Epic acquires RAD Game Tools • Hacker News Board

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#91

Post by shmerl » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 1:45 AM UTC

danbolt wrote: post #81

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…

> 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.

This sounds like an artifact of the past. Today there aren't that many hardware platforms that free codecs don't already cover properly. And I expect with something like push by AOM this will become even less and less of an issue in the future. Codecs are becoming more of a commodity in this sense so something like Bink I expect will be less and less relevant.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#92

Post by shmerl » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 2:00 AM UTC

azornathogron wrote: post #32

shmerl wrote: post #22

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

(I don't work in the industry, but am an interested amateur) [Edit- I may have misunderstood your question, but I'll leave my reply anyway.] Here are some possible reasons you might use Bink instead of a free codec: - Bink video has been around for a long time as a product, even though the codec has been updated (probably multiple times, I don't know). There weren't always good-enough free codecs, and if you have pri…

> Your state of the art free codec might work great on a modern smartphone or PC, but good luck getting it to work on a Nintendo Switch or whatever weird console you're targeting. Bink is available for whatever game-specific platform hardware you're targeting.

So basically this means something like Bink has limited application time wise, and going forward it will become more and more obsolete because free codecs will cover all needed use cases sufficiently.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#93

Post by jorvi » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 2:01 AM UTC

dharmab wrote: post #74

ratww wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't really compute. Audio decompression is pretty light on CPUs these days. It takes about half a second in a single core to decompress a 4 min MP3 to WAV in my 2012 MB Air, including writing to disk. In a gaming machine it will be way less. If anything, the audio could be decompressed and cached on demand, when loading levels, or even during installation. Also sound cards do not participate on the decompres…

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

All the console versions shipped with compressed audio due to the anemic hard drive and disk speeds, as well as tiny RAM amount.

In general it doesn't make sense to use wavs. Games have been using compressed audio since the late 90s without any significant trouble, and mp3s are aurally transparant at 320kbps.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#94

Post by mappu » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 2:43 AM UTC

dfox wrote: post #65

anthk wrote: post #38

RAD had an amazing software renderer on par on the Unreal one.

Pixomatic wasn't just on par with UE1's SW rasterizer it was somewhat explicitly designed to be the SW rasterizer for UE2. The thing was notable by the fact that it had feature parity with HW Direct3D implementations of the time and worked by dynamically compiling D3D shaders into x86 code (which had the interesting feature that it used ESP as general purpose register). IIRC the idea behing Intel's Larabee at least p…

I suspect Intel were going to run OpenSWR on it - that's the software renderer that they eventually donated to Mesa after Larabee shut down.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#95

Post by Impossible » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 2:52 AM UTC

shahar2k wrote: post #90

hutzlibu wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes and in most cases we would do this, but some content made more sense as video

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#96

Post by Impossible » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 3:03 AM UTC

hutzlibu wrote: post #73

Impossible wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video used as textures, either in world on 3D meshes, or as part of UI (HUD) elements. It could be prohibitively expensive to play a single video in some scenes, and we didn't support multiple videos. Not because it wasn't possible or anything, mostly because performance, although there would have been an engineering cost to doing also (ie I would have had to add support to the engine)

Ah, video textures. That makes sense and indeed sounds expensive.

Also remember "expensive" is relative. I think it added little over 1ms to total frame time per video, but in a 60fps console game that. Our budget was about 1ms or less for the entire UI during gameplay (including scripting, layout and rendering), so a video could more than double that. 4 simultaneous videos would be like 1/4 of the entire frame :).

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#97

Post by anthk » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 3:25 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…

>playing back full-motion video from a CD on a PS2 with its near-zero available CPU resources

Eh, a PS2 with a ~300mhz MIPS CPU is more than able to play VCD with MPEG1 encoded video. You must be young, because the PS2 is on par a Pentium MMX/Pentium 2 and for sure you could play MPEG videos back in the day.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#98

Post by anthk » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 3:26 AM UTC

0x7feb38ad wrote: post #84

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.

Yeah, is like most of HN should be kids, because, FFS, it's a PS2, not a Nintendo from the 80's.

They are so used to badly implemented software in Electron requiring humoungous CPU and RAM requeriments that basic performing tools it's mind blowing to them.

Heck, any Pentium2 on par of a PS2's CPU or better could play DivX videos under MPlayer under Linux/NetBSD with ease. 420p, ok, but video.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#99

Post by garaetjjte » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 3:28 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.

Or less favorable take from Joel Spolsky: "Bad Idea #2: How Much Money Do You Have? Pricing." https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

I too find those companies weird. They seem to have nice product, website boasts how nice it is, but: no publicly available documentation, evaluation SDK, no pricing, only thing that's there is sales@ address. And while their product might be good it isn't really unique. Why I would jump hoops to use it while I can likely implement video playback from libavcodec and generic compression with zstd or LZ4 faster than their sales people will reply?

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#100

Post by anthk » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 3:31 AM UTC

sudosysgen wrote: post #50

Jasper_ wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I say "run", I mean "runs at target performance". Yes, sure, Turing completeness technically means that software raytracing "runs" on the Switch, we all know that, but it's not a viable solution for a shipping product. This is not a biproduct of consoles being closed platforms, multimedia is a challenge everywhere; cross-platform, usable multimedia playback lacks a high quality product even on open PC platforms.

FFMpeg and Gstreamer both run on both Nvidia Tegra hardware and AMD Jaguar/Bulldozer at 4K 60fps.

Gstreamer is more suited for filtering/FX and media overlays.