Live data from Hacker News

Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

epicgames.com

191–194 of 194 posts

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What were they paying to keep these greybeards around?

AFAIR a public H1B entry from mid-2000 shows $300k salary, which was impressive at the time even for non-gamedev.

Thats insane for wages.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#192
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.

> "...literally sell your game on an SSD..."

That would be terrible from an archival perspective. Flash memory is subject to charge leakage that causes data be lost over time. High density flash, which has the lowest cost per byte, also has the poorest data retention lifetime.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#193
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I sure hope so.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#194
post #15

For those interested in what RAD Game Tools actually makes, as far as I understood from their website ( http://www.radgametools.com/ ): Bink 2 - video codec Oodle - data compression suite Telemetry - profiling toolkit Granny 3D - toolkit for building 3d games Miles Sound System 10 - sound authoring toolset in 2D and 3D

It doesn't appear to be mentioned on the site, but they also collaborated with Sony to develop the hardware decompression unit in the Playstation 5

Sony hardware engineers put in a herculean effort designing the awesome custam hardware decompression chip, but it was more or less just implementing the existing oodle algorithm, which they licensed. more like a translation of an existing book than writing a new work.
Post reply on HN