Hacker News Reader

Comment by pnw | Hacker News Reader

I spent a ton of time in 2022 looking for people adopting USD for game development and came up with nada. It's popular in vfx but nobody in gaming seems to be adopting it in any way I could find. Has that changed since?

View on HN

It's early days for USD in gamedev, but Remedy is using it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI2pyzTOvaQ

Interesting find, thanks!

USD isn't usable as a last-mile format, so many game engines still use internal formats that facilitate fast edit-time to last-mile format conversion and compression, mainly as a point of pragmatism. There is some slow adoption of USD, but given that the main drivers of the format are from VFX, it's understandable that it will take some time for game devs to embrace USD fully.

RealityKit (iOS & visionOS AR/VR/3D library) makes use of USD. Native apps and games for the Vision Pro will also use USD, alongside their new implementation of Entity Component System (ECS).

Yes, but using .reality files is better for stuff like games in RealityKit. For example it would contain a GPU-ready texture instead of a jpeg (and a lot of other differences), so it's more in-line with how assets are typically loaded in games.

Generally it never makes sense to use interchange formats for a runtime use.

Take the predominant game development format: FBX. It’s used strictly for interchange not runtime.

The use of USD is exactly the same. You’d compile it into a runtime friendly format that benefits your specific runtime.

Epic has started the work to implement it into Unreal Engine and various tools have started adopting it as well. All this within the last two years or so

USD and FBX/glTF serve very different purposes and can't replace each other.

What would you use USD for in gamedev?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com