How does the update really affect us?
We've all been thinking about this new update. I'll try to summarise what I think has happened and will happen.
At least for a while, Reflection bots are out of the question. Some have gone as far as state that a whole new approach to Java botting is required, which could indicate it would take months, if not longer to get working java bots again. And they'd have to become popular again, and they'd have to face continued changes by Jagex, as Jagex has stated that they will continue to try and stay ahead of bots.
This means that a lot of users will just quit botting in general, and some will go to the only two working colour bots: Simba+SRL or RiD (which I have admittedly only heard of, I don't really know anything else about RiD).
Jagex also stated that at some point they would go after colour bots. I have absolutely no clue as to what that means. Essentially, you can hardly stop a bot that just works as a human player - although a mentally challenged human player with an incredibly long focus span. Unless they're going to throw in major graphical changes and rid them self of the safemode / software mode rendering I don't see any big bumps ahead for SRL.
We should however not think that we are untouchable. We might need new techniques to adept to their client-side changes, perhaps even new functions in Simba to properly read the Runescape client, etc. (Can Simba currently target and perform find functions on the OpenGL client?)
What we should worry about - and I advise caution, is the fact that they completely dropped the unsigned client. Using a signed client means they can access files on your computer, view active processes, etc. Even having something like Simba on your computer (although I really doubt this) might make you look like a potential botter to Jagex. While I am very sure they currently do not employ anything like this, it is probable that they might try something like this in the future. I'm not exactly sure how much they would be affected by privacy laws and all, but we'll have to ponder on this.
As for the future of SMART, I predict that SMART will work again for colour at some (hopefully near) point in the future, but I doubt it will give us Reflection back any time soon.
So, what will happen in the next few weeks on SRL? I suspect we'll come forward with SRL-5. It is not a complete rewrite of the include, but rather the long awaited clean up (removal of deprecated functionality) and features a (nearly complete) SRL documentation. We're in the process of back porting our documentation. Switching to SRL-5 should be relatively painless and would generally only require changing a few include statements.
Going forward, there will be a new interpreter for Simba which will most likely offer proper Linux/Mac (and 64 bit on Windows) support alongside with other features that I cannot give exact details on, as I don't know what those features will be exactly. (Perhaps OOP, perhaps pointers, perhaps another language but that does seem unlikely for now)
We'll also work on integrating the initial script manager in Simba - it's in a somewhat finished state but I assume to actually make it usable and attractive (GUI work mainly) it'll require some more work. We could then have a central repository with all the scripts on SRL - with integrated SRL Stats support, providing updates for all the scripts.
We've survived all this time because of our awesome community - and I see that hasn't changed one bit. See you on the forums and on our IRC channels, #srl and #simba. (on irc.rizon.net)
Let's do this! :)
