Graphite's "patent for Texture Streaming System"

[fisherman]

Hi there,

while waiting for a release of Amplify Texture 2 ( has it been a year now ? ), I found another product doing basically the same thing. Now that's not too surprising, but on one of their pages they state to have a pending patent for this type of texture streaming system. Does this patent cover the technique used in AT2?

Thanks
Bernhard

[Ricardo Teixeira]

Hello,

Thanks for getting in touch it’s great to hear from you. Indeed time really flies; it’s hard to believe it’s been so long but we are still working on Amplify Texture 2, the main reason for the delay being that we are a small indie team with very limited resources. The product has been deployed for a while now and development is ongoing, even though we haven't officially launched.

One of our biggest constraint is the fact that, since our sales are fairly moderate (on the low side), we have to do quite a lot of outsource work to keep development going; other delays have actually been good, so to speak, from all the feedback we gathered thanks to our early adopters we were able to really improve and add to what we initially planned.

Just to clear out any doubts, Amplify Texture 2 is currently being used in commercial projects and has been licensed by a few larger entities, from games to simulations; it may not have been officially released but it’s fully production capable and an official release is not far off.

Regarding Graphite, while they have the right to patent their technology (pending patent), as do we - even though we're pretty much against software patents - we are fairly confident that that their patents have no validity over our product since our first public release dates back to 2011 and our initial technology was based on publicly available descriptions of generalized virtual texturing, such as Sparse Virtual Textures, that dates back to 2008 and others even earlier. It has, of course, since involved into something more complex, highly customized, flexible and reliable.

I hope this clears out any concerns but let us know if you have any additional questions, we would be happy to elaborate.

Thanks!

[fisherman]

Hi Ricardo,

sorry for being imprecise, I was referring to a publicly available release of AT2.

I know that you are (and have been) working hard behind the scenes. I am sure that most potential customers are waiting for some kind of final result because the price is above the usual asset store "pennies" - justifiably, because the product is complex and different and the value can be enourmous, depending on the type of project it is used for. Most of them are indie developers themselves (just like me), so it is clear that they want to be sure about the final product. And I guess many of them (just like me) are very interested a mobile / cross platform version, again taking the price into consideration. The two main applications for AT2 are

improve the quality and flexibility of textures to take them to the next level on desktop machines
get rid of the most annoying limitations for great textures on mobile.

Good to hear that you are relaxed about the patent stuff. I have been working with a friend on one of his inventions (not software related) and I had to learn about the complexity and manifold of patent laws. The early mention of the AT technology should indeed render their efforts useless.

Unfortunately I lost the project I wanted to improve with AT2 (because my concept relied on AT2, but I obviously misinterpreted the estimated schedule for a AT2 mobile release, so I could not deliver). But I hope there will be options to try out this product in the future with other projects, once it is officially released. In many cases establishing a product as a de facto standard means being the first/ one of the first in the growing competition. I hope you make it big

Thanks
Bernhard

[Ricardo Teixeira]

Hello Bernhard,

No problem, we understand what you mean. It is unfortunate really, we initially expected that AT2 would sell enough during the pre-order period to support its full development but as I mentioned that was not exactly what happened; sales are indeed a bit on the low side forcing us to fund our growth via other products and outsource work. Regarding Mobile support and Indie development, there will be a few changes for the better before the end of the year. Multi-platform, particularly consoles and mobile, are now our top priority.

Indeed, patents can be a really troublesome especially when people try to abuse them.

Our sincere apologies, I wish we had something you could have used at the time, hopefully there will be future projects where you can take advantage of AT2.

Once more, thank you for the support, it really means a lot to us.

All the best,
Ricardo Teixeira