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Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

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Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#141

Post by voltagex_ »

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.

Yes, https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000266629080.html - guessing that the AliExpress price is 2x the Taobao price which is ?x the quantity price. I do wonder how fast the controller/flash in this is, though (this is limited to SATA3) - that's now many times slower than the Series X / PS5 speed.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#142

Post by johnyzee »

mikepurvis wrote: post #47

Lots of love for Bink, but Bink's predecessor is an earlier video codec/format called Smacker, which was especially for 8-bit colour palettes, where the palette (or part of it) might be fixed due to being needed by UI elements outside the video, but some or all of it may be allowed to vary/rotate as the video played. I first encountered Smacker videos in Caesar II (which even shipped smkplay.exe on the disc so you co…

I immediately thought of Caesar II when you mentioned Smacker :). One of the impressive things in that game (besides being a great game) was the many very smooth video clips, enabled by that tech.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#143

Post by thibpat »

I've seen Epic using Oodle in the Fortnite replay files so it makes sense for them to stop paying a license and buy the company instead. I'm wondering if they are using the other tools from RAD Game Tools already, or if it's only for this compression algorithm!

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#144

Post by pjmlp »

shmerl wrote: post #137
pjmlp wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because what matters is what comes on the SDK and AAA game engines, regardless of what AMD supports.

I can call Epic, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Apple, Google when something doesn't work as expected, free codecs dumped on github, who knows.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#145

Post by jcpham2 »

johnyzee wrote: post #142
mikepurvis wrote: post #47

Lots of love for Bink, but Bink's predecessor is an earlier video codec/format called Smacker, which was especially for 8-bit colour palettes, where the palette (or part of it) might be fixed due to being needed by UI elements outside the video, but some or all of it may be allowed to vary/rotate as the video played. I first encountered Smacker videos in Caesar II (which even shipped smkplay.exe on the disc so you co…

I immediately thought of Caesar II when you mentioned Smacker :). One of the impressive things in that game (besides being a great game) was the many very smooth video clips, enabled by that tech.

I played Caesar II for days and days as a teenager. Awesome game.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#146

Post by girvo »

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...

A 1TB NVMe isn’t that cheap (though it’s getting there) yet, though. I’ll never go back to actual drives now I’m running 2x NVMe’s haha

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#147

Post by [deleted] »

jacobolus wrote: post #129
glandium wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#148

Post by MFApostrofaKing »

jcpham2 wrote: post #145
johnyzee wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I immediately thought of Caesar II when you mentioned Smacker :). One of the impressive things in that game (besides being a great game) was the many very smooth video clips, enabled by that tech.

I played Caesar II for days and days as a teenager. Awesome game.

smackply for life! Interlaced and/or all! While bink is great too.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#149

Post by perryizgr8 »

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…

> PCs probably won't get a comparable decompression accelerator card and such a card wouldn't get enough market penetration anyway

I doubt this particular moat means much since PC has practically unlimited disk space. This recent install size hype is basically irrelevant if you're on PC. Just get a nice $100 SSD and continue. It matters only to PS/Xbox because they do not provide easy/cheap expansion.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#150

Post by leoncaet »

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.

The "we can use worse software now that hardware allows us to do it" is why software is sunk so low these days.

We use Bink because it is better then the open-source alternatives, and that's it.

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