161–170 of 194 posts
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fabien giesen, also at RAD, has a very informative blog as well. https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/ they have a seriously impressive group of developers
What were they paying to keep these greybeards around?
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…
Filesystem compression could help here. To my knowledge games consoles don't support filesystem compression, but I'm not sure why.
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.
That's awesome! Congrats to the RAD team and Epic! Epic certainly has acquired a world-class team. Also, I've been a long time fan of Jeff's podcast, it is irreverent and hilarious if you haven't checked it out! https://jeffandcaseyshow.com/
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…
> PC games have been using more uncompressed assets to free up CPU time, massively bloating install size Filesystem compression could help here. To my knowledge games consoles don't support filesystem compression, but I'm not sure why.
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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…
Couple of things to note: MP3 is not appropriate for use in real time due to a variable amount of silence added to the start of the sample intrinsic to the compression. You can sometimes use it for music But if there’s any changes based on game events mp3 is unusable. A lot of work has been put into optimizing mp3 including at os and hardware levels but that’s not usable in games. Commonly it’s some custom spin on vo…
As another commenter mentioned, these games shipped with compressed audio for consoles. Also that generation of consoles have pretty good hardware codecs for audio (320 channels in the Xbox).
And MP3 was just an example of what I had here at my disposal. But as an exercise I converted my 4 minute MP3 to Vorbis. Decoding it converting to WAV took the same amount of time as before: about half a second on a very old and underpowered MacBook Air. Most of this time is spent writing 50mb to disk.
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.
Of course they are. Tencent had bought "not technically a majority stake" there, to try breaching Apple and pushing 3rd party appstore there (Apple has 7 billion revenue just from selling game apps in appstore). They will finance anything Epic does while they are useful for their plans.
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…
> PC games have been using more uncompressed assets to free up CPU time, massively bloating install size Filesystem compression could help here. To my knowledge games consoles don't support filesystem compression, but I'm not sure why.
> Filesystem compression could help here.
How? Compression is not free, no matter where you put it, someone has to decompress it again.
Are you talking about some exotic SATA controller or other hardware that does that?
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> PC games have been using more uncompressed assets to free up CPU time, massively bloating install size Filesystem compression could help here. To my knowledge games consoles don't support filesystem compression, but I'm not sure why.
> > PC games have been using more uncompressed assets to free up CPU time, massively bloating install size > Filesystem compression could help here. How? Compression is not free, no matter where you put it, someone has to decompress it again. Are you talking about some exotic SATA controller or other hardware that does that?