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Flower poker and a bigger home

The gambling house at home, torches either side of the doorway and the chequered flower poker floor visible over the wall
The gambling house at home, torches either side of the doorway and the chequered flower poker floor visible over the wall

Three days of work, and most of it landed at home. There is a gambling house east of the Rest Yard with flower poker running in it, Edgeville has been rebuilt westward with a blood rock clearing and a tree grove in the new ground, and a brand new account now arrives with a stocked bank and somewhere to train.

Highlights

  • Flower poker - challenge another player in the new gambling house, put up a pot and plant five flowers each. Best hand takes everything, and the server holds both stakes from the moment you both confirm, so there is no middleman and nothing to scam.
  • Home has grown west - Edgeville now runs further west, with a blood rock clearing and the Blood tree grove dug out of the new ground. The Rest Yard has slid a few tiles across and the ruins in the south east are gone.
  • A stocked bank on your first login - a new account opens its bank on three full tabs: an endgame kit, supplies, and the iron to adamant ladder, a thousand of each.
  • Three more game modes - Hardcore Ironman on one life, Trained for an account whose combat level means something, and Realism (Extreme) for the far end of the ladder.
  • The hiscores are public - no login needed. Every board is paged, split by game mode, and every player has a page of their own.

New content

  • The gambling house - a walled house east of the Rest Yard with three public planting lanes. Two Duel Arena doorways in the north wall are the only way in or out; inside, right-click another player and pick Challenge to open the staking screen.
  • What a pot may hold - blood money, Armoury gear and boss uniques. Anything you can already spawn is refused, so is any donator bond and anything untradeable, and no cut is taken out of the pot.
  • How a hand plays - both of you are walked down a lane planting a flower every few ticks, and your running rank is called out as it changes. Five Of A Kind beats Four Of A Kind beats a Full House and on down to a single Pair; a draw or a black or white flower replants the whole hand.
  • A blood rock clearing at home - blood rocks and the Blood tree grove now stand together in the new ground west of Edgeville. The Blood prospector and the Blood lumberjack have moved out to their own resources and work them between customers, and talking to either one stops him.
  • Somewhere to train - the teleport window has a Training category, and the first destination on it is a crab beach with fifty rock crabs spread across it, each carrying double the hitpoints they have in Old School.
  • A starter bank - three tabs written the moment you finish the character design screen: the endgame kit and currency slots, potions, food and runes, then the whole iron to adamant tier ladder for an account that has to earn its combat levels. Everything in it is something you could spawn anyway; it saves you a hundred clicks.
  • Watch a tournament from inside it - a knocked out gladiator stays in the arena as a ghost instead of being sent home, and anyone can walk into a bracket already under way to watch as one. The players still fighting cannot see you.
  • The launch giveaway - $100 across two draws of $50, one entry per confirmed vote and one entry for the first two hours you play. Entries open on 1 September and are drawn on 20 September, and the winner takes cash or a donator bond worth 1.5 times it.

Combat and balance

  • Hardcore Ironman - one life, and it is the death that costs you your items that spends it. The account carries on as an ordinary Ironman afterwards; a safe tournament, a duel or the Gauntlet cost you nothing.
  • Trained and Realism (Extreme) - Trained earns its own combat levels at full experience for +5% on every chase drop. Realism (Extreme) trains at a tenth of everyone else's rate for +25%. Both sit on the same ladder as Realism, and you can only ever step down it.
  • A blood rock pays for the ground it stands on - mining one at home pays the safe rate and mining one in the Wilderness pays the Wilderness rate, rather than everything in the world paying the deep rate.

Interface and quality of life

  • The website hiscores - readable without an account, paged twenty five at a time the way Old School pages them, filtered by game mode, with a page per player listing every skill and activity. Typing ::hiscores opens your own page and ::hiscores <name> looks somebody else up.
  • The Scoreboard at home opens the real boards - viewing it takes you to the website hiscores in your browser instead of a ten row window, and the WIKI banner on the minimap opens the wiki the same way.
  • The friends, ignore and chat channel panels do something now - adding and deleting a friend, adding and deleting an ignore, joining and leaving a channel and opening its setup all work from the new panels.
  • A preset loads back into its own slots - a loadout built round a gap comes back the way you saved it rather than packed up against the top of the inventory.
  • Home landmarks are on the world map - the eleven emblems over home's services are proper map icons now, so the world map draws them as well as the minimap, and a player or item dot no longer paints over the landmark underneath.
  • Milestones are announced - filling every slot on a collection log page is called out to the server, as is finishing the whole log, a whole achievement tier, and a finished task list. A single task or a single slot stays a message to you.
  • The wiki covers every monster - 475 monster pages went in, so every drop row on every item page now links to the thing that drops it. The website itself has been redesigned around a new crest and new artwork while we were in there.

Client and performance

  • The plain GPU renderer is the default again - a fresh install draws through it and 117 HD is one tick away in the sidebar. Un-ticking 117 HD now hands rendering back to GPU rather than dropping you onto the software renderer, which is almost never what you were asking for.
  • A renderer that freezes your machine only gets to do it once - if the client dies without shutting down cleanly, the next launch un-ticks the renderer that was drawing and drops one rung, so you can always get back in and change it.

Fixes

  • "Your account is already logged in" - a client that died without closing its connection used to hold your character in the world for a quarter of an hour, or for ever if the machine had frozen. It is dropped within thirty seconds now, and there is a Discord /kick you can run on yourself to end your own stuck session straight away.
  • The quest tab pointed at the wrong tab - opening the bank left the strip highlighting Summary while the panel underneath still showed whatever you had selected. It stayed wrong until you clicked something.
  • Combat Level read 0 - the character summary showed it as zero on every account, and had done since the panel shipped.
  • Three Araxxor upgrades were dead clicks - the fang's own Etch option, a raw fang used on an amulet of torture, and coagulated venom used on Nid all did nothing or said nothing. All three answer properly now, and a second venom is refused without being eaten.
  • The global presets handed out things they should not - one listed a spirit shield, which is a Corporeal Beast drop and not something a preset may mint, and every one of them silently dropped its amulet of glory when you copied it to your own list.