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Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

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Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#171

Post by BatteryMountain »

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...

Okay, imagine you have 300+ games on Steam/Epic/Gog etc... if you were to install 50 of them, that alone would eat up 1TB easy peasy. If you want to install more of them, a 1TB nvme drive is not going to cut it. Maybe 10TB either. So what do most people do? They install/uninstall frequently. But for those with crappy internet where 30GB take 2 days to download, it's better to make a backup before uninstall/reinstall. If the backups are smaller, that helps too.

So yes, 10GB here and there isn't much.. but as a collective, if you have 1000000 users downloading 300GB less per month (I know, silly numbers, it's way more in reality), it would make a huge difference to the "gaming industries & network load"-effects as a whole. Plug-in some real numbers (which I don't have)(Players X ave number games downloaded per year X ave game size).

Other industries like streaming/music sites, they optimize their transmission sizes and even small gains are often worth it (10 million people downloading 2MB less per song on spotify, while playing 50 songs per day... the numbers add up quick). Somebody will pay for the transmission - either the consumer or the business. The business only needs to ask is it cheaper to pay a few devs to optimize their code or is cheaper to pay for a fatter data pipe. I think long term, engineering effort always wins vs throwing money at the problem.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#172

Post by BatteryMountain »

imtringued wrote: post #169
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…

Complicated launchers often fail with proton.

So in steam, when you go into the properties of a game, there is a DLC's tab. When you select/unselect DLC's, it will often trigger a download to happen (although small). With Dota, they deliver support for OpenGL & Vulkan basically as DLC's.

So the mechanism to have modular game delivery already exists in steam, they can just repurpose it and give it a different label, or bake the options into the Install dialog so you can choose the parts you want upfront.

And yeah, other launchers are a pain (with proton), I agree.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#173

Post by Angius »

nothis wrote: post #16

It always seemed like RAD makes the kinds of tools you want as a developer who likes to run its own core systems and license powerful components for key issues. To think these tools will now be locked into the bloated Unreal Engine makes me feel a bit sad. It's like a lot of game companies get bought up by giants in a "just because we can" fashion, recently, and I can't help but wonder how this de-prioritizes quality…

Epic would have to be out of their mind to lock this tech up. Licensing it out to other companies brings them pure profit, and they still can incentivize people to use Unreal ecosystem by integrating this tech into their engine.

They haven't given me any reason to worry yet, what with how when they acquired Quixel, made Mixer and Bridge free, and cut the price of all Megascans assets in half for everyone while making them free for Unreal users.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#174

Post by klik99 »

usrusr wrote: post #159
klik99 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> For specific example in a very well known game, there are over 1600 samples for boxes hitting stuff That almost sounds as if it could be worthwhile to synthesize on demand from a very small set of (offset/overlaid) base samples through a deep chain of parameterized FX. With 1600 FX parameter preset tuples as the MVP, bonus points for involving game state context.

That’s literally my startup, I won’t get deep into the reasons why good tools for this don’t exist yet, but if you imagine game development is like regular development but with orders of magnitude more chaos you can understand how difficult it is to build stuff for reuse. After 15 years in the industry, my approach is just the same as yours

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#175

Post by klik99 »

ratww wrote: post #166
klik99 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You’d be surprised how under powered the consoles are in this regard 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 t…

Yeah that is curious if consoles shipped with compressed audio but not PC. The prevailing wisdom on PC is codecs are easier to deal with due to dedicated audio thread. Decisions like that are not made lightly so now I’m curious what the reason was

Edit: reasoning is here: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/03/12/respawn-actually... Minspec is 2-core PC, probably to support large player base and as noted before there can be 20-40 audio files all streaming from disk and decoding, so sure one file might be fast but no way that’s happening on a 2-core PC. Sure one file might decode fast, but 40 of them, all also streaming from disk while keeping frame rate playable, just impossible

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#177

Post by JabavuAdams »

HacklesRaised wrote: post #176

I think we should all congratulate these guys. They have been knocking it out of the park for years andI hope this brings them financial security, hopefully life changing reward.

Yes, the people who work there and who passed through there are the best of the best.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#178

Post by JabavuAdams »

person_of_color wrote: post #75
jo032 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Work environment matters more than pay, and the pay presumably was very good. Imagine being down the hall from the people who literally started indie game development, or demo-scene royalty.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#179

Post by JabavuAdams »

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…

You're making a lot of assumptions. You can probably get a free trial just by emailing them, and you will be in direct contact with the dev who actually wrote the tool. A number of their devs have/had blogs where they were constantly talking about the development of the products etc. First of all these guys are superstars in the games industry, so everybody knows about them, and secondly they are super approachable and responsive.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#180

Post by JabavuAdams »

Angius wrote: post #173
nothis wrote: post #16

It always seemed like RAD makes the kinds of tools you want as a developer who likes to run its own core systems and license powerful components for key issues. To think these tools will now be locked into the bloated Unreal Engine makes me feel a bit sad. It's like a lot of game companies get bought up by giants in a "just because we can" fashion, recently, and I can't help but wonder how this de-prioritizes quality…

Epic would have to be out of their mind to lock this tech up. Licensing it out to other companies brings them pure profit, and they still can incentivize people to use Unreal ecosystem by integrating this tech into their engine. They haven't given me any reason to worry yet, what with how when they acquired Quixel, made Mixer and Bridge free, and cut the price of all Megascans assets in half for everyone while making…

They're in a strategic fight with Unity, though. The goal might not be to profit from these products specifically.
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