Veiva

There was an Avatar movie? Oh come on, it couldn't be *that* bad... it's not like Shamalaonfgwhatever directed it, right?

Three limbs in one trip within 10 minutes. Not bad. Though in the past ~4500 kills I've only had 10 dragon limbs (only 3 in the first 3000, but 7 in the last 1500, haha), which is considerably lower than anticipated. Then again, it's not entirely unexpected, because I had an overall drop rate of 1:230 for a long time. Now it's back to 1:252, which is close enough to my estimate of the real drop rate. Not bad, all in all!

I fell asleep sometime after 6:50 pm. Woke up at 9:20 pm and already had three dreams. Now I'm too awake to fall back asleep. Sometimes I wonder if I have a sleeping disorder and that's the root of all my problems. But I don't think I'll ever get it through my current doctor anything but the notion that I have depression and whatever else. It's nice having an overworked state-funded organization help! North Carolina didn't expand medicaid, so let the poor fall through the gaps. The Republican way!

American politics is worse than you'd care to know. Rich people champion politicians who grovel as said rich people's feet, get their laws passed regardless of what the general population wants or votes for, repeat. After politicians 'retire,' they end up on boards or otherwise are benefited by said rich people. Parties don't exist except on wedge issues (abortion, gay marriage, drugs). Also, rich people is not limited to those with blood. Personhood applies to corporations. Have a nice day.

I'm not sure what you mean by dragonfire. Yes, the point is to avoid using prayer potions. If you swap on the demon horn necklace after every kill or so you'll won't need to bring prayer potions. Well, thinking about it, you probably only need a lot of prayer points if you also switch the 95 prayers since the overheads drain very little (but note that using the 95 prayers is significant and should be done). edit: Do you mean the dragon rider amulet? If so, no, it's not worth it. Blood amulet of fury will trigger about 2 times a demon dealing much more damage than any boost from the amulet (though I guess that's only helpful if you have a blood amulet of fury).

No. You'll have to kill the dudes in the GWD again. I'd also like to note warpriest is worse at TDs than dragonrider (if you don't have attuned ectoplasmator and demon horn necklace) which is worse than void. You don't take damage often enough at TDs (even if you use shadow tendrils every 45 seconds). Healing can be done via soulsplit flashing and EEE (though that should be rare).

Tormented Demons. Increases KPH by a noticeable amount. Though I don't know how relevant this is considering Tormented Demons are only what, 5m-6m gp/hr now?

I have like 30 kills and got bored :s I get bored if I kill them more than a few hours a week now (though this is the first time I've played more than half an hour in the past... 3 months?), but I find what makes them boring is luring and inefficiency. I mean, if you're constantly readjusting your gear, moving around, and choosing the right abilities, it's actually pretty fun for a bit. Heck, I even switch amulets often enough (demon horn and blood amulet of fury) on top of everything else. In total I've spent 240 hours in the past year down there. Araxxor I find is atrociously boring because it's the same thing... over and over. It doesn't even make too good use of EoC mechanics/abilities which is a shame. Even 5 minute kills would be too long for me. I got my leg and never went back. Tormented Demons are fun because there's a honest risk of dying simply because you aren't quick enough to readjust the demons or just DPS them before you get too many on you (again, if you don't lure; anyway, luring greatly reduces KPH). As well, I used to try out a lot of different strategies to try and find the most efficient setup, which means I was constantly learning. In the end, it's all a matter of opinion, but so it goes!

Almost 16k recorded kills... Nearly 29k logged. 123 limbs, 111 claws, and 72 armour pieces. [hide=Also got two limb drops.][/hide]

Medication is part of the problem (and sadly part of the solution). Side effects vary between medications and I fear involuntary muscle movements, a side effect that can be permanent. I understand 'atypical' medications have a much lower risk, but this is a pretty big side effect and I can't find solid numbers on the rate, which worries me more. I'd prefer a (much) lower dosage and therapy, but that doesn't seem like it's going to happen soon, and even then, effectiveness may vary. Of course. Thank you. This part sucks x100 As well, I sometimes I wonder if psychiatrists value kickbacks from pharmacies more than their patients. I swear, when I was advised Latuda, it was scripted...

Man, this is something I wouldn't want :\ Good luck to you. It's not fun. I've been keeping notes of most of my problems for a while now. After I saw the eyeball, I decided it's time to collect and sort them. At first I didn't date the issues/events (only have been since the beginning of this year). I'm getting 'help' but it's no use. Had to switch from a private psychiatrist because of income issues to a state-funded thing, no good. Trying like heck to find a therapist (and hopefully a good one). I've also decided to keep a 'diary' starting tonight, of my daily life. Simple things, nothing fancy, noting various events of my life and how my problems impact me. Because for obvious reasons people don't understand mental illness. At least I'm still mostly in control of my thoughts and experiences (or so I tell myself).

Well, I had my first hallucination. Was getting out of my bed to use the bathroom, saw a light out the corner of my eye, near my closet. Looked over and saw a shining eyeball. I'm not going to fall asleep now. First time mentioning this here on Tip.it in public, but I suffer from 'psychotic disorder NOS', though I often wonder if that's just an easy label I was given. I've relapsed several times in the past year, been fighting taking medication that has little to no effect on the symptoms (only causing horrible side effects), and now I can add I saw a floating eyeball to the list.

[qfc]15-16-261-65604552[/qfc], page 61 Jagex needs to pay for anyone who designs content a few courses in game design, because obviously they can't learn on their own.

Small update: darklight is super overpowed after Dimension of Disaster. You can hit more with melee without the demon switching its prayer (how much more, no idea, probably 2.5x more) and the accuracy/damage is insane. So best setup would be something like melee + mage with Steel Titan. With mage gear/ability bar, toss holy water, force the demon to mage prayer, annihilate with melee, finish with mage. Side note: destroy's next hit will always go through even if it would have triggered a prayer switch from earlier damage. Or is that assault? One of them at least, maybe both. I wouldn't be surprised if with some refinement 190+ kph is possible now with just melee/magic. At least 170 or 180. edit: darklight nerfed on demons, ignore.

Is there a Ditto title. I don't think there's a Ditto title. I'm sad.

In regards to graphics, Java has little impact on the graphics ability of any game. RuneScape's rendering pipeline is terribly inefficient (you can see it yourself by running it through apitrace). There are so many redundant and contradicting calls that affect graphics state it's insane. The reason is that the GPU does all the work (in brief). The CPU, at best, pushes data to the GPU (RuneScape does it way too often...). You can get 10k+ draw calls in any language (unless the native transition is horribly inefficient, which is not the case with e.g., Java or C#) on a decent GPU with little effort optimizing the behavior. RuneScape is just a pile of spaghetti and is generally CPU bound for various technical reasons. They could, in all honesty, have done the same work in Java. But Java is not fit for consumers anymore. As the dev log noted, it's being deprecated by common browsers. I know you are trying to generalize it but that's not at all how it works, even from a general standpoint. JNI allows Java to explicitly use the GPU. This is what RuneScape does. You always use the GPU to render. RuneScape is not so much bound by rendering on 'gaming computers' as it is by the CPU. C++ is a native language, it does not just run on the GPU to divide up work. It's not smart or knowing. The architecture of a standard processor is completely different from the graphics architecture. You can cross compile a subset of C++, but it's just that: a subset. I'm sure Jagex employees aren't stupid. They will hopefully make use of the CPU cache by using proper allocation strategies and algorithms (i.e., make the engine operate on data, thus avoiding the cost of virtual dispatch and such). They will hopefully make use of increasingly multicore CPUs by task pooling or some such mechanism where work can be divided between cores. And their rendering pipeline better be optimized for modern architectures.

Now that would be awesome, but what exactly is stopping them from doing this with the current client/setup again? I have a ton of free hard drive space just sitting there... The most likely reason for this is that they would have had to refactor large portions of the RuneScape client. Why do this again in Java when they can opt for C++ and ensure performance in areas Java does not excel?

I love all the Dunning-Kruger sufferers on various places trashing Java and proclaiming how much better C++ is without knowing any of the technical details. If I had the time, I'd correct every one of them, but oh well!

Funnily enough, I got my ectoplasmator from a Tortured soul while fighting the QBD...

Why? Probably because that's less likely to break if you change things around later, just sound programming practice. On the other hand since it's a blog and not a corporate/professional website I don't see that it would be too much trouble to patch up should that occur at some point o.O. Web design isn't programming. Only benefit I could see is if you visit the site with a sub-960px resolution, but... It works fine on any mobile I device I tried in landscape and portrait.

Why?

Anyone have a moment to spare? I've been working on my portfolio website for about a week now, gathering all the projects I've done over the years and compiling them together (on my website and on Github). It's still WIP but I'd like feedback. You can find it at http://aaronbolyard.com I'd post this in the gallery but it's so dead it makes me cry.

I would say Jagex should require textures, but then I remembered their game renderer is extremely inefficient. I mean really, RuneScape's requirements are too high for its graphical fidelity...

Clues were never any good (or objectively better) I think. I once had a clue worth under 1k back in 07 or whereabouts (it may have been 05 or 06). Sadly I don't know what level it was. I'll try and find the screenshot (it's somewhere in my backups...).

Tormented Demons may be good if you can't stand glacors. In fact, they may be the best alternative. I haven't played RS in weeks (and haven't been to TDs in months), but I don't think the rates would be much different now. 36% chance of blues, 22% of crimson (3 charms per drop). They're a decent experience as well, especially if you have ascension crossbows (~170k+ range xp/hr). Limb drops should more than cover the cost to 120 summon, if you don't have it already. At 140 kph (this is reasonable at tier 85+ gear with about 20-30 hours experience), you'll get 150 blues/90 crimson on 'average' over a long time span. In 240 hours, I received 31k blue and 19k crimson (average of 120 kph over the year trying all kinds of methods, with all kinds of gears, etc). Spring cleaner + limb drops at GE mid would be 8m gp/hr gross. They also require more skill and attention than glacors. I find glacors to be mindnumbling dull but only get bored of TDs if I no-life it.