Runescape Cache

Contains sounds, models, terrain, animations, interfaces, particles....

Every Runescape update since ~2001 has had a centralized storage system whereby all sounds, models, terrain, animations, interfaces & particles are stored in one location. This location is called the cache....

Essentially when you start up the Runescape client a loading screen appears:

This screen generally meant you were about to download all the game assets to your local computer. Why, you ask? As an MMORPG, Runescape runs off of the client server model, meaning one server and many clients. This means the server cannot connect to 2000 players at once and be sending 3D-Models and sound effects for 2000 computers. There simply is not enough bandwidth nor processing power.

Instead, every client or player has a computer which downloads the cache. In this case 2000 players are downloading the cache 2000 times when they start the server up. Jagex had a specialized cache downloading server where this happened independent of their game server.

Something to note, every game server was separated into a world in the lobby...

If you can see in this example, each world is a server that can contain up to 2000 players but the cache downloading server is none of these, but a seperate one the client connects.

Runescape Updates

So, how does Runescape update? Well, when there is an update to any of the game assets the cache is updated on the cache server. The client detects the change and at next start up downloads an updated cache.

*Something to note, Darkan's cache & client are both from ~July 2012, also called revision #727, right before Evolution Of Combat(EoC).