Kostya's Boring Codec World

So in the recent news I read about Epic Games acquiring RAD Game Tools and I guess I have to say something about that.

RAD was an example of a good niche company: it has been providing game makers with essential tools for more than quarter of century and offering new things too. Some people might remember their Miles Sound System and Smacker format from DOS times, some have heard about Bink video, others care about their other tools or recent general data compression library that even got hardware decoding support on PS5. And one of the under-appreciated things is that the developers are free to publish their research so you can actually read how their things were developed and improved. If that does not convince you of their competence I don’t know what can. (Side note: considering that you usually get useless whitepapers that evade describing how things work, the posts from Charles or Fabian are especially outstanding).

Since I’m no expert in business matters and lack inside knowledge I don’t know if it’s a good or bad step for a company and its products. Nevertheless I wish them good luck and prosperous and interesting future even if we have Electronic Arts to show us an example of what happens when a small company gets bought by a large game developer and publisher.

P.S. I would be grateful if they fill in missing details about Bink2 video but this is unlikely to happen and probably somebody caring enough about it should finish the reverse engineering.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 8th, 2021 at 9:14 am and is filed under Useless Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.