PS5 Kraken Compression 🎮, Teardown RT 🔦, Face WrapAI 🤖
🚀 Next‑Gen Game Tech Deep Dive
Inside PS5’s Kraken: Fabien Giesen on Compression, Patents, and Game I/O
Fabien Giesen (Oodle/RAD) goes deep into how modern game compression really works, from LZ77 and Zstd to Oodle’s highly tuned codecs. He explains why compression patents are a minefield, why most lossless codecs are fundamentally serial and hard to GPU-accelerate, and how Oodle Texture intentionally “worsens” textures to compress them better. The highlight: a behind-the-scenes look at PS5’s hardware Kraken decompressor and Sony’s automatic deduping tools, which quietly shrink game installs and supercharge streaming.
How Teardown’s New Engine Ray Traces a Fully Destructible Voxel World
Teardown’s creators break down how they rendered a fully destructible voxel world with raytraced lighting long before RT hardware was common. Dennis Gustafsson explains the original OpenGL 3.3 renderer: 3D texture raymarching, mip‑as‑octree acceleration, and a massive shadow volume for “fake” ray tracing. Gabe Rundlett then shows the new Vulkan-based engine that uses hardware ray tracing, procedural voxel chunks, and clever compression to add GI, better reflections, and full per‑voxel PBR—often with less VRAM than the original.
🎮 AI‑Driven Game Creation
From Assets to Worlds: How Tripo’s AI Is Rewiring Game Production
Simon Song breaks down the tech behind Tripo’s latest AI 3D models and how they’re being embedded directly into live level editors and UGC pipelines. With SparseFlex and the new P1.0 “probability space” approach, Tripo can rapidly output professional, game-ready meshes that integrate cleanly into standard DCC and engine workflows. The team is also experimenting with “world models” that infer full scenes and motion from video. For Song, the future lies in AI generating worlds while artists and TAs steer style, rules, and gameplay.
Automating FACS: How WrapAI Builds Rig-Ready Faces Overnight
Faceform’s Andrey Kravpuskov unveils WrapAI, an enterprise tool that automates the entire journey from raw FACS scans to rig-ready blendshape sets. Using a modular node-graph pipeline, WrapAI wraps, stabilizes, cleans, normalizes, and splits expressions, even fixing lip closure and eyelid/eyeball intersections automatically. A “hallucinated” FACS base (Cybele Era) plus optical-flow-driven wrapping enable clean results with almost no manual work. The pipeline supports custom topologies and MetaHuman, letting studios process dozens of actors overnight.