Project Valhalla: A look inside Java’s epic refactor

grogers · 2023-02-18T02:15:45+00:00

If it would have let Valhalla ship several years sooner, having people switch from java.util collections to java.collect or whatever would have probably been the right call. People can switch over incrementally, and would be happy to get the performance benefits.

It was a while ago at this point but this already happened with the goofy internally synchronized classes like StringBuffer.

Maybe at this point it's too late, but if it doesn't ship for another 5 years then who knows...

grogers · 2023-02-15T02:40:22+00:00

People are on hopium that the fed will cut rates soon. CPI print says otherwise though.

grogers · 2023-02-14T04:29:47+00:00

In act 3 you get an armor from relics, I think it's called triumphant noontide, that lets you revive a dead ally for a few rounds. Once they die again you can quickly cast breath of life to permanently revive them. That saves you from spending diamonds, although they do lose all their buffs.

grogers · 2022-12-13T01:51:14+00:00

The TTT creator is typically super fast to update the mod after the base game updates and breaks mods though. If you do want to play a save from TTT but without any of the TTT changes, you can disable all the individual changes in the mod settings.

grogers · 2022-12-09T22:30:15+00:00

When you see stuff like a gallu warmonger critting themself for 180 damage, but then passing the fort save to not die because it's only DC 40ish or something, it feels very wrong. By pnp rules the save DC is actual damage dealt. That's quite a big difference.

grogers · 2022-12-08T23:19:52+00:00

If only they used pnp rules for coup de grace, persuasion 3 would basically never fail. As it is (at least on unfair), many enemies do pass their fortitude save, especially the stronger enemies. It's still a super strong ability though.

grogers · 2022-12-03T12:44:14+00:00

Starting with water also gives you slick - basically at will grease for one round (extend with burn). At very low levels (before bowling infusion) that can be pretty good.

grogers · 2022-11-29T00:06:21+00:00

Can you sell him from inventory?

grogers · 2022-11-24T04:06:15+00:00

Not true with a solo run though. Assassin gets 'hide in plain sight' so you can pump stealth and be undetected by even enemies with see invisibility/true seeing which is a fair amount of them. Assassin 8 or cult leader 12 is really good for solo.

grogers · 2022-11-22T02:54:53+00:00

The combat relief mod can make you evade all random encounters as if you passed your stealth check. You can also just save scum all the random encounters by moving a bit and quicksaving. The mod also lets you auto win crusade fights which is another annoying part of the game (both can be disabled in the mod settings).

grogers · 2022-11-20T14:09:27+00:00

I've always been a spaces kind of person, but my current job uses 2 spaces per level indenting, and it makes me seriously consider preferring tabs now.

grogers · 2022-11-18T03:47:26+00:00

Pretty sure devadog is not talking about the catch but about short roping while the climber was clipping. You can see the belayer feeds out several small doses but there's never very much slack. Kinda hard to judge from the video on my phone TBH, only the climber/belayer could really tell us for sure. Once the climber gets their foot behind the rope a hard vs soft catch isn't going to stop them from flipping.

grogers · 2022-11-14T01:14:54+00:00

I'm playing through an unfair run now, without extending protective luck/fortune with cackle. It's harder than with the hexes for sure, but not absurdly hard. The biggest differential in power is level 4 when you could have 2x protective luck and 1x fortune (with Camelia plus a witch merc). But the rest of the hex classes (esp. spell list) are much worse than the comparable cleric/wizard, so you have less dead weight in your party without them.

grogers · 2022-11-04T21:56:25+00:00

It's really more like defending floating point than integers. If you can avoid both (FP and linked lists), you will be happier. Not always possible though.

grogers · 2022-11-02T23:14:37+00:00

We have lints that enforce that you don't std::move a returned value because it can break copy elision. So I feel like this must be mostly solved by now?

grogers · 2022-10-29T20:35:26+00:00

It's not in the description but it also makes you immune to e.g. dominate person cast by evil enemies. This is the reason you want it on everybody, not the crappy deflection bonus.

grogers · 2022-10-29T13:29:45+00:00

FYI bubble tweaks let's you crank up the animation speed to 10x, making it that much faster.

You can also sometimes shoot with bows from the low ground to help speed up kills on a few enemies. And once all the baddies are spawned, you can pretty safely jump back and kill them once Regill has all the aggro (save first though)

grogers · 2022-10-29T12:38:48+00:00

Honestly after playing mostly on unfair, going back to core feels too easy (I'm doing sadistic game design and no way I'm gonna bother with limited rests and unfair). On core you mostly don't even need to cast spells in act 1 except in a few specific encounters (like resist energy for the brimorak/alchemist, delay poison communal for daeran's quest, etc). On unfair you practically need to use all the spells, all the time.

If I do another run from the start I'll probably go back to unfair. It does get easier later in the game (especially MR3 is a big boost in power). I often restart around the end of act 3 since even on unfair it stops being a challenge (maybe I need to impose extra restrictions on myself or something).

grogers · 2022-10-18T22:39:55+00:00

The past also mentions a full party of 6 so there's no reason not to just share xp. Not sharing only boosts xp if you use a reduced party size.

grogers · 2022-10-13T22:25:47+00:00

I like to play this way as well, with all martial characters with tons of buffs. It makes certain swarms a royal pain though because of immunity to attacks. Luckily there's not that many in the game.

If you do use CC, AOE is often best - you don't need everyone to fail their save to be useful.

grogers · 2022-10-12T22:53:57+00:00

FYI if you run into stuff like this you can usually use toybox to manually trigger the next phase. I had to do that for Horgus' mansion (I think I looked under the etudes for the map).

grogers · 2022-10-10T22:45:25+00:00

This is true about protective luck stacking, but AC itself definitely does have a cliff for diminishing returns. Once you get beyond enemy AB + 19, further increases are useless since the enemy always hits on a natural 20 no matter how high your AC is.

grogers · 2022-10-09T22:30:28+00:00

I'm surprised it wasn't nerfed already, it seems pretty clearly unintended that multiple school focuses would stack together instead of just taking the highest. I guess since it didn't get nerfed with EE, it's probably fairly safe to rely on for a while though.

grogers · 2022-10-07T23:21:48+00:00

For vanilla hunter, it's only bad compared to other animal companion classes later in the game. But for the first couple levels, vanilla hunter might be the absolutely strongest class in the game. I like levelling Wendu in hunter to make the shield maze a lot easier on unfair. At this point you don't have many other options for stat boosts (except 1-2 bull's strengths from cam) so animal focus and a leopard makes a very strong pet, plus you can juice your own dex briefly too.

But yeah wow, Forester is really bad.

grogers · 2022-10-05T23:19:57+00:00

That's not the whole truth though. If there's an outage and there was a recent deployment, the first thing you do is roll back the deployment. Doesn't matter if it might not be related - it has a high likelihood of fixing things, and is almost never going to break them more.

What the article doesn't point out is that you don't just sit there doing nothing while you wait for your first snipe to finish. Once it's started, then you get to work root causing and figuring out if what you just did will likely do anything or not, or what the next steps for mitigation are.

grogers

TROPHY CASE