That's things like GE, adventurer's log, forum avatars, and many more like that which becomes a huge amount of
RS gold work. Additionally stuff in particular such as the GE will also impact Old School as both games share that module (same as how both games have to receive the same friends chat updates at the same time)Why shelve everything else?First thing to say here is that this has been the status for a long time. It doesn't mean it would never be picked up in future, but that the benefits the rework offers don't offer as much as we could get from other smaller engine features that have also been requested over the years.The rest comes down to the sheer complexity. To start a game engine update is very different to a regular content update, if it breaks you have to turn the game off until you can fix it.
That can be mitigated through beta servers of course, but it's still makes large-scale changes risky.It's especially risky, as to the engine all inventories are practically the same thing. Shops, worn equipment, beast of burden, bank, etc... are all the same thing at the core. Game scripts generally define the behaviour for the inventories. That means making a change in the engine to support bank features doesn't just have the potential to break the bank, but practically the entire game.On top of that there's part-deprecated systems that need to be supported. Any changes that were made to the engine which the client needs to know about would need to be implemented in NXT, java, and HTML5 (in which the comapp is based).
All very different languages, which could break in very different ways. It's not straightforward to just turn these off, but it's obviously ideal only to implement in one location.Why did we say we were doing it to start?We were experimenting with ninja taking on larger-scale projects which were Quality of life rather than the typical ninja fixes which had less impact on gameplay than when ninja first started.We had the means to do engine work in-team and looked into a lot of the technical complexity to
buy old school runescape gold feel like it was possible, even if it would take a long time.