Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

epicgames.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 194 posts

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#121

Post by dafelst »

Thaxll wrote: post #67
bexsella wrote: post #31

There's a lot of focus here on Bink, but Oodle has a fascinating history as well. From world-class compression ratios/decompression speeds to being implemented in hardware by Sony in all PS5s. RAD have a great history of getting exactly the right people that are interested in their fields and are great at what they do. I echo the sentiments of many when saying I am surprised no one had scooped them up earlier (althou…

Oodle is very expensive though.

Ehhh, I mean it's not cheap, but definitely within the realm of reasonableness for a funded semi-indy game - and to be fair, if you're creating enough assets that using Oodle makes a substantial saving to your disk/memory footprint (i.e. your game package is in the multiple GB range) then probably you have some money to pay all those artists, so hopefully you can afford Oodle. If you're doing a pixel art or retro game, it's probably not worth it.

The biggest pain in the ass with Oodle is recompressing everything after you integrate it, that first time takes FOREVER.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#122

Post by chii »

midnightclubbed wrote: post #116

Of all the RAD offerings Telemetry is the most special. It lets you record millions of CPU profiling events (thousands per frame) with extremely low overhead, and then shows those events in a hierarchical timeline. For game optimization it is completely unique and literally game changing. It will show you where your hotspots are, where your threads are starving out, which CPU core is running an event (and when it is…

How does it do these things without a high CPU overhead?!

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#123

Post by iamcreasy »

garaetjjte wrote: post #99
selectodude wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reall…

That was a great read. Thanks for posting.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#124

Post by glandium »

duskwuff wrote: post #17
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.

How does it compare with zstandard these days?

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#125

Post by [deleted] »

chii wrote: post #122
midnightclubbed wrote: post #116

Of all the RAD offerings Telemetry is the most special. It lets you record millions of CPU profiling events (thousands per frame) with extremely low overhead, and then shows those events in a hierarchical timeline. For game optimization it is completely unique and literally game changing. It will show you where your hotspots are, where your threads are starving out, which CPU core is running an event (and when it is…

How does it do these things without a high CPU overhead?!

[deleted]

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#126

Post by numlock86 »

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…

> massively bloating install size

On release the new CoD:MW was 130 GB large. A few updates later we are now at over 256 GB.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#127

Post by sitkack »

moritonal wrote: post #79
manfredo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard that the main issue with decompressed assets was audio, not video (granted, video is image and audio so one is a strict superset of the other). One game - Titanfall or a CoD game, IIRC - had something like 20 GB of uncompressed audio in a 35GB installation footprint. Rationale was saving CPU cycles. Meanwhile here I am with a sound card in my desktop PC for no real reason anymore :\

Rumour I heard was that it was because they realised 20% of their customers using much older PC's wouldn't be able to decode fast enough, so they distributed it with the uncompressed to everyone because no distribution platform allowed "optional" downloads.

This sounds like the most plausible.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#128

Post by [deleted] »

mappu wrote: post #94
dfox wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#129

Post by jacobolus »

glandium wrote: post #124
duskwuff wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does it compare with zstandard these days?

Cbloom has a bunch of blog posts with charts purporting to show it doing significantly faster decoding than zstd at every choice of compression ratio.

I would trust him to run his own benchmarks fairly and properly, but I am not sure if there have been good independent benchmarks done.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#130

Post by sitkack »

manfredo wrote: post #21
bluedino wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Pretty much. Though they've periodically updated them to use new techniques like animation blending. I think there's also a lot of work in optimizing for different platforms. And perhaps more importantly, there's a lot of work in making the middle ware easy to integrate. Ease of integration is often more important than performance for a lot of middleware. I've seen their logo on tons of games. I never knew they were…

Not geezer splaining you, but they had a fairly heavy advert presence in gamdev magazine and dr dobbs. They are right behind Attachmate in being a big software outfit in Seattle.
Post reply on HN