12 ms·
Epic acquires RAD Game Tools
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- eutectic 6y agoRAD's Charles Bloom has a blog (https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com) which is excellent for anyone interested in high-performance programming. Especially compression.
- jo032 6y agofabien giesen, also at RAD, has a very informative blog as well. https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/ https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/ they have a seriously impressive group of developers
- person_of_color 6y agoWhat were they paying to keep these greybeards around?
- Rexxar 6y agoInteresting job with other people they like is probably a good guess.
- psykotic 6y agoRAD always paid very well by gamedev standards. But that was never the main reason people worked there. Some of the engineers are older but Fabian is in his thirties and last I checked his goatee wasn't greying.
- killtimeatwork 6y agoAFAIR a public H1B entry from mid-2000 shows $300k salary, which was impressive at the time even for non-gamedev.
- person_of_color 6y agoThats insane for wages.
- JabavuAdams 6y agoWork 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.
- caeril 6y agoEveryone who works there is extremely talented. Fabien, Sean, Allen, etc. Jeff has a very keen eye for it. He's funny, too. Highly recommend The Jeff and Casey Show for podcast content.
- mrec 6y agoNot just high-performance, his "Library Writing Realizations" post is also well worth a read whatever domain you're working in. http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2015/09/library-writing-realizations.html http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2015/09/library-writing-real...
- duskwuff 6y agoEspecially compression. The compression provided by RAD Tools is nothing short of otherworldly -- it can provide compression ratios comparable to XZ, but with decompression speeds more along the lines of what you'd expect from gzip (or even better). I hope that Epic does something interesting with what RAD has built here. Taking it more proprietary (e.g, halting new licensing) would be a huge blow for the industry.
- glandium 6y agoHow does it compare with zstandard these days?
- jacobolus 6y agoCbloom 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 6y ago[deleted]
- nothis 6y agoIt 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 and diversity in the industry.
- zerocrates 6y agoIt certainly could happen down the road, but the post says the opposite for the time being, that they'll continue to support usage outside Unreal Engine.
- ATsch 6y agoWe'll see about that in a few years when some of the contracts start to expire and the company becomes more integrated.
- Angius 6y agoEpic 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.
- JabavuAdams 6y agoThey're in a strategic fight with Unity, though. The goal might not be to profit from these products specifically.
- astlouis44 6y agoAs far as I know, they are one of the few video game compression companies out there. Undoubtedly this is amazing news for Unreal Engine 4 devs, but for those not using the engine this is going to be a bit of a blow. On the plus side, this opens the doors for a "Pied Piper, but for games" style startup to come out of nowhere and take big market share.
- scrollaway 6y agoPied piper did have a whole subplot about compression in the context of reducing VR video game bandwidth latency. You might be more spot on than you think :)
- astlouis44 6y agoYup! Shameless plug btw - but my startup is working on a suite of tools for gaming on the web, that includes advanced compression libraries.
- egypturnash 6y ago"RAD will continue supporting their game industry, film, and television partners, with their sales and business development team maintaining and selling licenses for their products to companies across industries - including those that do not utilize Unreal Engine." - the article How long this will last is anybody's guess, of course.
- randtrain34 6y agoFor those interested in what RAD Game Tools actually makes, as far as I understood from their website (http://www.radgametools.com/ 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
- bluedino 6y agoWhat’s amazing is they have made these same products for like...25 years?
- manfredo 6y agoPretty much. Though they've periodically updated them to use new techniques like animation blending. I think there's also a lot of work in optimizing for different platforms. And perhaps more importantly, there's a lot of work in making the middle ware easy to integrate. Ease of integration is often more important than performance for a lot of middleware. I've seen their logo on tons of games. I never knew they were a local company (Kirkland, WA near Seattle).
- sitkack 6y agoNot geezer splaining you, but they had a fairly heavy advert presence in gamdev magazine and dr dobbs. They are right behind Attachmate in being a big software outfit in Seattle.
- scrollaway 6y agoReally hoping epic takes the opportunity to give Bink a more open license, to be honest. Much as I appreciate how advanced Bink was at the time, i don't know any dev that still use it given that av1 and such are just Good Enough.
- medecau 6y agoshows up on cyberpunk 2077 splash screen
- xienze 6y agoMan, 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.
- ineedasername 6y agoWell, they're a bit company right now, still riding the revenue success of Fortnite and the potential of their launcher/store. So investors are interested, including Chinese investors that own a decent swathe of shares. I just hope they don't become such huge industry giants that they stomp on anything with a faint smell of competition.
- xienze 6y agoI’m just amazed with what Fortnite has done for them. I pass by their current HQ regularly and it’s pretty modest. You’d never suspect that’s the HQ of such a successful company. I was surprised to learn they’re still taking funding. I figured they were pulling down absurd profit.
- ameen 6y agoTheir legal challenges with Apple might’ve put a dampener
- mrkramer 6y agoEpic's management is one of a kind; they made amazing game that millions of people love and play which makes them billions then they want to compete with Steam on digital video game marketplace in a way that they bribe devs for exclusive release on Epic Store then they got in fight with Apple over App Store fees and got their game kicked out of the store. I mean one hell of a ride. They grew some big balls in the last couple of years.
- reificator 6y ago> Their legal challenges with Apple might’ve put a dampener They started the fight, and I think it's safe to say they knew what they were getting into.
- hertzrat 6y agoI’ve been using unreal for the past 6 months to make a game. It’s not as easy to get started with as unity is, but if you are good at figuring stuff out then it’s just a powerhouse. The renderer is incredible, the workflows are modular, you can work in a data driven way, you can modify skeletal animations in-engine, performance is amazing, etc etc etc. It’s also stable, and non-production ready features are clearly identified as beta or experimental. I wish this was next week so I could post a link to my alpha build at the bottom of this post
- numlock86 6y agoYou are welcome to return and share your work in seven days!
- shmerl 6y agoWhat is the point of making custom codecs for Bink, instead of using state of the art free codecs?
- azornathogron 6y ago(I don't work in the industry, but am an interested amateur) [Edit- I may have misunderstood your question, but I'll leave my reply anyway.] Here are some possible reasons you might use Bink instead of a free codec: - Bink video has been around for a long time as a product, even though the codec has been updated (probably multiple times, I don't know). There weren't always good-enough free codecs, and if you have prior experience integrating Bink with your stuff then you may prefer to stick to something you know is good even if it costs money. - RAD focuses on producing libraries that are very easy to drop in, specifically in the context of games. They know how game code is written and structured. They know game developers want to be able to integrate video in a way that works -- and performs reliably -- within an existing game engine that does a lot of custom management of textures/buffers/graphics memory. State of the art free codecs don't necessarily have free libraries that are actually high performance and easy to integrate within a game context. - Your state of the art free codec might work great on a modern smartphone or PC, but good luck getting it to work on a Nintendo Switch or whatever weird console you're targeting. Bink is available for whatever game-specific platform hardware you're targeting.
- shmerl 6y ago> Your state of the art free codec might work great on a modern smartphone or PC, but good luck getting it to work on a Nintendo Switch or whatever weird console you're targeting. Bink is available for whatever game-specific platform hardware you're targeting. So basically this means something like Bink has limited application time wise, and going forward it will become more and more obsolete because free codecs will cover all needed use cases sufficiently.
- pacificat0r 6y agoGiven that bink has been around for ages, it almost always finds a niche of decoding stuff fast for video games. As a game you will always want more cycles for level loading or whatever else happens in background as you also play that video so bink-like specialized and super lean and fast library will always have a use in that scenario. Gstreamer is a pain to set up, and when you do set it up it uses tons of threads, ffmpeg isn't nicer either.
- jcalabro 6y agoThat'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/ https://jeffandcaseyshow.com/
- kleiba 6y agoCasey, in this case, is of course Casey Muratori of Handmade Hero fame.
- bexsella 6y agoThere's a lot of focus here on Bink, but Oodle has a fascinating history as well. From world-class compression ratios/decompression speeds to being implemented in hardware by Sony in all PS5s. RAD have a great history of getting exactly the right people that are interested in their fields and are great at what they do. I echo the sentiments of many when saying I am surprised no one had scooped them up earlier (although I doubt it wasn't for lack of offers).
- Thaxll 6y agoOodle is very expensive though.
- iamcreasy 6y agoI wonder why some companies do not publicly post their price of the product? Or at least a price range? What's the harm in that?
- selectodude 6y agoBecause pricing on stuff like that is negotiable and they don't want people to have a starting point.
- iamcreasy 6y agoI see. Thank you.
- garaetjjte 6y agoOr 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-duckies/ 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 really unique. Why I would jump hoops to use it while I can likely implement video playback from libavcodec and generic compression with zstd or LZ4 faster than their sales people will reply?
- mappu 6y agoThe 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. Current-gen consoles also all have NVMe SSDs. Given this trend, RAD's heyday was definitely in the days before consoles had NVMe disks (Bink in particular let games punch far above their weight) so this might be a nice forever-home. Blame Intel for not making faster CPUs, and consumers for tolerating massive install sizes, i guess. The other angle to this story is that the PS5 has a hardware decode unit for RAD Kraken. To get the best use out of the PS5 hardware, it's essential that the encoder is still made available. This is a huge competitive moat. (PCs probably won't get a comparable decompression accelerator card and such a card wouldn't get enough market penetration anyway.)
- cma 6y agoI'm sure Sony didn't burn kraken decompression into hardware without a license saying all their third party devs can use the compressor for Sony's PlayStation console (and future ones for backwards compatibility at least) in perpetuity.
- manfredo 6y agoI heard that the main issue with decompressed assets was audio, not video (granted, video is image and audio so one is a strict superset of the other). One game - Titanfall or a CoD game, IIRC - had something like 20 GB of uncompressed audio in a 35GB installation footprint. Rationale was saving CPU cycles. Meanwhile here I am with a sound card in my desktop PC for no real reason anymore :\
- ratww 6y agoThat 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 decompression process. It's been CPU from the start, baring rare exceptions. Sound cards just receive raw PCM. There used to be hardware codecs but they're not really common, especially in consumer/gamer-grade soundcards.
- anthk 6y agoRAD had an amazing software renderer on par on the Unreal one.
- dfox 6y agoPixomatic wasn't just on par with UE1's SW rasterizer it was somewhat explicitly designed to be the SW rasterizer for UE2. The thing was notable by the fact that it had feature parity with HW Direct3D implementations of the time and worked by dynamically compiling D3D shaders into x86 code (which had the interesting feature that it used ESP as general purpose register). IIRC the idea behing Intel's Larabee at least partly involved running pixomatic on that hardware.
- mappu 6y agoI suspect Intel were going to run OpenSWR on it - that's the software renderer that they eventually donated to Mesa after Larabee shut down.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- anthk 6y agoI think the Havok engine ran on that on software mode too, at least for the first Max Payne. I remember forgetting to install NV drivers back in the day, and the game launched smoothly at 640x480 with no issues. Ok, it was uber-grainy, but still playable.
- mikepurvis 6y agoLots 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 could play them from outside the game), but they were used for a lot of games of that era, including a bunch of early Blizzard titles like Warcraft 2 and StarCraft.
- johnyzee 6y agoI 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.
- jcpham2 6y agoI played Caesar II for days and days as a teenager. Awesome game.
- MFApostrofaKing 6y agosmackply for life! Interlaced and/or all! While bink is great too.
- mrkramer 6y agoThese guys are my heroes!
- gman83 6y agoIf Epic wanted to make a video game streaming service like Stadia, the video compression knowledge these guys have could come in very handy I imagine. So maybe it's not just about Unreal Engine, but about making the Epic store in to a streaming service.
- CadellFastro 6y agoForgot about epic games for a second and thought it was weird that a medical software company was buying game tools.
- Thaxll 6y agoI'm not sure it's great news tbh, in 5 years everything will be in UE so people not using Unreal will be screwed.
- Moeg 6y agoSounds like a reaction to the recent interview of the famous game repackager Fitgirl
- leeoniya 6y agofor those who don't know, Fabian Giesen (@ryg of demoscene group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farbrausch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farbrausch) works at RAD. his blog: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/ https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/ one of my favorites: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for-madmen/ https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for...
- midnightclubbed 6y agoOf all the RAD offerings Telemetry is the most special. It lets you record millions of CPU profiling events (thousands per frame) with extremely low overhead, and then shows those events in a hierarchical timeline. For game optimization it is completely unique and literally game changing. It will show you where your hotspots are, where your threads are starving out, which CPU core is running an event (and when it is thread-switched), where your random frame hitches are happening, how your cpu workload is being spread across your frame. You can seamlessly zoom from seeing the scheduling/tasks for 100 consecutive frames of a game down to what was happening in a 100us slice of a single frame.
- chii 6y agoHow does it do these things without a high CPU overhead?!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Snild 6y agoBased on no knowledge at all about Telemetry, probably something similar to the amazing trace functionality in the Linux kernel. That is: non-shared (per-cpu in Linux) ring buffers, small simple events, and formatting done after the fact.
- WhoCaresLies 6y agogood, people who focus on performance and efficiency should get rewarded the most now epic, fix you 1gb electron launcher, hire me if you can't
- thibpat 6y agoI'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!
- HacklesRaised 6y agoI 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.
- JabavuAdams 6y agoYes, the people who work there and who passed through there are the best of the best.