Unreal has had the ability for games to create patches (new exe and changed/additional content) for some time.
Distribution and application is generally the harder part of diff patching though and I suspect most early-access games prefer not to worry about it (though 40GB seems a bit further along than early access!)
I'm one of the engineers working on this, I even make a semi-appearance in the video. I'm not really going to say much about it because it's a little annoying that it leaked out, and by such a crappy recording too, but -
a) I think the title here is pretty good, better than the hyperbolic one the Inquirer used.
b) Your middle two paragraphs are spot on
c) Given the video, it's understandable people are focused on the "actor as a virtual character" previsualization part ('but Avatar did this two years ago!', 'our game engine does that!', yadda yadda). That's only a small part of it, and honestly one of the less interesting ones.
I don't see what you think is condescending though. There's not a lot of difference today in the skill-set of a CG artist and a games artist. Generally they're just working to different budgets. (I say that as someone who spent 15 years working on console games).
The painstaking days of game artists building models that use less than 100 verts and hand-painting 256x256 textures are gone. Now, both your CG and game-artist build super-high resolution models, probably starting with something like ZBrush, then decimate down to whatever they need with the highres asset used to generate normal or displacement maps.
Optimius Prime in the original Transformers movie used ~20x more polygons than a PS4/Xbone game would today for a similar character. That's pretty amazing when you think that the GPUs in those machines are already handily outmatched by PCs, and the performance gains Nividia/AMD bring with every hardware cycle.
There's a big difference between "X would like to access your contacts" and "X would like to access your contacts, then store everything on their servers for reasons/duration of their determination"
Right, and that lack of bargaining power is because in these days of hefty PCs and standardized software studios can always find other VFX shops, either in the US or abroad, to do a "good enough" job for less.
There's zero chance of requiring studios to only use unionized VFX shops, so unionizing them will simply make them either less competitive (need to charge more to cover guaranteed benefits) or more prone to bankruptcy (cannot meet commitments to workers if there's a shortage of work)
Uhh, no. The last thing the US VFX industry needs right now is to become more expensive.
The problem is not artists being screwed over pay & benefits, the problem is that most VFX shops are struggling to stay in the black, period. In part this is due to overseas competition and expensive bidding processes, but also shops taking on work at or below cost in an effort to keep people employed.
The article is a little misleading in that it suggests a land-grab. The short links are auto-generated from app names/company names by pruning whitespace, copyright/trademark symbols and so on.
So if your app wasn't already called "Banking", you're not going to get appstore.com/banking.
When I installed Windows 8 a few weeks ago, the 64-bit install was about 20GB so where the hell is the other 21GB going?
Is the recovery partition literally a mirror image of the default install? That sounds ridiculous because the thing is basically a computer so could have a USB-restore, but I don't see how they get to 40GB+ otherwise.
<facetious>21GB of trials and time-limited software? </facetious>
I can't speak for this specific case, but when releasing software to others (open sourcing, licensing, etc) it's common to run the codebase through something like Black Duck. Everything that comes up as a false positive needs to be checked into and cleared. Everything that's a true positive must have its license read to ensure that any terms of its release are being met.
For software that's been released but doesn't have a clear license (e.g. some "Pull to refresh" implementation on Github) it's often necessary to ask the author to sign some form of "no, I really won't sue you" release.
If it's discovered that some license was inadvertently violated (e.g. attribution) then it can be necessary to send a mea culpa to the licensor so they're not incensed if someone points the violation out to them later.
Well that point is complete nonsense so you should undrive it.
Just because a piece of code incurs hardware related performance issues does not mean it's "no longer close to the real machine". Cache misses? Reorder your data, or start inserting prefetch statements. Mispredicted branches? Issue a hint, or structure your code better.
Both of these are profile-guided optimizations. It's very difficult for compilers to optimize for access patterns that will only become clear in the context of execution, and often depend on your target spec machine.
I think few people would consider border controls to be any of these things.
You were flagged somehow and that sucks, but if you don't like the immigration procedures of the US you are free to either a) live elsewhere or b) try to take action to change it (we are a democracy after all). On the other hand, venting on a blog isn't going to do anything but irk people who wish they were fortunate enough to hold a US green card, or come back to haunt you if this happens again and some cranky overworked agent google's you.
FWIW I'm a former, now naturalized, US green card holder and this happened to me twice in six years. It sucks, but I considered it a very small price to pay for being able to freely travel and work (or not work!) in this country.
Distribution and application is generally the harder part of diff patching though and I suspect most early-access games prefer not to worry about it (though 40GB seems a bit further along than early access!)
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Deployment/P...