Epic acquires RAD Game Tools • Hacker News Board

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#81

Post by danbolt » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 12:44 AM UTC

shmerl wrote: post #22

What is the point of making custom codecs for Bink, instead of using state of the art free codecs?

The free codecs might not necessarily be designed or optimized for the platform you're working on. Porting an open-source player for your particular situation might cost more in developer time than simply licensing Bink. Bink's developers are also going to be more conscious of the technical limitations of a game console that you might be running into (eg: hard thread/socket/resource limits) compared to a more general-purpose codec.

This becomes a more notable tradeoff for a studio looking to get funding for a particular milestone from a publisher. Your technical leads (and content creators) likely also cut their teeth on games that integrated it, so it has existing operational momentum too.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#82

Post by xienze » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 12:44 AM UTC

altdatathrow wrote: post #77

xienze wrote: post #19

Man, Epic is absolutely flush with cash. They’re moving their HQ down the road a mile or so by buying a dying mall for $100M and hiring 2k more employees.

Hey, I know it's been a day, but I want to remind you that you're still a covid-denying seditious piece of shit.

Oh, so you’re one of the people downvote brigading me. Thanks, now I have your user ID and a comment that I can send the mods as evidence that people were downvoting unrelated comments of mine because they got mad about the thread last night. Thanks for making my case easier to prove!

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#83

Post by gruez » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 12:48 AM UTC

ratww wrote: post #78

dharmab wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that Titanfall had to ship on the Xbox 360 and PS3.

Interestingly, those two consoles had dedicated hardware decoders. It doesn't make any sense to have uncompressed audio for them.

If it's any similar to the hardware decoders on iPhones, they're probably limited to n streams. That might be good for playing some background music or ambient sounds, but it gets tricky really quickly when you have multiple sounds playing at once.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#84

Post by 0x7feb38ad » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 12:48 AM UTC

mappu wrote: post #33

The history of RAD is a history of media read speeds - playing back full-motion video from a CD on a PS2 with its near-zero available CPU resources was a superhuman effort. So low-overhead (fast) decompression is essential for AAA titles. But recently I guess developers think disks are fast enough now, because PC games have been using more uncompressed assets to free up CPU time, massively bloating install size. Curr…

The PS2 had a hardware MPEG decoder and could also play DVDs so I don't think it had much trouble doing FMV.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#85

Post by Danieru » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 12:51 AM UTC

tomc1985 wrote: post #64

incrudible wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, Kraken is for general compression, not video. Of course you can do video decoding in software, that's what Bink is. It can do 4K60 on a PS4 CPU.

Makes sense. If it were just video it'd seem like it would be cheaper to include an h.264 chip, they're a lot more common and you get the same thing

Encoding videos across consoles in h.264 is a pain and unreliable. I did it, and so I can see why a big budget title would use blink. Each console has its own odd and undocumented requirements for the encoding specification. Think 1079p at 29.99fps pm one console while vannila 1080p 30fps on another. Get it wrong and your video is blank with only a "failed to decode" in the logs.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#86

Post by gruez » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 12:52 AM UTC

xienze wrote: post #27

ineedasername wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they're a bit company right now, still riding the revenue success of Fortnite and the potential of their launcher/store. So investors are interested, including Chinese investors that own a decent swathe of shares. I just hope they don't become such huge industry giants that they stomp on anything with a faint smell of competition.

I’m just amazed with what Fortnite has done for them. I pass by their current HQ regularly and it’s pretty modest. You’d never suspect that’s the HQ of such a successful company. I was surprised to learn they’re still taking funding. I figured they were pulling down absurd profit.

They literally bought a mall to use as a new HQ. https://www.eurogamer.net/amp/2021-01-04-epic-games-buys-sho...

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#87

Post by xienze » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 1:04 AM UTC

gruez wrote: post #86

xienze wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m just amazed with what Fortnite has done for them. I pass by their current HQ regularly and it’s pretty modest. You’d never suspect that’s the HQ of such a successful company. I was surprised to learn they’re still taking funding. I figured they were pulling down absurd profit.

They literally bought a mall to use as a new HQ. https://www.eurogamer.net/amp/2021-01-04-epic-games-buys-sho...

Yep I mentioned that. It's a mall that's been slowly dying for several years. It is absolutely massive too.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#88

Post by leeoniya » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 1:14 AM UTC

for those who don't know, Fabian Giesen (@ryg of demoscene group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farbrausch) works at RAD.

his blog: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/

one of my favorites: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for...

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#89

Post by iamcreasy » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 1:16 AM UTC

selectodude wrote: post #80

iamcreasy wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why some companies do not publicly post their price of the product? Or at least a price range? What's the harm in that?

Because pricing on stuff like that is negotiable and they don't want people to have a starting point.

I see. Thank you.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#90

Post by shahar2k » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 1:29 AM UTC

hutzlibu wrote: post #63

Impossible wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on COD:AW and we used video in game often. The lead UI artist would have used it significantly more if performance was better. Might be an exception but it's not uncommon, I've worked on multiple titles with full 3D and video playback at the same time

Hang on, the performance of playing static video content was not good enough? (and worse than dynamically rendered game art?) You mean a single - full screen video, or videos inside the 3D content?

likely the performance of playing small video elements as part of the UI, oftentimes it's faster to keep a whole uncompressed texture atlas in memory for animations and such.