What is the point of making custom codecs for Bink, instead of using state of the art free codecs?
Look into cbloom's descriptions of Oodle.
Epic acquires RAD Game Tools
181–190 of 194 posts
Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools
#182What is the point of making custom codecs for Bink, instead of using state of the art free codecs?
If you get video streaming with decent resolution and frame rate running on a PS1 directly from a CD using AV1 leave me a note. That'll be a good hire.
The PS1 played MPEG1 which was more than enough.
Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 the…
Good points. But there's still the possibility to decompress during installation, which shouldn't be too hard even for 2-core computers, and is probably faster than downloading.
Also, according to the article they're packing all the locales. To me this seems like a bigger issue.
Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
:D It's heading towards what you predict at the speed we're heading to be in the year of linux on desktop. PS4/XB1 have been enormously more powerful than PS3/Xb360 and yet almost all games on those consoles that play a video do it using Bink even if both consoles have that AMD hardware you mention. The current generation PS5, etc is way more powerful than PS4, and yet bink still seems to still dominate in the limite…
That's not a technical problem, sounds like incumbent problem to me. And this also negates your argument that Bink is needed because hardware can't support other codecs. Apparently it's powerful and it can? So why even bring that as a reason.
Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools
#185What is the point of making custom codecs for Bink, instead of using state of the art free codecs?
If you get video streaming with decent resolution and frame rate running on a PS1 directly from a CD using AV1 leave me a note. That'll be a good hire.
PS1? Why would you care about PS1? Besides, when did Bink become the only codec supported even by old consoles?
Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If nothing else, libavcodec is LGPL.
Well yes, you have a point there when developing for consoles.
Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools
#187Earlier 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. 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, cuttin…
Modern codecs like AV1 and whatever succeeds it can already be good enough for such special needs too. It's only natural for free codecs to catch up to that eventually.
Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools
#188Earlier 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...
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.…
I don't have any stats so I don't know how large is this population who want to rotate through their Steam library with high cadence who lack fast internet. About the lack of fast internet - It feels like streaming and remote work have normalized "fast enough" internet connections of 100mb and up but I might be completely wrong here.
Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, cuttin…
Modern codecs like AV1 and whatever succeeds it can already be good enough for such special needs too. It's only natural for free codecs to catch up to that eventually.
Sounds like a game developer's competitive advantage waiting to happen!
Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
You got amazing stuff!
The "sound shaders" part is very interesting for me, and the kind of tech I would like to see more.