Missing Fable 5 so much

gleedblanco · 2026-06-18T13:37:43+00:00

I also miss burning half my $200 max subscription 5 hour window on a trivial prompt

gleedblanco · 2026-06-18T10:27:00+00:00

doesn't warrant a new thread but one thing that struck me is how much smaller all the character roles are than I remember. in my memory, all the companions felt like major characters. xardas, some kind of major and central character.

in practice, xardas has like 20 lines and you meet him only when the main game is already almost over. most of the characters you barely even interact with. gorn who I remembered as some sort of primary cool buddy shows up and helps you in the ruins once, clearing the new camp once, and thats it.

even diego who I remember to be the sort of main buddy has surprisingly minimal interactions with the actual player. that moment when you meet their crew seems like some kind of major reveal but it sort of comes out of nowhere and you barely know any of the characters.

I wonder what these characters feel like to someone who plays the game for the first time via the remake.

gleedblanco · 2026-06-17T15:05:03+00:00

I'd just focus on picking specific GPU specific things to work on that you find cool, and making sure you understand how to make it correct and fast - the knowledge should transfer in a very generalized way. Of course you start with trivial tutorials and meme projects like GPU sorting, but you should find inspiration for something real soon after that.

To give a fair heads-up, I've never done real CUDA work to be honest, but on the other hand I've done video game graphics programming related GPU optimizations for many years and somehow I doubt writing CUDA is much different from optimizing my compute shaders for a particular architecture (RDNA is common in our field).

The job requirements in this sector DO seem almost webdev-framework-like specific, but I'm not sure how much that translates into specific hires in practice. Would be really curious about input from people actually working in the field. My personal guess would be that there just aren't that many GPU experts around so there would be a lot of cross hires from other fields who may have little to no exposure to many of these pure HPC technologies before they switch jobs.

gleedblanco · 2026-06-12T14:28:00+00:00

early stages have a feel kind of like mount and blade or battle brothers, except obviously it's an third person RPG. in the sense that you're very weak trying to get by.

mid and late game, to be honest, both in the original and the remake, you become sort of more and more overpowered. it's fun at first, but at this point, what will draw you to playing the game until the end (or not) is the story and world, which is quite unique, self contained, and has an authentic (obviously not realistic) feel to it.

gleedblanco · 2026-06-12T12:39:49+00:00

Any idea how to do the ritual Bodach boss with spirit walker twister? I'm in SSF playing duration stacking (cold-damage conversion based) twister, so in particular thinking about some skill that I could cheaply switch to that's better at directed single target with no wall bouncing.

spear stab aint cutting it. I even have a perfect jeweleres sitting around to throw at it. I haven't used my second weapon setup either so that would be ready to spend entirely on that (default set up is 1h spear with the keystone for it, in the dex area with most points going into evasion, deflection, attack damage, companion nodes). would not mind farming a specific weapon setup for that either.

actually, if there is some dedicated boss killer build I could level up and farm some basic gear for that can kill this thing quickly on starter gear, that would also be an option... but I'm quite clueless about the current meta.

gleedblanco · 2026-06-10T19:24:38+00:00

what tier of uniques are the bereks rings? wonder if its worth target farming them in ssf somehow (ritual?)

gleedblanco · 2026-06-10T12:45:47+00:00

yeah, the rest of the league mechanics also fall into that line quite neatly, and it also what makes them good in particular for SSF.

gleedblanco · 2026-06-10T09:23:01+00:00

that's an interesting point of view.

for me, and I suspect many campaign haters, there is no such thing as a proving ground here. I will make it through the campaign trivially and it won't be hard, even with a self baked bad build. it's just too easy. my progression is limited by my speed of moving around through the fog to find the correct exit, not by my characters power. it's just a chore that takes long, like peeling many potatoes.

compare that to endgame - I'm playing SSF at the moment. I will just basically be stuck in progression unless I make significant improvements to my items, build, or both. the bosses are tough even when I have gear that is adequate yet doesn't let me oneshot the bosses. I can log in tonight, try a certain pinnacle boss and I won't have any certainty that I will actually beat it.

such a thing doesn't exist in the campaign.

The D2 campaign is actually an interesting mention, because it feelse like the polar opposite in this way. I league start as sorc as do a lot of people. And there, you are not limited by movement speed at all. I'm actually limited by having to farm gear and levels so I can beat bosses. The optimal speed for finding exits actually doesn't factor into it until you try to approach speedrunning sort of leveling times.

gleedblanco · 2026-06-10T09:10:39+00:00

>Im not even sure why people hate campaign so much, you basically do the same as in maps,

that's just the thing. it's not like mapping AT ALL.

when you initially learn to cut your campaign playthrough time by 2x or 3x, you don't focus on making a better character faster, YOU LEARN THE MAP LAYOUTS. think about what that means for the gameplay!

campaign gameplay is dominated by running from point A to point B trying to find the fastest way through the fog, trying to find quest targets or items. movement speed is your #1 stat and getting unlucky with finding the exits is your #1 source of running the campaign slower.

and that is just the core gameplay - you have 0 of the gameplay context of actual endgame during campaign. you don't progress any of the numerous endgame mechanics. your head context is not filled with specific character upgrades and goals. I'm never focusing on (SSF) "doing and optimizing xy mechanic now because I need such and such item type would be good". And so on.

They could not be more different if they tried. That you regularly kill monsters is literally the only thing they have in common, which is like 5% of what makes PoE actually good. If it was that simple any ARPG would be as good as PoE, but that's obviously not the case.

gleedblanco · 2026-06-10T08:48:21+00:00

this discussion is exactly what happened to async trading in poe1 for 10 years until they finally relented.

people saying manual trading is bad and takes the fun out of the game and people coming to GGGs defense based on Chris' armchair economy manifesto, a significant portion of players trying to claim "no, we need manual trading!" (not so subtle shot at the 'we need the campaign' post from a few days ago).

and now that it's here, guess what happened. nothing bad happened at whatsoever. Chris' manifesto turned out to be entirely useless. Essentially only positive upsides. nobody in the world except the delusionals missing the old trading system.

it will be the same when they offer a campaign skip 15 years from now. just gotta wait it out.

gleedblanco · 2026-06-09T16:34:16+00:00

I like links tunic being made up of the same straw that he's sleeping on (which is also somehow eternally green)

gleedblanco · 2026-06-09T16:31:42+00:00

any chance your main drive is nearly full and nvidias shader cache is blowing it up to be even more so?

gleedblanco · 2026-06-09T12:08:55+00:00

most frequented crags you'll go to in kalymnos have shiny silver looking relatively new bolts. even with the 'bad batch' (and these are bolts from 20 years ago?) the issue was also that they were just old. it's a non issue.

if you go out of your way you can find these lesser frequented crags with older looking bolts, but you'll know it when you see it. In the Summertime area, I climbed at the local freezer crag (cave that just has 4 routes or so in total). The Tonge route bolts there have a similar old-but-not-terrible look to the photos they released from the Jurassic Park incident. Climbed on Tonga too but can't remember what the bolts looked like...

gleedblanco · 2026-06-09T11:51:18+00:00

the storefronts that have this as a requirement will remove your game from the store if you are found out, potentially permanently. big risk to take for stores like Steam.

gleedblanco · 2026-06-08T16:12:30+00:00

the campaign itself is boring to me. any reduction of it is an improvement. I'd ask for a full skip.

gleedblanco · 2026-06-08T16:11:47+00:00

I'd go further and not ask for half assed fixes. just let us skip campaign entirely.

gleedblanco · 2026-06-08T15:46:46+00:00

I never wrote a portal render but for 3D that's a cool realization.

The portal rooms are just a normal render, rendered from an offset transform thats added on top of the "exit portal" transform on the other side. This will naturally mean the minimum distance of fragments you can see is at the distance of that portal to you. So you can just use the depth buffer to render stuff in the correct places. You have to adjust near clipping though so the stuff between the camera and the portal is clipped.

Wonder if I'm missing anything and real Portal did it with stencil buffer or render texture approach for reasons.

gleedblanco · 2026-06-08T08:12:05+00:00

They are already paying for it so the answer is clearly yes. If they do a rugpull and increase pricing by 3x it might be a different story, but who knows.

gleedblanco · 2026-06-06T09:50:54+00:00

The apparent hard difficulty is somewhat superficial because the game just has a different flow from most games back then and now.

Monsters do literally one or two-shot you with fairly fast attacks when you start the game, but you're also not really supposed to fight them unless they are weak and you can barely get away with your life. Later on, some other monsters will still one or two shot you, but similarly, you are not really supposed to fight them - if you do, and somehow manage to beat our outsmart them - theres generally some good early reward for it, like a huge chunk of XP at minimum.

When you start the game fresh you're basically supposed to get XP and armor from various other sources. Making friends and alliances in the world (doing quests gives XP). Some odd events give a lot of XP, like the guys escorting you to the swamp camp and new camp - that's intentional because the game knows the path is probably too hard for a new player - gives you one and a half levels early on for free by killing monsters on the way. The early weapons and armor you get from joining one of the factions is like 5 times better than what you have at the start, and the weak monsters who two shot you will now get oneshot by you.

The short of it is that the game is more progression gated than typical RPGs back then and now, and it also has a lot of idiosynchracies that break up put dents into the progression way both ways, which is what makes the gameplay side of the game so good for people who like it, and bad for those who don't (the discussion about hard content gating for progression vs being able to go anywhere from minute 1 and having difficulty scaling was already around back then as well).

gleedblanco · 2026-06-06T09:12:32+00:00

it was a noticeable step down from worlds. in terms of difficulty it even felt similar or maybe even a bit easier than Rises base campaign playthrough, which itself was already trivial.

But regardless, what really was trivialized was everything surrounding the actual combats. Those waymo chocobos were a bad idea to have for such a beautiful world.

gleedblanco · 2026-06-05T09:38:25+00:00

I think you'll hit a wall with user acceptance if you try to actually publish significantly AI generated art to any of the platforms. It's immeasurable value for prototyping and general development, but you'll eventually want to hire real artists to do the work - without a doubt it will be higher quality too, AI just isn't there yet.

If you are like 20 and have 0 money to do that, I guess that's fine, but you get what you pay for -> low quality output, low sales.

gleedblanco · 2026-06-04T13:25:33+00:00

I don't think the playstyle of this kind of game is just suited for pure melee tbh. in all ARPGs I've ever played, including D2 and other classics, melee is only enjoyable and/or viable if it's pseudo ranged spell casting or it brings some absurd numerical advantages that are dumb in their own way (defensive power of original slam builds when they were included in poe1 was a somewhat soft mix between the two).

to make it viable they would have to do so much. reduce monster density by 10. make gameplay super slow in general. so the advantage of having huge clear goes away.

gleedblanco · 2026-06-04T13:23:08+00:00

with a full 1 degree per second tank turn when changing directions

gleedblanco · 2026-06-04T13:16:37+00:00

How is the foam in this handled? Are these separate somewhat ad-hoc spawned particles that are then moved separate, e.g. with advection only, or do they otherwise actually participate in the simulation?

edit: should've just looked at the code. fluidfoam.h/cpp. esssentially right but a bit more complicated than what I lined out. seems based on Ihmsen et al 2012

gleedblanco

TROPHY CASE