Slashdot Mirror

Oh, and for a full list of details on this stuff, see the site here http://www.radgametools.com/mi...

Off the top of my head, reading/writing files including savings settings/game saves

What's wrong with fopen & friends, and POSIX memory-mapped files? What would be gained by using Cocoa APIs here?

USB device management

Why would a game need to manage USB devices? If you mean input devices, then it shouldn't care if they're USB or not at all - that's for OS to deal with

Though you do have a point that the only cross-platform input API right now is SDL, and, IIRC, it is fairly primitive with respect to functions it supports (force feedback and the likes).

thread management

POSIX.

Core Audio?

Most game engines today just license some existing cross-platform audio framework that already wraps and abstracts away OS differences. So, presumably, such framework would only have to be ported once.

Since we're speaking of Source games specifically, HL2 uses Miles Sound System, which is in fact available on Linux (or, really, any system where OpenAL is).

and it's used in tons of video games (precisely because it doesn't need to be licensed, I think)

And because a popular package used in games, http://www.radgametools.com/, has very good support for ogg. So there is little reason why video games shouldn't use ogg. Better, cheaper and usable.

"Bing", "Zune", ...? Where does Microsoft come up with these names? And why aren't they stopped before they leave the building? Is there really no one in the company who thought to say, "You know, that name sounds kind of stupid"?

On a related topic, can anyone else see the makers of Bink Video getting a little bit leery about the creation of Bing Video? Sure, they're different things, but Microsoft has sued other companies over similar trivial name differences. There's no way Microsoft will try that in this case -- Bink has been around too long, and the Bink codecs have been used in games published by Microsoft Games for years. But one still wonders whether Microsoft is trying to muddy the waters, or if they just don't care.

There is nothing like Bink that allows for cross-platform in-game videos.

What about, erm, Bink?

"The Bink SDK includes everything necessary to playback Bink movies quickly and easily. It is available for Windows, Sony PLAYSTATION (R) 3, Sony PSP, Sony PS2, Xbox, Xbox 360, Nintendo DS, Nintendo GameCube, Macintosh (PPC and Intel) and x86 GNU/Linux."

According to RAD's site (the guys who made BINK) there IS a Linux client. It's not any more open than the Windows version, but I don't see why NWN couldn't've made use of it.

"In my opinion, and I'm sure everyone with a sane and reasonable way of thought will agree, an open source implementation would be a fool's errand. With the limited amount of hardware-accelerated drivers for linux, just how large are the chance for an implementation by a hardware vendor even if open source Direct3D was a reality? The best solution, which both Wine and Cedega utilize, is a Direct3D->OpenGL wrapper. It's not optimal, but it often works decently."

Huh?

OpenGL is open-source. Hardware vendors have no problem implementing that. Why would they have trouble implementing an open-source D3D API? And FYI there already is SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) which is basically the same thing.

Not to mention, the hardware wouldn't care if the Direct3D implementation was open-source or not. It wouldn't know the difference. Try installing a open-source OpenGL implementation, and compare that to a closed-source one. One might run better than the other, but that's not your vidcard's fault. The difference is in the software.

I'm not sure I understand your market.

Is it to provide fallback for games that are 10 years old? Certainly you don't expect id to port their renderer to an DX9.

Is it to provide fallback for games that are cutting edge (DX9)? If so, then the marketting claims you've made are erroneous. The engine cannot simply be dropped in. Are you telling me that your renderer can process 120M polys/sec at 1600x1200? That would be shockingly impressive.

Is it to provide fallback for games that are a couple of years old (DX7/DX8)? If so, I wish you luck with that, but unfortunately RAD Game Tools beat you to market by about a year and a half.

Is it to provide a method for people who are currently doing 2D graphics (ala Commander Keen)? If so, I think I should point out that people doing that would be better off using GDI or the 2-D OGL API, for any of several reasons. One is that the emulating 2-D in 3-D is necessary for some applications, but generally not preferable due to complexity. Another is that using GDI allows the hardware--should it exist--to potentially improve performance of 2-D "for free."

And although you didn't make a reference to the ref rast comparison in your reply to me, you certainly did in any of the other 17 replies you made on this thread.

Finally, if you believe that DX9 shaders won't decimate performance because DX8.1 shaders don't, you are kidding yourself. Beyond the fact that DX9 shaders support more texture fetches (causing cache misses), branching (causing pipe drains and cache misses), and dependent texture lookups (totally hammering any semblence of cache performance), you're ignoring the obvious factor that DX9 shaders can and typically are orders of magnitude longer than DX8 shaders.

PS: I don't know Daniel, and it's quite inappropriate for you to bring mention of my employer into this conversation. That requires me to post-fix this post with a 'the statements I've made herein do not reflect the opinions of my employer.' Yada, yada.

Oh, I presume that the demos are very much faster than 50x the REF, but again people should not be saying "the only other alternative for Direct3D 8/9 emulation" because first, you are not allowed to redistribute the reference rasterizer with a product because it is part of the DirectX SDK not the redistributables package for DX8 or DX9, second, there IS another DirectX 9 compatible API for software rendering and it is fantastically fast and feature rich, it's called Pixomatic:

http://www.radgametools.com/#Pixomatic

This sounds very much like Pixomatic, courtesy of Michael Abrash.

The DX9 featureset appears to be the big win here, unless of course you consider Linux support important :-)

This looks like it is meant to compete with Pixomatic from RAD Game Tools. ( http://www.radgametools.com/default.htm ) Perhaps it's cheaper or faster, but pixomatic is not overly pricy and I trust Mike Abrash *now at RAD) has a little bit of experience writing fast renderers :)

OK smart-ass, how do I play it on my MacOS X platform?

I doubt anyone's going to read this, but try downloading the MacOS X Bink player and opening the EXE with it.

I played one of the old Half-Life 2 Bink videos on my Linux machine like that a while ago, so I presume it'll work in a similar manner...

RAD Game Tools produced the Bink codec. Although I'd guess very few PCs have a Bink player installed already, free players are available for download for Windows, Mac and Linux.

The encoder is pretty flexible (and pretty much idiot-proof), so you can cut down the quality/bandwidth/size as required. I've only used it for streaming game video off dvd, so I don't know how it performs for the smaller files you're wanting. Might be worth a try, though.

When was the last time you saw a software rendered engine - after all, SIMD has been around in x86 processors for quite some time...

e-mail me about it if you've got enough space in a mail account, all 10 chapters are in divx4-fast motion at 480x320 and the whole season is 337 Mb, probly a few less if i zip it, otherwise IM me, or, i used a program called rad video tools, it does QT to divx ridiculously fast, wish i could find something that worked as well for RM format...

So to make the comparison valid, both in terms of encoding speed an quality, some other tool should've been used.

No, for this to be considered as the "end all, be all" answer to the question "What is the best video encoder," some other tools should have been used.

But that wasn't what this was about. It was about consumer encoders -- they specifically say "free, or for a moderate cost" ($30 was paid for QT Pro).

I mean, if they were doing a "best of all worlds" roundup, they'd have to include things like Rad Game Tool's Bink, which if you have a few days to encode your video will find you the best goddamn motion video solution it can.

However, it's not the original software renderer written for the Unreal engine, as shipped with the original "Unreal" game. It's Pixomatic, the latest project from Michael Abrash. Pixomatic is a pure software renderer that supports modern video card operations. Version 2.0 was recently released, and brings it up to "DX7-class" devices (1.0 was only "DX6-class"). The game won't look quite as good under Pixomatic, and it won't run anywhere near as fast as it would with a 3D chipset. But hey! it runs!

Who gets the software renderer? Well, Pixomatic is heavily optimized for x86 processors, so you're not likely to see a Mac port. However, it is officially supported under Windows and Linux (though presumably x86 only). So the Linux builds of UT2k4 could ship with Pixomatic; it remains to be seen whether or not they will.

larry

p.s. I've only played a little of the (beta) demo, but I did get spider mines, and I believe I've had the grenade launcher too.

I would imagine that the software renderer is probably a PC-only option. UT2K4 uses Pixomatic for its software renderer, which from what I can gather from the website, is heavily optimized for speed, but is only for PCs. (I suppose the fact that it was written by Mike Abrash, who worked on the original Quake software renderer with John Carmack and has written a fair share of optimization books, is more than enough assurance for me.) Anyways, there doesn't seem to be a Mac version of that, but Macs tend not to be saddled with crappy onboard graphics chips, anyway.

The software renderer, which you can download and try (it also works for UT2003) and read about here, is really built more for people who buy computers with integrated (i.e. crappy) 3D graphics from the big manufacturers and still want a taste of the game. Framerate and graphics quality-wise, it really is just a taste--on my P4 2.4 GHz, I don't get more than 20-30 fps at 640x480 (actually rendered at 320x240 and scaled up, except the HUD). There's just too many polygons for a CPU to handle all by itself.

Still, it's a nice move on Epic's part to make the game accessible to more people.

Supposedly Bink uses a compression technology based on wavelets that is not used anywhere else. Looking at the quality of that movie, it seems pretty interesting. That would be a neat reverse-engineering project, for somebody with the time.

What format was it in?

Bink

But yeah it's rather choppy on slower computers (mine happens to be one too), so I think this is just a frindly hint from valve to upgrade ;-)

1. Certain compilers (Intel for example) will allow you to use MMX, SSE and SSE2 compiler intrinsics without going to asm.
   
2. Doing it by hand will still beat the compiler (although the gap is always closing). If you get the Quake source from id, you can see Mr. Abrash's real-life demonstration of this. The hand-optimised asm runs faster (only a couple of frames, but still noticeable) than the compiled optimised C version even today (on processors that didn't exist when the asm was written with very different performance profiles). I didn't know that he was involved in the pixomatic thing, it's nice to see that he's still putting all those asm skills to good use :)
   

I keep hearing good things about Bink. Anyone have any experience with it, one way or the other? Seems to be used in a lot of games.

Apparently Japan is ahead of the game with a relatively standardized 3d render engine.

OpenGL is perfectly suited to 3D rendering on handelds, with the caveat that software rendering for OpenGL, which is to say, Mesa, has not been seriously optimized for this purpose. This is only because there hasn't been much manpower focussed on the job, to date. What's needed is some more thinking like this.

After all, it's just a matter of programming.

I agree with you, ideally, but if someone has control over the market for ANYTHING, watch out. Remember the 80's where EVERYTHING was Nintendo, and every last bit was pretty much crap? Of course, the console wars brought them right in line. What if there had been no console wars? Would Nintendo have been nearly as motivated to make a better system? And then Sony comes along and crushes Nintendo's corporate arrogance even FURTHER.

The GameCube is a very nice system, and so far Nintendo's been the most successful in thwarting piracy, which is a plus in the gaming industry. How many "backup" PSX/PS2 games does the average modded-PS2 owner have?

As for the multiple platform bit, yeah, they try to make things for as many platforms as possible, but at the same time companies want to limit their games to platforms that will probably get the most sales on based on average ownership. Why? SDKs for consoles are damn expensive. And then if you want to make your programmers happy, you can do something crazy like buy RAD tools, which cost $5000+ apiece (usually much more). There's a steep capital in joining the business, and the fewer consoles you develop for, the happier your accountants and market researchers will be.

Anyway, no one is going to resign themselves into a niche. I could go on, but let me just say that in a market capitalist company, if you have the capital, you don't just stick to your niche, which will eventually grow out of it or die, you divide and conquer. If everything cute suddenly becomes incredibly unpopular by everyone, Nintendo would still want SOMETHING keeping them afloat. Granted, they'd be up shit creek, but they'd at least have a (however unuseful) paddle.

Granted this sort of issue:
"Support for the wheel varies on different distributions of Linux. " (from the NWN Linux Client page)
is I imagine a real headache for developers and reiterates the importance of standardization. Of course, to some extent the commericial distros don't what too much standardization, because obviously each distros uniqueness is what makes it marketable. At the same time they do want standardization as its good for their consumers. But this is getting into another issue entirely.

I'm not involved with that particular product and can't rattle any stats off the top of my head, but I remember being shocked to hear how much download traffic our site sees per month. The donation button shows up only when you're downloading a freebie like the video toolset that's of primary interest to (non-paying) end users.

And a follow up question:

RAD makes a ton of dough liscensing this stuff, it's used in thousands of games. The encoder is free, but the SDK is big bucks.

So why do they ask for paypal donations?

Anyone else find it just a little cheesy when a for-profit corporation is soliciting donations?

And a follow up question:

RAD makes a ton of dough liscensing this stuff, it's used in thousands of games. The encoder is free, but the SDK is big bucks.

So why do they ask for paypal donations?

Anyone else find it just a little cheesy when a for-profit corporation is soliciting donations?

that the REAL story here is the availability of Bink and Miles. These two tools are widely used in the gaming industry, and should make porting of MANY games and other multimedia apps (not just NWN) a real possibility. In fact, a quick look at Rad Game Tools page shows 2,700 games that use the Miles API. Bink is pretty cool too...used in quite a few games as well.

-JT

And the RadGameTools guys have already responded in that thread and SAID they have linux ports of both Miles and Bink available - Bioware just never asked!

If that's true, then perhaps one of the following pages should have listed Linux:

Bink Video! - Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, Xbox, GameCube, Mac OS, Mac OS X.
The Miles Sound System - Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X (Carbon), Xbox and GameCube coming soon.

(Can't access the Great Linux Thread due to /.)

And the RadGameTools guys have already responded in that thread and SAID they have linux ports of both Miles and Bink available - Bioware just never asked!

If that's true, then perhaps one of the following pages should have listed Linux:

Bink Video! - Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, Xbox, GameCube, Mac OS, Mac OS X.
The Miles Sound System - Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X (Carbon), Xbox and GameCube coming soon.

(Can't access the Great Linux Thread due to /.)

Quote: Posted 12/14/02 06:37:02 (GMT) by Kwalish
It looks like our fearless BioDevs have their work cut out for them when it comes to Bink. I mean, they have to either convince Rad Game Tools to port Bink to Linux, which is a possibilty, however that might take too long (if such a qualifier exists at this point in the game ). One option, if it is possible from a legal standpoint, would be to recode all of the video using MPEG and release it with the client download and when it installs that, replace all of the video content then. However this could be a problem in the future for the expansion packs, as the video would have to be recoded in those as well. Another option is to see if a bink-to-whatever conversion program exists for Linux (I highly doubt this) and convert the videos during the install. [ Edited By Kwalish: Saturday, 14 December 06:44AM (GMT) ]

OK, guys, maybe this is somewhere we can do something practical to help.

I am a good general purpose geek, and I expect a lot of the rest of us here are. I've never actually written a CODEC, and while i've reverese engineered file formats before I've never tackled a compressed video stream. However, it can't be impossible.

How many people would be up for setting up a sourceforge project for either an open source BINK player or an open source BINK2mpeg converter (actually both would use most of the same components). This way we could make an actual positive contribution to getting games onto Linux. We probably would not be finished quick enough to make a real difference for NWN - three months is damn tight for such a project - but it might help BioWare and other companies with future cross-platform games.

We've also all got sample BINK files to analyse, and a google search for 'bink file format' found me a useful text from someone (Mike Melanson) who has already started to analyse the format.

So, come on, who's in?

First of all, does this not sound like a gread opportunity for RAD to make a chunk-of-change by providing a BINK decompressor for linux?

Secondly, the movies are not a big part of the game. There's only eleven of them in total, including such highmarks as "AtariLogo.bik", "WOTCLogo.bik" and "BiowareLogo.bik". The in-game movies are the intro and then one per chapter and the ending. The consist mostly of images fading together and a storyteller voice. Recreating this in code (change the movies to a series of pictures) and possibly extracting the voice and layering that on top should NOT be a big problem. Sure it won't be the _same_, but it'd work

But I must tell you, I'm disappointed with Bioware on this. I _urged_ them to use more open formats. I made numerous posts on the benefits to them of them going with Vorbis instead of mp3... and that all ended with one of their engineer saying words to the effect "Don't you worry, we'll have all our licensing ducks in a row".

Well goodie, but then why are we having this problem?

I've just got to wonder if the problem with bink isn't that they _can't_ reverse-engineer it (I'm sure it can be done, especially since there are free tools so you can compress whatever you want and analyze the output. The file structure is actually very simple and I already know the header and chunk format)... or maybe there's the legal implications of doing it.

Man, those licensing ducks sure lined up fine!

(the problems with the sound API sounds odd, I don't see of SDL_sound/OpenAL wouldn't be enough)

I might be totaly wrong but isn't Bink typicaly used to compress video, not mpeg?

Smacker/Bink? The format seems to be pretty good, and mostly used for cut-scenes in games like Starcraft. I heard they were working on a linux player, but haven't seen one yet. While not open-source, the company seems better than the 3 big players(the free Smacker tools are pretty useful even if you aren't using them for the Smacker format). If they're telling the truth, Bink is better than MPEG2.