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Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

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Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#131

Post by pjmlp »

shmerl wrote: post #110
pacificat0r wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said, in games there's always a need for fast, platform agnostic (and super low overhead API that just works). And I mean truly platform agnostic, PS4, PS5, Switch, etc. Those are new platforms that may or may not have ports of whatever else is "available" and "fast". Bink fits the bill today and has fit the bill since forever. I don't see any of the alternatives having similar performance characteristics, ease…

Consoles held progress back for decades, but even they can't stop it. So I see Bink becoming obsolete, I don't really see any major arguments for it. Just because it fit the bill before doesn't say anything about the future.

Yeah, those Switch sales are tanking, while PS 5 and XBox X/S pile unsold on the store shelves.

Ah, you mean that 1% market share on Steam, sorry.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#132

Post by fsloth »

BatteryMountain wrote: post #118
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…

Another thing that changed from say 10 years ago, some games have better launchers and ways to configure them. What I'm hoping to see at this front, since install sizes are bloating, that the installers/configuring becomes slightly more advanced. When I install a game I want to be able to choose the following at install-time: Texture Packs (main blobs that takes up a lot of space - why download 50GB if you need the 1…

A 1TB SSD drive costs around 100 (€/ $). A person who enjoys tweaking their PC likely can easily get terabytes of storage space. I don't really see the utility of fiddling with 10GB here and there...

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#133

Post by Aerroon »

fsloth wrote: post #132
BatteryMountain wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thing that changed from say 10 years ago, some games have better launchers and ways to configure them. What I'm hoping to see at this front, since install sizes are bloating, that the installers/configuring becomes slightly more advanced. When I install a game I want to be able to choose the following at install-time: Texture Packs (main blobs that takes up a lot of space - why download 50GB if you need the 1…

A 1TB SSD drive costs around 100 (€/ $). A person who enjoys tweaking their PC likely can easily get terabytes of storage space. I don't really see the utility of fiddling with 10GB here and there...

I wonder if it would be possible to get 250 GB SSDs for like $25 or less. You could then literally sell your game on an SSD. According to this [0] Nintendo charges $8-20 per cartridge to third parties.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#134

Post by ratww »

gruez wrote: post #83
ratww wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really: The Xbox has 320 independent decompression channels according to its marketing material, which is kinda powerful. The PS3 had similar tech in its Motion Decoder, but they didn't disclose how powerful it was.

And even if it had just a single decoder, there's always the possibility to pre-decode audio. Or just decode the music/film.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#135

Post by NetOpWibby »

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…

So you’re saying Fortnite is gonna be amazing for us PS5 owners?

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#136

Post by pfranz »

shmerl wrote: post #91
danbolt wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 becom…

Maybe. Real time and production often has special needs general purpose tools don't cover. A lot of delivery codecs focus on things like lossy compression and buffering. I know from video production and computer graphics, delivery codecs are miserable to work with for reasons such as: not allowing arbitrary channels (if you only need 1 channel or maybe you need 5 for an alpha and bump map), playing in reverse, cutting in on arbitrary frames, different compression on each channel (lossy rgb, but lossless alpha), etc. My understanding is that Bink is often used for realtime playback of multiple elements integrated with the 3d environment (triggered explosions, HUD elements, streaming textures) so it needs to be performant, handle many simultaneously, and integrated with the engine since you'd be applying transforms and LUTs.

It'll be nice if there are great, free, off the shelf codecs and tools, but at least right now almost every current AAA game seems to use Bink.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#137

Post by shmerl »

pjmlp wrote: post #131
shmerl wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consoles held progress back for decades, but even they can't stop it. So I see Bink becoming obsolete, I don't really see any major arguments for it. Just because it fit the bill before doesn't say anything about the future.

Yeah, those Switch sales are tanking, while PS 5 and XBox X/S pile unsold on the store shelves. Ah, you mean that 1% market share on Steam, sorry.

Not sure about Switch, but recent AMD based consoles should have good video decoding capabilities. You can do fine without Bink there.

So instead of trolling again, analyze where it's heading. I don't see any reason why Bink can't be replaced by free codecs.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#139

Post by audunw »

Aerroon wrote: post #133
fsloth wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 1TB SSD drive costs around 100 (€/ $). A person who enjoys tweaking their PC likely can easily get terabytes of storage space. I don't really see the utility of fiddling with 10GB here and there...

I wonder if it would be possible to get 250 GB SSDs for like $25 or less. You could then literally sell your game on an SSD. According to this [0] Nintendo charges $8-20 per cartridge to third parties.

Yeah, this is basically exactly what Nintendo is doing. I guess for PC and larger consoles you could use larger memory cards that might be cheaper to make. But anyway, it's still a problematic approach since it eats into the margins unless you increase the price of the game, which most game publishers try to avoid.

I really like Nintendo Switch cartridges, I prefer to buy physical copies when I can, but I don't think there's a future in them. I kind of wish someone would make "smart cards" that just gives you access to the game online. Since there's so many essential updates to games these days, that's almost what cartridges are anyway.

You forgot the reference link btw.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#140

Post by fsloth »

Aerroon wrote: post #133
fsloth wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 1TB SSD drive costs around 100 (€/ $). A person who enjoys tweaking their PC likely can easily get terabytes of storage space. I don't really see the utility of fiddling with 10GB here and there...

I wonder if it would be possible to get 250 GB SSDs for like $25 or less. You could then literally sell your game on an SSD. According to this [0] Nintendo charges $8-20 per cartridge to third parties.

Given the popularity of digital sales it's hard to see the business model where this would make sense.

I have a bog standard internet connection with a download speed of 1000gb. Most games download faster than it would take me to go to the store or order a package.

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