The Daily Llama

RuneScape releases new content about every 3 days, but they have missed a few small tweaks that they really need (in my opinion).

A real client

Okay, you can download an official “client” for RuneScape.  However, all it does is embed IE6 and it can only be run on Windows.  Windows may have the highest current market share, but that’s mostly Windows XP.  Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP on April 14^th, 2009.  At that point, Windows users will have to either pay $200+ for Vista or switch to Mac or Linux.  Basically, the client needs to be made non-windows based.

Also, since the client still needs Internet Explorer to run, it may be removing the visible clutter of a browser, but it’s definitely not removing the CPU and RAM clutter.  I’m better off using a bookmark in Firefox than running an insecure browser inside a client that does nothing but RuneScape.

Here’s how they can change it to be better:

Make the client load the game applet directly and run it without the clutter of the web browser dragging it down.  It could even have a cache of the game applet (verified by a checksum) that would save Jagex a bit of bandwidth.

A news RSS feed

I subscribe to most websites by RSS.  That way, I can read all the news in one place, and if I want to find out more, I can click on the title (and I don’t have to go to every single website/blog that I read)

Jagex could relatively simply make an RSS feed for RuneScape news.

Offline messaging

There have been a lot of times that I wanted to message someone about something, but I didn’t know their email address and they weren’t online.  A simple thing to do for Jagex would be to store the messages sent to a player when they were offline and have something in the options menu to read them when the user logged in.  There would probably be a notice like the one you get when the GE updates.

The Legend of Sir Soybean has been rated by Alex 43 and Dex.  You can read about it here: http://llamaslayers.net/sir-soybean/guest-post-manya-rates-your-stories/.

Although there are no llamas in LlamaWorld, there is plenty of JavaScript.  In fact, almost the entire world is JavaScript.

At the moment, most of LlamaWorld’s code is directly taken from an example on the Mozilla Developer Center.

If you beat the first (and currently the only) level, please take the survey when you are asked.  I’ll be posting the results on my blog later as soon as there are enough to be worthwhile.

The Legend of Sir Soybean is being written, and it turns out I’m just a figment of someone’s imagination!  How sad!

Excerpt from the translated diary of Sar Sobrun, page 51,382

I have been spying on the humans again.  I know, my mother told me that I should never go anywhere near humans for fear of being seen, but sometimes, I just can’t help myself.  I stay shielded, so they can’t see me, but somehow, the human children have started to make up stories about mystical elves by the name of Sir Soybean, a frighteningly close name to my own.

I’m just glad that they are children and Sir Soybean can be passed off as imagination.  If they were adults, who knows how long I could be grounded.  And even worse, what would happen to Alfstad if the humans became a threat?  It wouldn’t just be me in trouble.  All the elves would lose their home!

I’ll just have to hope that it’s only a coincidence and Sir Soybean was the result of childhood imagination.  If it isn’t, I’ve created a gigantic threat to all elves just by looking at some children who I thought couldn’t see me.

Do you like the story so far?  Want to read more?  Then head on over to The Legend of Sir Soybean!

Generic cat, generic shirt

A while ago, I posted a picture of Sir Soybean in a red shirt.  Now, I’ve decided that that shirt model was too ugly, and since the cat system is being redone (so all the rendering is client-side), the model was completely worthless.

As the cat modeling splits into two different models, Kat and I must each create clothing models.  Kat likes to make them in non-antialiased PNGs (antialiasing makes it harder to render as SVG and increases the filesize), while I like to make the clothing models in Inkscape on top of my kitten model and then remove the kitten from the image.

Kat had the idea to make a generator for clothing just like there is a generator for cats.  Here’s the chat we had about it.

Kirby has suggested that we add texture to cats on VKitty, and the only thing stopping us is a lack of knowledge of texture in SVG.