From a development standpoint, this partnership does add a lot of common functionality to the Unreal Engine that wasn’t there before.
BINK VIDEO CODEC LICENSE
Epic bills its Unreal Engine as “the world’s most open and advanced real-time 3D creation tool.” Many companies from all over the world license versions of Unreal from Epic to make mainstream video games, including high-profile recent projects like Final Fantasy VII Remake, Gears 5, Minecraft: Dungeons, the forthcoming Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, and of course, Fortnite. Other major RAD products include Granny 3D, a toolkit for building 3D games Telemetry, a profiler for real-time application performance and Miles, a middleware sound system named after its primary developer. We’re excited and humbled to join the amazing Epic team.” “We both believe that solid technologies enable developers to build beautiful, performant, and reliable experiences. “Our work with Epic goes back decades, and joining forces is a natural next step given our alignment on products, mission, and culture,” Jeff Roberts, founder and CEO of RAD, said in a statement.
Bink has quietly powered an incredible number of games’ video cutscenes over the last 21 years or so. Further details of the deal, such as the cost of the acquisition, have yet to be officially disclosed. Based on the announcement, RAD’s ownership is simply changing hands, and it’s otherwise business as usual. None of its tools will become exclusive to games or products that use Epic’s Unreal Engine. Under the terms of the acquisition, RAD plans to continue supporting its current partners in games, film, and television production. “The RAD team includes some of the world’s leading compression, video and game dev tooling experts, and we are thrilled to welcome them to the Epic family.”
“We know first-hand how impressive RAD’s compression technology is,” said Kim Libreri, Epic Games CTO, in a statement. RAD’s tools, notably, are already in use in current builds of Fortnite. “Together, Epic and RAD plan to integrate RAD’s powerful technology into Unreal Engine to benefit the developer community and gamers alike,” Epic said in its initial announcement. Oodle was recently licensed by Sony for use with the PlayStation 5, in a specialized edition called Oodle Kraken that - to use RAD’s term - “ supercharges ” the PS5’s data loading.
RAD also makes Oodle, a data compression utility that’s used to make games’ files smaller, for faster loading times and lower bandwidth costs. RAD launched a follow-up codec, Bink 2, in 2013. Bink, a specialized codec, has been used in more than 25,000 games on 14 different platforms, dating back to the end of the 1990s. If you’ve played any video game that was made in the last 21 years or so, there’s a good chance the game was using RAD’s Bink tool to encode its video files. RAD is one of those companies that runs under the radar, but has quietly influenced much of the modern games industry. (Epic Games Image)Įpic Games, the company behind Fortnite and the Unreal Engine, has acquired the game development toolset creator RAD Game Tools, headquartered in Kirkland, Wash. Epic Games buys Seattle-area video game development toolmaker RADįortnite is one of Epic Games’ top titles.
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