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Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

epicgames.com

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Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#11

Post by bluedino »

randtrain34 wrote: post #8

For those interested in what RAD Game Tools actually makes, as far as I understood from their website ( http://www.radgametools.com/ ): Bink 2 - video codec Oodle - data compression suite Telemetry - profiling toolkit Granny 3D - toolkit for building 3d games Miles Sound System 10 - sound authoring toolset in 2D and 3D

What’s amazing is they have made these same products for like...25 years?

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#12

Post by egypturnash »

astlouis44 wrote: post #7

As far as I know, they are one of the few video game compression companies out there. Undoubtedly this is amazing news for Unreal Engine 4 devs, but for those not using the engine this is going to be a bit of a blow. On the plus side, this opens the doors for a "Pied Piper, but for games" style startup to come out of nowhere and take big market share.

"RAD will continue supporting their game industry, film, and television partners, with their sales and business development team maintaining and selling licenses for their products to companies across industries - including those that do not utilize Unreal Engine." - the article

How long this will last is anybody's guess, of course.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#13

Post by astlouis44 »

scrollaway wrote: post #10
astlouis44 wrote: post #7

As far as I know, they are one of the few video game compression companies out there. Undoubtedly this is amazing news for Unreal Engine 4 devs, but for those not using the engine this is going to be a bit of a blow. On the plus side, this opens the doors for a "Pied Piper, but for games" style startup to come out of nowhere and take big market share.

Pied piper did have a whole subplot about compression in the context of reducing VR video game bandwidth latency. You might be more spot on than you think :)

Yup! Shameless plug btw - but my startup is working on a suite of tools for gaming on the web, that includes advanced compression libraries.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#14

Post by scrollaway »

randtrain34 wrote: post #8

For those interested in what RAD Game Tools actually makes, as far as I understood from their website ( http://www.radgametools.com/ ): Bink 2 - video codec Oodle - data compression suite Telemetry - profiling toolkit Granny 3D - toolkit for building 3d games Miles Sound System 10 - sound authoring toolset in 2D and 3D

Really hoping epic takes the opportunity to give Bink a more open license, to be honest. Much as I appreciate how advanced Bink was at the time, i don't know any dev that still use it given that av1 and such are just Good Enough.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#15

Post by jsheard »

randtrain34 wrote: post #8

For those interested in what RAD Game Tools actually makes, as far as I understood from their website ( http://www.radgametools.com/ ): Bink 2 - video codec Oodle - data compression suite Telemetry - profiling toolkit Granny 3D - toolkit for building 3d games Miles Sound System 10 - sound authoring toolset in 2D and 3D

It doesn't appear to be mentioned on the site, but they also collaborated with Sony to develop the hardware decompression unit in the Playstation 5

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#16

Post by nothis »

It always seemed like RAD makes the kinds of tools you want as a developer who likes to run its own core systems and license powerful components for key issues. To think these tools will now be locked into the bloated Unreal Engine makes me feel a bit sad. It's like a lot of game companies get bought up by giants in a "just because we can" fashion, recently, and I can't help but wonder how this de-prioritizes quality and diversity in the industry.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#17

Post by duskwuff »

eutectic wrote: post #4

RAD's Charles Bloom has a blog ( https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com ) which is excellent for anyone interested in high-performance programming. Especially compression.

Especially compression. The compression provided by RAD Tools is nothing short of otherworldly -- it can provide compression ratios comparable to XZ, but with decompression speeds more along the lines of what you'd expect from gzip (or even better).

I hope that Epic does something interesting with what RAD has built here. Taking it more proprietary (e.g, halting new licensing) would be a huge blow for the industry.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#18

Post by medecau »

scrollaway wrote: post #14
randtrain34 wrote: post #8

For those interested in what RAD Game Tools actually makes, as far as I understood from their website ( http://www.radgametools.com/ ): Bink 2 - video codec Oodle - data compression suite Telemetry - profiling toolkit Granny 3D - toolkit for building 3d games Miles Sound System 10 - sound authoring toolset in 2D and 3D

Really hoping epic takes the opportunity to give Bink a more open license, to be honest. Much as I appreciate how advanced Bink was at the time, i don't know any dev that still use it given that av1 and such are just Good Enough.

shows up on cyberpunk 2077 splash screen

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#20

Post by hertzrat »

I’ve been using unreal for the past 6 months to make a game. It’s not as easy to get started with as unity is, but if you are good at figuring stuff out then it’s just a powerhouse. The renderer is incredible, the workflows are modular, you can work in a data driven way, you can modify skeletal animations in-engine, performance is amazing, etc etc etc. It’s also stable, and non-production ready features are clearly identified as beta or experimental.

I wish this was next week so I could post a link to my alpha build at the bottom of this post

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