Old School RuneScape is one of the old guard—with the original version of the game being released way back in 2004. This is where I'd usually tell you about the good old days, but I was nine years old at the time. Sorry.
Anyway, that means it has some legacy code issues that need wrangling with—which, per some developer comments on the 2007scape subreddit (thanks, GamesRadar+) will make the game explode if not dealt with. Well—"explode" is a bit dramatic. It just wouldn't allow any more scenery to be added to the game if not fixed. Lest it explode.
Okay, it might not be that dramatic.
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In this thread, which shares a fake screenshot from Mod Ash claiming the doom of RuneScape, Jagex mod Nin actually chimes in and writes: "You joke, but we are imminently going to run out of IDs to assign to models and scenery so we need to do a bunch of work to stop the game exploding soon."
This, as one player points out, isn't the first time this has happened: "Isn't this the second time something like this happened? The first time was around 2018 before [Theatre of Blood] came out, no?" In response to which, Nin confirms: "Yep, around May 2018. Either the developer at the time was in a bit of a hurry (likely) or didn't have much faith in the longevity of the game (who knows), as they only doubled the available capacity."
I did a bit of digging, and I was able to find the 2018 dev post Nin's referring to—my thanks to the OSRS Wiki—wherein Mod Ash saw a crop of surprising ladder icons flooding a room, indicating the presence of "scenery pieces" that weren't actually supposed to be there:
"The two of us spent a while investigating it, liaising with the tools developers to see if our map editor had malfunctioned, and eventually noticed that the Theatre's development branch now had about 32,800 scenery pieces defined, up from about 32,400 in the live game ... those numbers are suspiciously close to 32,768, which is a power of 2.
"We theorised that, just as the game can't handle coin stacks of 2,147,483,648 (2 to the power of 31), it similarly can't handle 32,768 scenery piece definitions (that's 2 to the power of 15)." In other words, they were running out of IDs.
The post claims that Mod Atlas "confirmed our diagnosis, and confirmed with management that raising this limit for OSRS was more urgent than the other work he'd been due to do.
"Over the subsequent week, he was able to rework the engine's handling of scenery to let us define more scenery pieces. That wasn't an insignificant change, and it needed considerable testing from Mod Wolf and Mod Noldor's team of tech QA staff, but it needed doing if OSRS was going to be allowed any more scenery ever again."
By the sounds of it, the team at Jagex are well aware of this upcoming issue and will have more than a week to fix it, but still—it's a good reminder that numbers rule all in the land of videogames, and one should never assume a computer can count to infinity. Because they, er, really, really can't.
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