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Fatigue system
It happened around the time when Bovine Labs swarmed with cheaters. One day we noticed that the game has been changed. Jagex went in open war with cheaters. This was a new strategy for them, because they had always been claiming that there are no cheats for RS before that day.
Virtually every action in RS made your character tired. That wasn't new, the real surprise was the human check you got every time you would sleep. Whenever you clicked on a sleeping bag or a bed, a picture with a word would appear. You had to type the word displayed to continue. It's of course easy for a person to read the word from the picture, but it's a difficult task for a computer program, especially because every letter was in different angle and font.
We thought that 27th May, 2003 wold be the end of the cheating. Jagex counted on it. But then we found a solution.
The first idea
Initially we thought of the most difficult way to get around this problem. To create a program that recognizes the words in picture and types for us. I created a small program that collected the sleep words and stored them in database. Later I was supposed to build and train neural network for OCR using this data. I collected about 10000 different word pictures but I never created the program.
The first idea did not work. It's a bad solution if we wanted sleepwalker to be public. If Jagex found out about it, they would change something to mess it up. This is however a perfect solution for private cheats. I don't have created a private sleepword typer, but I'm not the only programmer in and around the community.
We needed something more flexible.
The initial sleepwalker idea
It was my idea. I had planned it to work through web. It would store words on web, read sleeping pictures from web etc, people would be able to pay each other for typing. The idea was posted on Bovine labs forums and caused a bit of confusion because this was something completely new. The hope had returned.
The first generation sleepwalker (1-2)
The first versions were created by Evil Cowgod. He took my idea and transformed it, he made SW/FO work in IRC, which is a brilliant solution if you ask me. Cow also is responsible for the names (Coldfeet, Sleepwalker and Fatigue Op) and he recently told me that in his oppinion "Coldfeet" is one of the least successful program names he has ever used.
Sleepwalker 1.0 worked funny. It opened web server on sleeper's computer and hosted picture. Fatigue Operators would connect to sleepwalkers and download picture directly from them, something like p2p. This was not good since it makes it impossible to use for people behind firewalls.
Also the first versions were based on kindness and devotion of the cheaters. There were no FO/SW counts and people would just type for others, receiving back nothing but "Thank you".
The second generation sleepwalker (3-4)
Cow got bored of making sleepwalker soon and I took over. I practically rebuilt it.
The problem with people behind firewall (and I was one of them) was solved by making SW send pictures over IRC as text.
Since there were less and less typers, we had to force cheaters to type for others. The sleepwalker counted words typed (FOs) and slept (SWs) and stored locally in computer registry. This was too easy to cheat and people abused it by changing their FO count. We required a new system to keep track of FO/SW counts.
The third generation sleepwalker (5-6)
From now on users had to create account on web to use FO/SW. Whenever a word was typed, SW informed server and FO count for typer was increased while SW cound for sleeper was increased as well. Also FOs were no more given for incorrectly typed words. This was much more secure.
The fourth generation sleepwalker (7+)
Dylock and Mediator have overtaken SW developement and they're promising lots of changes in the new Sleepwalker. We'll see.
Alternative sleepwalkers
There are several peron to person sleepwalkers with one typer and one sleeper. These are not very interesting, because you fully depend on a single person and if he stops typing, your automater stops as well.
RANCID is working on a sleeper that would be as functional as Coldfeet. Check out RANCID's program here: http://www.zonehacks.com/sltp/
RS is copyright of Jagex Ltd.
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