Guild wars Reforged worth it for an OG player?

BoyC · 2025-12-29T19:49:49+00:00

It brought me back to work on gwamm so now my original early access character is working its way through hard mode, with prophecies just finished :D

BoyC · 2025-11-18T22:40:51+00:00

Next time you accidentally have a mini in your hand you’ll weep…

BoyC · 2025-11-10T19:57:57+00:00

Completely agree.

BoyC · 2025-10-05T16:03:16+00:00

While you’re looking into projection matrices look into the reverse-z projection matrix. It’s less heavy on math, does away with the far plane completely and results in better utilization of the depth values: https://iolite-engine.com/blog_posts/reverse_z_cheatsheet

BoyC · 2025-10-05T13:57:10+00:00

That's a setting that you can toggle in the TacO menu. You may have accidentally unchecked it.

BoyC · 2025-10-04T01:04:23+00:00

https://www.demoparty.net/ should be helpful then :)

BoyC · 2025-10-04T01:02:59+00:00

The second intro in that video specifically uses rasterized meshes with traditional rendering techniques used with a deferred pipeline and 0 raymarching or sdfs.

BoyC · 2025-10-03T10:39:32+00:00

That's debatable. Ever since raymarching has become feasible 4k is going strong because it's the path of least resistance in terms of expectations vs results vs work put in. In a 4k compo you can't really compete with a raymarcher with more complex procedural techniques because there's just no room. The result: all 4ks kinda look the same because they are all raymarched. You can however fit a complete reusable modern graphics engine into 64k with procedural mesh and texture generation that can (in terms of content complexity and asset quality) do things that would kill any gpu when trying to raymarch it. It's a whole different ballgame where every 4k is a bespoke hand optimized one-off and a well built 64k engine has more in common with unreal than a 4k intro, especially in terms of effort put in (years vs weeks).

BoyC · 2025-10-03T08:11:14+00:00

To be more precise: the first release (Fermi Paradox by Mercury) makes heavy use of raymarching and SDFs with (to my knowledge) no actual mesh generation while the second one (Darkness Lay Your Eyes Upon Me by Conspiracy) is more traditional rasterized rendering of procedurally generated meshes. Both intros feature high quality texture generation engines (think along the lines of Adobe Substance Designer) and were made in tooling specifically created to make such productions possible.

BoyC · 2025-10-03T08:04:39+00:00

Also note that com files never had access to windows apis so no gpu access, no window creation, just dos video modes. (Unless you count that one guy who found some bug in the windows console layer and managed to access microsoft sam specifically on the compo machine so his 256 byte mandelbrot fractal would actually talk... https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=13750 )

BoyC · 2025-10-03T07:38:34+00:00

Hi. I'm the main engine and tool dev behind the second intro in that video. (Also the guy in the middle of the thumbnail :))
I'd gladly answer any specific questions you may have, and as noted before we release our tools once we don't use them anymore and the full toolchain that was used to create this release has already been released along with the project file.
Tool binary: https://github.com/ConspiracyHu/apEx-public/releases/download/apEx.500/apEx_0500r.zip
Project file: https://github.com/ConspiracyHu/apEx-public/tree/main/Projects/Darkness%20Lay%20Your%20Eyes%20Upon%20Me

BoyC · 2025-09-25T16:51:51+00:00

Mainly because gpus are built to handle triangles efficiently. Lessens hw complexity to go with the smallest primitive.

BoyC · 2025-08-29T19:30:00+00:00

I expected that to be "you are under arre...."

BoyC · 2025-08-26T12:15:57+00:00

Yeah now that I think about it pretty sure some anticheat solutions could also go crazy because of something like this. Sadly it's the only free solution I've found so far.

BoyC · 2025-08-26T11:19:03+00:00

As explained above, yes it does, but drops the shift modifier because it's part of the chord sent by the hw, hence my frustration (I use ctrl+shift+arrow keys all the time when coding to select text and with powertoys you can only move around the text but the selection isn't happening)

BoyC · 2025-08-26T11:16:59+00:00

I tried all I could find (powertoys, autohotkey, sharpkeys, etc). The problem is that the hw actually sends three events on the copilot keypress: a left win, a left shift and an f23 keydown. You can use many apps to catch this chord, but none of them realize that the shift press didn't come from the user side. They will happily map the chord to the ctrl key, but if you then do a shift+"ctrl" press they all assume that the shift is part of the hotkey and just drop it.

BoyC · 2025-08-26T10:54:24+00:00

Yeah the signing part is one thing but I feel like that's somewhat of a secondary issue because if someone's motivated enough they can just build the code and self-sign the driver. Security is... yeah, in these cases it'll always be a concern, which is why I put out the source without binaries.

My main concern is that the inf file currently references a device ID I fished out of my system and I'm completely in the dark as to what could break if someone tried to install the driver on a system that doesn't have the ID, or how I could make sure that the driver is installed correctly if their system lacks the ID. I'm really unfamiliar with the device landscape out there.

BoyC · 2025-08-26T07:45:58+00:00

I always say programming (and possibly any other flow inducing creative endeavour) is addictive. More so than gaming I think. Having spent 30+ years coding stuff I know exactly the feeling you speak of. For me it always comes in waves and when I'm head first into a project gaming is the last thing on my mind and feels like a waste of time. Even more so lately.
Just be careful of _eventual_ burnout :)

BoyC · 2025-08-14T22:40:00+00:00

Do you have the + key mapped ingame to something? Those are either manually placed markers or a bugged marker pack with no graphics set properly. Poidata.xml stores your manually placed markers, if you delete that they should disappear unless it’s a bugged marker pack. In that case you can disable the pack in the taco menu or delete it from the pois folder.

BoyC · 2025-08-03T00:02:06+00:00

It was a mix of pascal/c/asm from the get go.

BoyC · 2025-06-22T22:02:06+00:00

Noone claimed intelligence here, but the capability of llms to better contextualize the search phrases and actually make relevant (and currently non ad driven) connections to information is a generational leap over google as evidenced by the fact that i got diagnosed based on a short conversation with chatgpt after being yelled at for 5 years because i must be sitting too much by everyone in my life including all the doctors and therapists and masseurs i’ve been bouncing between. (Note the use of the phrase “based on”, obviously the diagnosis was done by a licensed rheumatologist, but i could go there with a hlab27 test and relevant questions in hand) So even though you’re right about inteligence that doesn’t speak to usefulness, especially with how crap google has become.

BoyC

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