External APIs for Runescape? Please…
As I wrote in the ‘How to read Runescape highscores?’ article, there is one API (Application Programming Interface). Specifically an API that allows programmatic access to information from the Runescape highscores. This is the good news. The bad news is that it is the only Runescape API available for fan sites to build their services on. Taking in account ‘we choose to ignore fan sites’ position Jagex has, it is not very surprising. Actually, the fact that the ‘highscore lite’ API was released was indeed a pleasant surprise. At least it gave a hope that more APIs may be released some day. That’s why this article is here. It is basically a wish list of a fan site developer with a touch of hope on top of it…
The list is not very big, but not a small one either. I separated the wish items into two categories with self-explanatory names: ‘badly needed’ and ‘nice to have’. All right, here we go.
Badly Needed
- Access to skill levels/exp for every player and every skill. Not just skills from highscores, but all of them. And I don’t care about ranks. It is harder and harder to get into highscores nowadays; most of the players do not have all or even half of their skills in highscores. If it is too much to ask, maybe access to levels/exp for skills which are over 20 or 30.
- Possibility to get a list of quests completed by a player as well as possibility to check if a particular quest was completed by a player.
- Possibility to check if a particular player is a member or not.
- Access to a player quest points number.
Nice to Have
- Access to a player combat number. It would be also nice to finally find out what the real combat formula is.
- RSS feed for Runescape news.
- Monsters database with an API to get monsters stats by name as well as make it possible to search by other criteria.
- Possibility to check status of the achievement diaries tasks. Same for the Varrock museum and Bones and Rags man.
The list may go on of course, but other things I am thinking about are not realistic, so no point in asking for them. Things like statistics about monster kills for each player, statistics about player death and reasons and such.
Well, I guess, that’s it. Now comes the hoping part…
Posted by vrunewise (owner of Runewise and Runescape Reader’s Digest)
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(11 votes, average: 1.55 out of 5)
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September 25th, 2007 at 5:04 am
Monsters database with an API to get monsters stats by name as well as make it possible to search by other criteria. Lunar magic “Monster Examine” is used for this, but anyway good ideas, some which I don’t really think that are badly needed. It is from a runewise perspective ofcourse :p .
vrunewise Says:September 26th, 2007 at 12:35 am
Yes, this wish list is primarily for creating services like ones at Runewise. But it is not just Runewise, there are other fan sites providing programmatic services to the players. Everyone would benefit from additional APIs to Runescape data. I believe, including Jagex, as the players will get richer gaming experience by using such services. These services may even be viewed as providing a competitive advantage over WoW and other games.
knifestorm Says:September 27th, 2007 at 5:57 am
A short time ago Jagex tried to make all third party apps “illegal”. There were “riots” over SwiftSwitch and Jagex backed down. Still, Jagex’s position seems to be that they don’t like third party apps. They added clan chat, world switching and other features [i] specifically [/i] to make such utilities less desirable. It seems unlikely that they will expose any APIs to give third parties [i]more[/i] power.
An exception was made for Highscores for some reason. I think they saw how popular dynamic signatures were, and decided that they couldn’t squash them and they also decided that they didn’t want to make dynamic signatures of their own, so they tossed us a bone.
Any of the features you ask for would only be made available if they were already present in the game or in the official website (again, Jagex doesn’t want to give 3rd parties power).
In other words: don’t hold your breath waiting for this stuff.
Joost Says:October 1st, 2007 at 11:16 pm
The lite version of the highscores was only to put down the pressure on the servers.