As a member of the tech media, I'm paying more and more attention to games.
In August this year, "Black Myth: Wukong" released a real machine demonstration after a year and won the praise of the whole network. Behind the positive reviews is Unreal Engine 5 based on Epic Games, NVIDIA's DLSS technology, 4K resolution, and Dolby Atmos.
Every piece of snow in the game, every step of movement, every change of light and shadow, can make me feel the improvement of technology on the quality of the game.
Not long ago, at the 2021 Tencent Game Developers Conference (hereinafter referred to as TGDC) held by Tencent Game Academy, practitioners and scholars from different companies and different fields shared their views on future games, and the breakthrough of new technologies showed not only games, but also the future of life.
From the improvement of picture quality to the upgrade of gameplay, from looking back at the games released in recent years, technology is an unavoidable topic.
In today's games, technology is the first productive force
Gunners on warhorses ride through misty forests, sunlight projected through leaves to the ground, illuminating the gunmen's faces in light or darkness — not a movie scene, but a live-action cast of Rockstar's 2018 red dead Redemption 2.
If you look closely, you will find that the shadows in the game are very realistic, and even produce different shadow effects depending on the changes in the clouds in the sky. This is all thanks to real-time rendering of the upgraded RAGE engine, as well as PBR (Physically Based Rendering) technology.
Even before the game is launched, game enthusiasts will look for clues to new games in technical patents.
Earlier this year, a patent from Take-Two (Rockstar's parent company) caught the attention of players, mentioning "simulation of vehicle routes and behaviors," a project patent developed by David Hynd, Rockstar's chief AI designer and technical director, that made players think: "Is that long-awaited game going to have a real virtual world that is not limited by hardware and software?"
The application of games to technology is numerous, 5G network makes cloud games possible anytime, anywhere; the performance of rendering engines and chips has improved the experience of mobile games has also been greatly improved; breakthroughs in artificial intelligence technology allow us to compete with AI such as "Glory of kings" and "Tianya Mingyue Knife".
▲Schematic of the deep learning process of AI "absolute enlightenment".
At this year's TGDC conference, we also showed us a lot of new technologies from gaming. One of the most eye-catching must be metaHuman with fake realities.
In a presentation by Sun Danlu, a technical artist from Epic Games China, she detailed Epic Games' latest digital human solution, MetaHuman Creator (MHC), which can quickly and easily create high-fidelity digital people, from facial features to skin tones, from body type, hairstyle to clothing range, and even teeth can be edited.
Once crafted, the character will contain full rigs and can be animated directly in Unreal Engine or maya.
In the sharing, Sun Danlu showed us the process of pinching people through MHC, which can be created interactively on the web side, and pinching a new digital character takes only 4 minutes. You can control the rapid production of facial feature points, or you can adjust the details for the smallest feature points (such as the tip of the nose), which is simple to operate and has a low barrier to entry.
Because the amount of data for facial details is huge, MHC adopts a cloud-based solution that not only does not consume local resources, but also updates and iterations quickly enough.
Sun Danlu shared: "I don't know if you realize that the use of Pixel Streaming (a streaming technology based on Unreal Engine) means that the background is also running Unreal Engine, making digital people in the Cloud Unreal Engine, and exporting it to the local Unreal Engine for use. All parameters, models, hairs, fabrics, textures, materials, LOD parameters can be matched one by one, which is true what you see is what you get."
It is foreseeable that such a universal digital human technology will surely accelerate the construction of the virtual world, and there will be richer applications in the content industry such as games, film and television, live broadcasting, and even in the industrial field.
In addition to metaHuman technology, unreal engine 5 (UE5) used in Black Myth: Goku also caught my attention.
As a UE 5 to enhance developer productivity, the most important purpose is to improve game performance and reduce the threshold for developers to use, Epic Games China chief engine engineer Wang You also mentioned in the sharing: "We also hope to improve the efficiency of development and iteration, provide more and more rich and easy-to-use tools, improve the user's entire editing and creation experience, that is, reduce the user threshold" - because of this, we can see the creation of 3A in small and medium-sized studios like "Black Myth: Wukong" The possibility of a masterpiece.
At TGDC, Wang You mainly shared the two technologies of Nanite and Lumen, which are the most concerned by developers, to help developers understand UE5 faster and use new technologies to improve game expression and R&D efficiency.
A real virtual world, the environment and the characters are equally important, in the technical special session, we also saw how "Tianya Mingyue Knife" to create a cloud and fog atmospheric system; how to render excellent water performance in the open world 3A masterpiece; in order to better show the plot, how to carry out high-quality automatic skinning of game characters and improve industry efficiency. Nearly 3 hours of special sharing, it can be described as dry goods.
Technology leads the progress of the game industry, and the pursuit of creating a virtual world with ultimate screen performance, timely feedback, and multi-person participation is closely related to the innovative development of semiconductors, screen display technology, information and network technology, virtual reality and interactive technology and other fields. Games both rely on technological progress and drive technology as a demander.
In addition to games, we can also see the shadow of game technology
In her opening speech at TGDC this year, Charlene, Vice President of Tencent Games and Dean of Tencent Game Academy, shared: "The technology accumulated in the game industry is being applied to other fields to improve the production efficiency of different industries."
Many new technologies are first tried in the field of gaming, and these new technologies can not only create a higher quality gaming experience, but also lay the foundation for applications in other fields. Last year's hit "The Mandlow Man" used Unreal Engine 5 to create special effects scenes. And the technology in the field of games is not only used for film and television shooting.
In the case of autonomous driving, for example, the difficulty in developing driverless technology is that it requires adequate testing of the real-world pavement environment. The industry generally believes that 17.7 billion kilometers of test data need to be accumulated to ensure its safety. What is this concept? The total length of China's highways is 5.2 million kilometers, and it takes about 3,400 times to run through the country's highways to complete the test.
The TAD SIM, an autonomous driving simulation system developed by Tencent, uses self-developed game engine technology to make the simulation results more realistic based on high-precision screen rendering. In this simulation system, there are not only weather effects such as heavy rain, fog, and snow, but even the height of the sun, the concentration of fog, and the size of raindrops can be adjusted and simulated.
Simulation based on game technology has greatly reduced the research and development costs of autonomous driving. Not only in China, the world's leading autonomous driving R & D manufacturers have also transformed into game engine technology for testing, the industry's recognized technology leading Google unmanned car Waymo, in reality only completed 0.2 billion miles of road testing, but in the virtual scene has been carried out 15 billion miles of simulation testing.
Not only in the field of automobiles, but also in digital twins, smart cities, industrial manufacturing and other fields, the real-time graphics rendering and physical simulation capabilities of game engines can also be used to help improve production efficiency, such as fire emergency drills, port throughput simulations, and so on.
▲ Digital twin of Shenzhen Mawan Port application game engine.
In terms of scientific research and exploration, games also play an active role. In 2011, a player solved the protein folding problem that had plagued biochemistry parents for 15 years in 3 weeks in the science puzzle game Foldit, and published the paper in the scientific journal Nature. The game launched the experimental puzzle of the new crown virus in 2020, attracting more than 200,000 players from around the world to help researchers understand the principles of the virus.
Games that integrate with technology are using their unique functionality to offer new possibilities for all aspects of social production and life – all of which are "by-products" of your horseback riding in Red Dead Redemption 2 and visiting the city that never sleeps in Cyberpunk 2077.
If you ask me who can see the progress of science and technology the most, my answer must be that of game practitioners and players. The advent of real-time ray tracing technology has given Spider-Man: Miles stunning light and shadow effects; advances in cloud computing technology have made Microsoft Flight Simulator a reality with a capacity of 2 million GB; and the release of Unreal Engine 5 has made Black Myth: Goku stunning all players who are looking forward to it.
As a test field for technology, the emergence of a new technology often means that players will have a new game experience. It also means that game practitioners will have more options. How to create excellent works in today's ever-evolving world requires not only positive creative impulses, but also accurate industry insights.
At the recent TGDC conference, more than 40 game practitioners at home and abroad shared their views on the game industry from 7 sessions, including product research and development, technology exploration, artistic creation, market operation, independent games and game social value.
Charlene, Vice President of Tencent Games and Dean of Tencent Game Academy, said in her opening speech: "This year is still a year full of changes and development. With rapid technological advancements, games are constantly broadening people's imagination of the future of digital life."
Through the previous article, we can also see that technology has been very deeply applied in various fields of the game industry, and games are increasingly promoting cutting-edge technology, and the two promote each other's development.
This reminds me of a famous speech given by Satoshi Iwata, then president of Nintendo, at GDC(the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco), in which he said, "On the business card, I am a president. Mentally, I'm a developer. But in my heart, I'm a player."
In the context of the vigorous development of the domestic game industry, TGDC is undoubtedly a booster to accelerate the running of game developers, from "Dream and Ingenuity" to "Game 4 Change" to "Five by Five", TGDC, which has gone through 5 years, also focuses on the latest direction of the development of the game industry. Let practitioners come with problems, find the technology that can be used in game projects, and go with insights and experiences, and can't wait to invest in a new round of game innovation with their peers.
From cutting-edge technology to market experience, TGDC has been committed to promoting the healthy development of the industry and exploring more possibilities for games. Not only can game developers and practitioners learn dry goods here, but also let them cheer up.
At this year's Tencent Games Annual Conference, Ma Xiaoyi, senior vice president of Tencent, said that with the technological revolution and thinking innovation, games are becoming a "super digital scene", better connecting virtual and reality, past and present, time and space, and becoming a better way of connecting people and people, people and society.
Not long ago at the Facebook Connect 2021 conference, Zuckerberg renamed Facebook to Meta and proposed several basic concepts: from social, entertainment, games, fitness, work and other aspects to show the beautiful imagination of the metaverse. But in the eyes of many people, isn't this just a game? But in the future, why can't it be a game?
And this future world, with the continuous development of game technology, continues to come to us with a more personalized and imaginative appearance.
From games to film and television, to autonomous driving, port construction, game technology connects all walks of life in the digital world, and TGDC is also using its own accumulation to make games as a bridge, connecting game technology with developers, players, and various fields of life.
Games, as one of the driving forces of technology, are making our lives better and better, and the imagination of the future in games is slowly becoming a reality.