I’ve always played around with the idea of making a vector-based texture system but people mocked the idea. But 4J Studios has developed Rixels and that’s brought brought some faith back to me.
But if I want to even attempt this system, I would need to know where in the engine I need to target to add this new file type and entirely new way of rendering.
at least custom file types can be used with custom importers:
*just a side note, news seem to suggest that they are patenting it.. so depends what kind of license or price tag they will put on it.
You mean vector graphics rendering. UI Toolkit has that for instance.
What is so special about this file type that it cannot be stored simply inside texture? The rest is just shader math
That’s not what they are referring to. In this case it’s a recently publicized way of storing textures as vector data in a way that significantly compresses the information (or so I gather, I haven’t done more than a cursory glance at a single screenshot and some headlines). I agree with Neonage though that it probably can just be stored as traditional texture data or a compute buffer and decompressed on the fly via shaders. At the very least, I think it warrants RnD using those techniques first before going all-in and re-writing portions of the pipelines.