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Comment by hutzlibu | Hacker News Reader

Hang on, the performance of playing static video content was not good enough? (and worse than dynamically rendered game art?)

You mean a single - full screen video, or videos inside the 3D content?

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Video used as textures, either in world on 3D meshes, or as part of UI (HUD) elements. It could be prohibitively expensive to play a single video in some scenes, and we didn't support multiple videos. Not because it wasn't possible or anything, mostly because performance, although there would have been an engineering cost to doing also (ie I would have had to add support to the engine)

Ah, video textures. That makes sense and indeed sounds expensive.

Also remember "expensive" is relative. I think it added little over 1ms to total frame time per video, but in a 60fps console game that. Our budget was about 1ms or less for the entire UI during gameplay (including scripting, layout and rendering), so a video could more than double that. 4 simultaneous videos would be like 1/4 of the entire frame :).

Videos can be used for a lot of different things. You can animate textures, obviously, but you can also animate things like normal maps to get really interesting effects. I recently read an article that described how one of the more recent Assassin's Creed games used animated normal maps to make rainfall patterns on the ground.

likely the performance of playing small video elements as part of the UI, oftentimes it's faster to keep a whole uncompressed texture atlas in memory for animations and such.

Yes and in most cases we would do this, but some content made more sense as video

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