Ten Ton Hamster

RuneScape has added a two part Developmental diary so that fans can read all about what goes into the rework of the game. They also are including some new screenshots.

Here is a snippet of the article:
"The story of the this graphic update project began a year and a half ago, and who better to ask about it than Lead Developer, Andrew Gower: “We've considered a hardware-rendered version of RuneScape a number of times in the past, but it was only two years ago that we felt Java was mature enough.” We knew the things we wanted – textures, shadows, lighting, fullscreen – and it seemed the right time to start, as Andrew continues: “I tasked the Tools team to run a feasibility study to verify if it was possible to do what we wanted to do.”

Mod Nick, Head of Tools, says, “It wasn't long before it became apparent that we wanted to do this, needed to do this to move forward and, more importantly, could do this, so it became my team's main focus.” The Tools team, which develops and maintains all of Jagex's in-house development software, then went about this study. They had to be very thorough, so spent around nine months researching things like how possible all of the features we wanted were, how we would do them, how they'd fit together, etc. Mod Nick says, “The feasibility study had to cover everything we wanted to achieve; we didn't start any work on the game's engine until we could prove, 100%, that nothing would stop us.”

Click here to read the whole article and see more screenshots