:
- What are "RSC+ Replays" and when did they come out?
- RSC+ Replays are decryptable network data captured on official Jagex RSC servers between May 25th 2018 and August 6th 2018, stored to disk for posterity. Their purpose is to document Jagex's RSC server so that its official behaviors during that timeframe are not forgotten or misremembered. More information is in the About RSC+ section above.
- Why replays? What benefits do they have over video?
- Replays can be easily scraped to search for and obtain data
- they preserve the networking protocol of RSC
- the camera can be manipulated while playing a replay (as well as being able to use all other functions of the client during playback)
- and their file size is very small (6 hours of RSC+ replays would fit on a floppy disk).
- What format are replays stored in?
- Replays are made up of multiple binary files stored in a folder. Inside the binary files are encrypted networking packets of the client 233+ RSC network protocol which can be decrypted with the "keys.bin" file.
- I played RSC using RSC+ between May 25th 2018 and August 6th 2018. Do I have replays?
-
It is possible that you may have replays, although potentially unlikely since recording replays was not automatic due to privacy concerns. You would have had to have clicked the button marked "Record" on the login screen in order for a replay to have been recorded.
If you did have replays, they would be in the same directory as the RSC+ client, in a folder called "dist". You may also search for a file called "keys.bin" to reliably search your entire hard drive for replays. We'd be happy to have any replays you find! Keep in mind that we can now remove chat from replays for privacy, while retaining information related to RSC preservation. Contact us on Discord if you find any replays you'd like to submit.
- How can I use RSC+ Replays?
- Download replays from one of the two links above, make sure you're on the latest RSC+, and either drag the folder onto the game window, or click the "play" button from the login screen. You can press <CTRL-Q> to view all the replays you have queued.
Github
Click here for a link to our GitHub repository.
Direct link to codebase download
Source CodeSoftware license
RSC+ is licensed under GPLv3, which means that it is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
RSC+ is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with rscplus. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
Prerequisites
- Make sure you have Java installed. If you're on Windows, a Java 8 runtime is included in the executable. Version 8 of Java is preferred, but versions up to 11 have been tested. RSC+ has been tested in both OpenJDK and Oracle's JDK.
- Download the RSC+ client from above
- Download replays if desired
Windows instructions
- Unzip the archive to some folder you will be happy for RSC+ to be installed to.
- You will see two executables. One is rscplus.exe, and the other is rscplus-console.exe
- rscplus-console.exe is preferred, because the console is very useful. But if you don't want it, use rscplus.exe
Mac and Linux instructions
- Do not unzip rscplus.jar
- You can double click rscplus.jar if your system is configured to run jar files this way
- The preferred way to run RSC+ is to open the console and run the command
java -jar rscplus.jar
, because this will give you the console window, which is very useful.
More Help
If you have any trouble or further questions, please join our discord server and ask for help there: