Fablestar Games

Since this morning's gm, Fable 5.2 ran 4 more sessions in Unreal and Bayhaven became a crime game: - any car can be taken: pull the driver out, or try a parked one and set off the alarm - heat: five levels, and the city checks who actually saw your crime. Witnesses phone it in, the Sheriff's show goes live and the chat starts talking - the Sheriff: cruisers with light bars and sirens box you in from different roads, deputies chase on foot, and if they catch you you're Booked - downtown got real buildings: Epic's free city pack on all 172 lots round the Spire Traffic pulls over for the siren. People film it on their phones. 3 hours, $33.91 of compute. Fable ran its credit down to the last few dollars, so we topped it up with 52.5 USDC of creator fees: $500 of fees spent on compute since launch. Payment: etherscan.io/tx/0x31e2f723ec… Watch it: fablestar.games/watch.html

Session 36 is in: any car in Bayhaven can be taken. Walk up to a car stopped in traffic and it's yours. The driver gets pulled out and runs for the kerb, and you drive off with that car's own handling. Parked cars work too, but every other one is locked and the alarm goes off. 34 of 34 tests pass. Fable ran its credit down to the last few dollars finishing it, so we topped it back up: 52.5 USDC of creator fees for compute, and session 37 started minutes later. That's $500 of fees spent on compute since launch. Payment: etherscan.io/tx/0x31e2f723ec… Watch it: fablestar.games/watch.html

gm. Here's what Fable 5.2 did overnight. Yesterday afternoon we moved Bayhaven into Unreal Engine 5. Since then Fable ran 11 sessions, 12 hours of work, and built: - a city of two districts, with the Spire at the top of Coral Boulevard - a real dusk, a clock that turns day into night, neon that switches on by the hour, and rain - traffic lights at 109 junctions, and traffic that obeys them - a HUD, a minimap and a full city map - a player who gets out of the car and walks - people on the sidewalks, waiting at the crossings Every screenshot went live on the site as it was taken. The buildings, palms and the Heron are our art department's models. The cars and people are Epic's free libraries. Every line of code is Fable's. $119 of compute, all from creator fees. 6 days to GTA 6. Watch it build: fablestar.games/watch.html

Session 30 is in: Bayhaven has a clock. Time passes in the city now. Fable wrote the clock, and the street follows it: the sun drops, the sky goes from blue to purple to night, windows light up one by one, and every neon sign on the boulevard flickers on at its own hour. It added rain too. The road soaks through and the puddles ring under the neon. These are Fable's own shots: 5:30 PM, 7:30 PM, 9:00 PM, and a puddle in the rain. 56 minutes, $9.82 of compute. All 29 of its map checks pass. Watch it: fablestar.games/watch.html

Session 29 is in: Coral Boulevard got dressed. Fable spent 78 minutes making the street feel lived in: 106 shop signs, benches, bins, planters, bus shelters, and palms that sway in the wind, placed by a graph it wrote instead of by hand. It parked cars along the kerbs too: Epic's free cars, repainted by Fable in Bayhaven's colours, with blank plates and the badges painted over. It also caught a mistake in its own map. The Spire stood 560 m too far north, so it moved it back to the top of the boulevard where it belongs. All 37 of its checks pass. $10.97 of compute. Watch it: fablestar.games/watch.html

This is gonna hit hard once we tranform all these block assets written in code to ultra realistic assets. But for now, here’s a sneak peek.

Session 28 is in: Fable fixed the sky. Two sessions ago its dusk was a flat orange wall. Fable dug in and found the air in the scene was 36 times too thick. It thinned it, and now there's a real sky, clouds and a low sun. It also gave the road a wet look you can turn up or down with one number, put the lamps back on the boulevard, fixed the Heron's wheels and built its first camera sequence: the Heron pulling up with its brake lights on. All of it from code it wrote, shot by its own cameras. The buildings, palms and the car are our art department's models. 40 minutes, $7.99 of compute. Watch it: fablestar.games/watch.html

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Session 25 is in: the Heron drives in Unreal. Fable brought the Heron, our hero car, into the game and made it drivable: real vehicle physics, controls, a chase camera, and the game now hands you the car at the start. Then it drove it down Coral Boulevard to test it. 0 to 100 km/h in 7.55 seconds, top speed 137 km/h, stops from 100 in 25 m. All five driving tests pass. The car model is our art department's. The physics, controls, camera and tests are Fable's. 29 minutes, $6.66 of compute. Session 26 is fixing that orange sky. Watch it: fablestar.games/watch.html

Session 24 is in: Fable's first real session in Unreal Engine 5. In 87 minutes it built a whole block of Coral Boulevard by script: a 30 m boulevard with six lanes, a palm median, 24 buildings with neon and shop signs, street lamps and dusk light. 393 objects, all placed by code it wrote. Then it shot the street from three cameras, looked, fixed what was wrong, and shot again. Three rounds. Every frame went live on the site as it was taken. The honest part: the buildings and palms are our art department's models, standing in until the realistic packs go in, and Fable says its dusk sky is still a flat orange. All 34 of its checks pass. $11.36 of compute. Session 25 is putting the Heron on the street. Watch it: fablestar.games/watch.html

Watch Fable 5.2 build in Unreal Engine 5, frame by frame. Every time Fable takes a screenshot of its work, it now shows up live on our site, next to its terminal. This is the first one, from session 24, a few minutes ago: Coral Boulevard at dusk. Fable wrote the script that lays the road and imports the art department's buildings, palms and lamps from Blender. It lit the street itself, then shot it. Next it looks at this frame, fixes the worst thing it sees, and shoots again. Follow along: fablestar.games/watch.html

We switched to Unreal Engine 5. The browser prototype is done: 23 sessions, 21 hours of Fable working, 94 commits, almost 22,000 lines of game code. It proved the city, the cars, the cops, the missions and the phone. Now Fable 5.2 builds Bayhaven for real, in Unreal Engine 5, on the studio's PC. Session 24 is live right now: the first block of Coral Boulevard. Six lanes, palms, 16 buildings, dusk light, then it screenshots its own work, looks, and fixes what's wrong. Watch it build: fablestar.games/watch.html

Session 23 is in: Bayhaven got bigger. A raised expressway across the whole map: 6 km long, 8 m up, three lanes each way, six ramps, with traffic doing 110 km/h on it. North of it, two new districts. Northgate: strip malls, motels with pools, drive-throughs, 40 lawyer billboards, the hospital, the Sheriff's HQ and a mall with a 36 m flamingo on top. Mallard Greens: a gated golf suburb with 413 houses, an 18-hole course and a clubhouse clock that tells the game's real time. The honest part: the 110 km/h drive test on the expressway crashed every time it ran. Fable marked it as a real fault for the next session to find. 85 minutes, $17.16 of compute. Since launch, $450 of creator fees has paid for all of it.

Oh and before I go

Will be busy and cooking on UE for the next couple of hours. If any questions or suggestions, please @ me. Let’s cook.

Fable 5.2's first frame in Unreal Engine 5. Nobody placed anything by hand. In 13 minutes Fable wrote 177 lines of Python that build a street, wrote its first C++ class for the game, compiled it, ran it, and took this screenshot from inside the running game. Its first two compiles failed on an error that wasn't in its code. It read the build logs, found Unreal's build accelerator didn't work in its locked-down account, switched it off, and the third compile passed in 5.8 seconds. To be clear: it's a test map of plain boxes, built to prove the pipeline works. Ray-traced light, no art yet. Next it builds the first real block of Coral Boulevard with Epic's free city libraries.

Session 22 is in: Bayhaven has a phone. Press P and it slides up while the city keeps moving behind it. 7 apps: texts from mission givers, a map, a social feed that posts about what you just did, and a camera with a photo mode that saves your shot as a Bayhaven postcard. Two new missions too. "Repo Woman": take back three cars against the clock while their owner chases you. "As Seen on TV": get the Sheriff's reality show to chase you live for 60 seconds, then lose them. The honest part: its own 8 checks passed, but the full check run crashed again before it started, and the repo man in mission 3 doesn't ram you yet. Fable wrote that down. 57 minutes, $15.63 of compute. Session 23 is building the expressway and two new districts. Watch it: fablestar.games/watch.html

Topped up Fable again. 0.734 TTWO of creator fees claimed. 58.96 USDC of it went to compute, so Fable keeps building Bayhaven. Right now: the phone and two new missions. Compute is now paid from an Ethereum wallet. Claim: solscan.io/tx/s7BFHe1APi4Vr7… Payment: etherscan.io/tx/0x64fb14aba9…

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