2022N. GAME NetEase Game Developer Summit (hereinafter referred to as the Summit) was held in "April 18-April 21", the summit around the new theme of "The Future has come THE FUTURE IS NOW", a total of creative trend field, technology-driven field, art polishing field and value exploration field four sessions, invited 20 heavyweight guests at home and abroad to share industry research and development experience, cutting-edge research results and future development trends.
On the third day of the art polishing forum, Zhou Jiake, an art design expert and senior art manager of NetEase Games, brought a speech entitled "Promoting Art Work from Game Experience", taking "Ace Racing" as an example, reviewing and summarizing how to promote art work from this starting point, and what kind of positive effect it has on creating an immersive racing experience and excellent operation feel.
The following is a transcript of the speech:
Zhou Jiake: Hello everyone, I am Zhou Jiake, from NetEase Art design center, I am very happy to have the opportunity to share with you about the art of "Ace Racing".
To briefly introduce myself, I studied oil painting in college, and when I was in school, I used to be a professional starcraft player because I loved competitive games. In 2006, he joined the Art Department of NetEase, participated in the art development of many games, and joined the new project of "Ace Racing" with my team in 2017.
"Ace Racing" is NetEase's first self-developed racing project, and the real drawing style and refreshing game experience after the launch have also been recognized by players.
Why is Ace Racing what players experience today? Taking this opportunity, I also reviewed the whole process of our project from demo establishment to research and development to online operation, which stepped on many pits and summarized some experience, hoping to give you some reference and inspiration.
Time back to 2017, when the company decided to layout in the category of racing, we as the first team to join, at that time was full of mission and enthusiasm, but at that time for us itself was lack of relevant development experience accumulation and reference.
Externally, because different racing IP has actually formed its own relatively fixed player group, we were more confused at that time, as if we were at a fork in the road, and we did not know which road to choose.
We didn't even know at first whether to focus on racing or to make another type of game with racing elements, or whether to do open world rides, do quests, collect, cultivate, or race against players on the track.
We don't know whether to do a hardcore experience of technology or to prefer a form of entertainment and leisure. Different gameplay tendencies actually have different emphases on the performance content of the game, so we progressed very slowly for a while.
After a period of rocking and exploring, we finally decided on the direction of focusing on racing, and to increase playability, we added an element of entertainment.
Ultimately, it is the team's own interest that drives us to decide on this direction, for us to play speed confrontation on the track in a relaxed and entertaining way, is the most exciting way to play, in short, we think that such a racing game is fun and exciting, we believe that first do our favorite game to bring players fun.
Restore the truth
After setting the direction, we made a certain degree of transformation from the beginning of the track. Our early direction is more realistic, we can see from the left figure, the design of the curve is more inclined to the natural landform, more relaxed and irregular, the map is relatively larger.
Our game is mainly based on drifting corners, accumulating nitrogen and releasing big moves to gain buffs, so we need to design more corners to cope with drifting skills.
You can see that the picture on the right is also our current map, the curves are more and more regular and diverse, since the requirements of the road are different, so the first thing we need is to improve the road construction tools.
We have developed a modular road tool in-house that helps us to precisely customize a wide variety of corners and easily create tracks that match our gameplay.
Let's take a look at what the track made with this tool looks like now, does it feel a little monotonous? In fact, on this track, from the level of pure levels is close to completion, theoretically we can already practice skills and race on such a road, but it is clear that the experience of only the cards is incomplete.
We want players to have an immersive environment and atmosphere when they play the game experience, so how can we make an immersive track? Our answer is to restore the real and try to create a real environment atmosphere.
Our first thought is to do our side of Hangzhou, because we are located in Hangzhou, we are familiar with it, understand it, probably we are immersed in it, in order to make an immersive track, we have the West Lake, Su Causeway, Longjing and the big golden ball such a very iconic landscape are designed into the game, of which Longjing Tea is also the first track we made to make ourselves satisfied.
Of course, the truth does not actually mean that 1510 should be restored, what we want is to refine and summarize, for example, this one we take from the Duku Highway, which is a war-ready national defense highway, and it is a road that tens of thousands of officers and soldiers have worked hard for ten years to cross the Tianshan Mountains to connect northern and southern Xinjiang. Due to the difference in rainfall, different natural landscapes have been formed on the 500-kilometer road, so it is now also called the most beautiful road that spans the four seasons in a day.
We took one of the 60 km of road as a track, because two of them were very representative and skill-testing continuous hairpin bends, and in fact we condensed it to about five km in the game, but we almost just zoomed in an equal ratio, preserved the original direction of the road, and then did the track planning and environment designation in each section.
But here's a little challenge, we want to achieve 500 kilometers of different natural landscapes in just five kilometers of track, and we want to make players feel the four seasons of the day in the game.
Let's take a look at how we do it. The first section starts with us in the Gobi region. We designed a semi-enclosed canyon, which not only restored the steep natural landscape, but also obscured the vision, and the player crossed the canyon into a new snowy mountainous landform, and we used this similar transition technique to connect different environments.
The second section is in the snow-capped mountain area, through an enclosed waterproof corridor, before entering the open lush grassland area. We set the finish line near the Jorma Martyrs' Cemetery in honor of the 168 soldiers who gave their lives to build the road, and we also named the track The Heroic Road.
Our tracks are very rich, some in the sun and in the tunnel, there is no exposure or dark situation, so how do we achieve a relatively consistent bright picture?
In nature, such as cats in the sun, their pupils will shrink into a slit, and then in low light, such as indoors or tunnels, they will sell cuteness, why? Because the light is too dim, the cat will enlarge the pupil to increase the amount of light, so the biological eyeball it can generally adjust to a certain extent according to the change of light conditions, so that the picture they see is relatively bright and consistent.
We also simulated this process, which is usually called auto exposure in the game, and let's look at the contrast.
On the right, with auto exposure turned on, the brightness of the screen will be increased in a closed low-light environment, which is to allow the player to see more clearly. Let's pay attention to the performance after the tunnel, as the light strengthens, the exposure is depressed.
We also simulated the process of eyeball adaptation delay, which we believe will allow players to feel closer to the real visual sensation during the game.
Relative to the reality of the environment, the route design of Ace Racing is actually more "unreal", and we can look at the road design in the picture.
Doesn't it look very strange? These strange-looking bends are actually custom-designed for different drift techniques. These corners also make our gaming experience more operational, strategic, and at the same time open up difficulty zones.
Of course, the unreality of the route does not mean that the experience must be divorced from reality, and the design difficulty of our art is how to bring players a real and reasonable immersive track experience in this seemingly unreal route. Here we have a trick to "design the route to where he should be" and so on. For example, a discontinuous road surface is planned and designed, where there is an operation technique that can be used by leaping to the near road.
You can make up for it, if you say that one hundred and fifty to restore this section of intermittent pavement, let's not talk about aesthetics, from the rationality is also more difficult to say, then where should he appear?
We found that in a geomorphological situation such as a tropical golf course, there are undulating situations in itself, and there are many bunkers, and we can use the bunkers to express the springboard. Comparing the effects in the game, it looks more natural now.
For example, this track, the planner's request is to make a track that looks like a fighter jet, and then hopes that it will appear on the airport. We passed the keywords: airport and track, the first thing that came to mind was the Silverstone Circuit that was rebuilt with an airport, but it was long like this, and our route was too different, there was no reference value, obviously if it is more difficult to find a consistent route reference from reality.
Since the reality is not good, what about the future? We stumbled upon the concept of airports, and the design of airports around the world pays more and more attention to the presentation of local cultural symbols, and has a sense of form. For example, the picture on the left is one of the schemes of Weifang's new airport, because Weifang is the capital of kites, so the shape of the airport is a reference to the form of a kite, so it feels similar to our needs.
So we first built this concept airport, the central blue area is the terminal, we planned the bridge airport boarding gate, parking lot, flight track, and then laid out the track around the new airport, presenting this form of fighter. The image on the right is the top view of the track after we finished.
Take a look at the effect in the game, this section is the bridge gate area, which is the entrance and exit of the airport terminal and the parking area.
We laid out the new airport according to the real situation, and then when you finally play on the track, you will feel more realistic and more informed. In fact, this process is a bit like the set of the movie, to tell a good story, we must first build the environment behind the story, so that the audience has a more sense of substitution, and the game design is the same logic.
Our scenes will not be static, in order to enhance the sense of atmosphere, we have also added dynamic weather changes, such as the transition from cloudy to rainy, there will also be some detail effects of raindrops hitting the window glass.
This is an extreme climatic condition like a sandstorm, and after entering a sandstorm, it will block the player's field of vision to a certain extent, which will make the player more immersive.
vehicle
Next, let's talk about the vehicles in the game. In the early days of our project, we used fully licensed real vehicles, most of which were models that could be accessed or seen in people's lives, and of course there were some dream models like Bugatti.
But after the vehicle has added skills and set positioning, we will find some problems under this setting. The biggest problem is that the overall art style tone does not highlight the characteristics of the game very well, specifically the lack of some strong enough correlation between the purely realistic model and the futuristic vehicle skills.
So we have also added self-designed fantasy models while licensing models, and it is also from this time that we have established the unique game characteristics of Ace Racing on top of realism.
You should be able to guess these two cars without me saying them. Like the one on the left, it must be a racing car because it has a rocket-like shape, huge spouts, and a sense of speed. The one on the right is a very cute and cute auxiliary car designed for female players, which can assist the teammates around us to increase the acceleration.
Let's take a look at its design process. We first referred to and extracted some of the styling characteristics of the cartoon tiger, and then applied it to the design language of the posture and front face of our model.
Although it is a fantasy model, our vehicle designers also design the opening and closing of the doors, the details of the cockpit interior, the center console, the steering wheel and the seats according to the process design standards of the real vehicle.
It was the end result, we even added a tail that could be wagged to him, and I think every macho should have such a car.
This is a tiger-themed car, then he is not easy to look at, muscular, full of aggression, he is indeed a disturbance bit of the car, in the game he can attack the opponent's vehicle to cause durability or speed loss.
Ace technology vehicles can be said to have a variety of unique skills, our models have different positioning, we can combine and match different lineups to get a very rich game experience, which is also our unique game feature that distinguishes us from other racing games.
Enhance the experience
After talking about the game screen, let's talk about the part of the enhanced experience, which is also a process of continuous improvement of the program, art and planning working together.
First of all, racing players actually want to get some feedback that conforms to the laws of physics during the game. Our project used to use pure physics, but real physics does not mean that the game experience is good, especially after we join the vehicle skills, on the complex road, the vehicle will lose control, it can be said that it is heaven and earth, omnipotent, of course, it does not matter the driving experience, so we adjusted the physics program.
Let's look at this set of simplified physics schemes, with which the movement of our vehicles is more controllable under the current gameplay framework, and the gameplay is established, but the performance is simpler, lacks enough suspension feeling, and collisions do not have enough physical feedback.
So we used a combination of animation to solve the problem of insufficient physical feedback, and these seemingly strange animations on the right are actually simulating the jolt and collision of the vehicle in the process.
Of course, there are many other animations, we superimpose these animations into the state of the vehicle through the graph table, and through the settings, different vehicles can behave differently on different roads and at different speeds, which also makes the vehicles in our game have different characteristics, and also strengthens the physical expression.
Looking at the effects in the game, I deliberately chose a car with a relatively high posture and obvious suspension. We can pay attention to the uneven pavement, as well as a manifestation of drift and collision, at this time we will feel like driving a car with suspension and weight on a textured road.
Sense of speed
Next, I want to talk about the sense of speed. The importance of speed to a racing game is self-evident, but our lack of understanding of speed in the early days led to actually stepping through the pit.
Here's a look at the speed of the fastest car in the game, Excalibur, in the middle of the game, at a speed of more than 200 kilometers per hour.
Doesn't it look very slow? At that time, it also caused great dissatisfaction among players, and in the face of doubts, we tried to increase the real speed to solve this problem, but can this really solve the problem? We also sink our hearts into learning and studying what the sense of speed really is.
Let's look at these two pictures, on the left you listen to music on the plane, and then enjoy the view from the window, ready to take a break, but this time your speed is about 900 kilometers per hour. The right go-kart was no more than 40 kilometers per hour, and we noticed that the owner was nervous enough to sweat. This is my colleague and friend, thank you for inspiring us.
We have concluded that in fact, the sense of speed is through the refresh rate of the environmental reference object, to believe that it is in high-speed motion of this subjective feeling, it is not necessarily real. Our reference on the plane is the blue sky and white clouds in the distance, and the reference for driving a go-kart is the surface and the guardrails on both sides, etc., and the guardrails will be intentionally made into red and white forms to increase this feeling of refresh.
We further analyze, what are the subjective factors that affect the sense of speed?
First of all, increasing the real speed can of course improve the sense of speed, but at the same time the game has become difficult, affecting the gameplay, so it is excluded. The image on the right shows our impact on the sense of speed when the camera is depressed, but the front view of the camera is also compressed, which also affects gameplay. So our main remaining means is to add references and focus on techniques like FOV adjustment, lens shake, and motion blur.
We also ignored the effect of FOV on the sense of speed, and we can see screenshots of our early game, when the value of FOV in the game was very small, the screen appeared to be relatively flat, and the field of view was relatively narrow.
In fact, the FOV in the game is similar to the concept of the focal section in photography, and students who have played photography know that telephoto can compress space, and can shoot shallow depth of field and close-ups. The short focus has the opposite effect, so we usually shoot girls with a wide-angle end, because we can shoot the legs long. But we have to pay attention to the framing, because the face can also be taken long.
Since the legs can be stretched, of course, the road surface can also be stretched. We can make a simple judgment, if you use the same time to pass a road that seems to be longer, can you improve the sense of speed?
So I did an experiment, we now have multiple cameras on our phones, we shoot with the wide-angle end and the telephoto end, and record a video at the same speed. We can see that the floor at the wide-angle end is lengthened longitudinally, the field of view is larger, the direction of progress is a narrowing effect, and the corresponding sense of speed has also been improved.
More importantly, add references. We center on the blue area of the pavement, prioritizing it according to near and far, because the closer to the center area, the more obvious the effect of lifting, and the ground details are actually the most recent references.
We first gave the highest mapping accuracy to the surface to represent the graininess of the surface, such as details like crack stains, and then we added patterns like some artificial designs. Next up is designs like the advertising bars and guardrails on both sides of the road. We added more variations, no longer the same color, and then added more items, objects, such as vegetation, rocks, or buildings, beyond the parapets on both sides of the road.
After all the BUFF is stacked next, let's take a look at the speed performance in the game. We first increase the value of THE FOV, you can see that the car body close to the picture has a certain stretch, the surface has more details, we are placed on both sides of the trees, the FOV is further increased when accelerating, and the lens has a certain shake.
If you really experience the game, I'm sure you'll feel the adrenaline rush, and when I first played Ace Race, I thought it would be a good game.
optimize
Let's talk about optimization. For us, optimization has two purposes, first of all, we hope that more players can experience Ace Racing, because we set a relatively low model goal, and secondly, we want more players to experience the performance of the full game, and the operation is smooth and smooth. So when we put technology as the core experience, we decided to put the smoothness of the operation at the highest priority.
I wanted to illustrate our team's approach to optimization with the most frequent vegetation in the scene, a very iconic sycamore tree-lined boulevard on North West Lake Road.
That conventional 3D method will sacrifice some details for performance, such as the leaves of the branches will be sparser, some angles will have a clear sense of patches, the accuracy will be further reduced when switching the lod model, and there will be problems with model loading and switching.
To do this, we used the material of the tree bulletin board, we first made the most accurate vegetation effect, baked to the dough sheet, then superimposed spherical normals and normal maps, and then superimposed 3S translucent materials, in the game to achieve a very fine wood feeling. The mid-site vegetation is then further merged to achieve the effect of this lush vegetation.
In addition, we baked the vista mountains onto the Skyball map, further reducing the pressure on performance. At the same time, it also better realizes the sense of space of this picture.
Let's look at the effect of the comparison, the picture on the left is our early traditional 3D way, because of the pressure of performance, we dare not put too many plane trees. You can see that the whole West Lake feels bare, and you can see the obvious impact of model switching on the picture, and the vista is not yet loaded. Even so, the game ran less than 30 frames.
Let's take a look at the effect of the game now, we have achieved the feeling of walking through the sycamore trees on the North Mountain Road in the West Lake, we can even see the Su Causeway and Longjing Mountain in the distance, and the game runs very smoothly, it can be said that we have achieved better game effects at a much lower cost.
Gaming experience
Finally, back to our topic, let's talk about the gaming experience. In fact, the game experience macroscopic, is all the feelings we get in the game, including the gameplay of the game, including audiovisual feelings.
When we talk about improving the gaming experience, we're actually talking about providing a game's target players with a performance that better meets their expectations.
In racing games, I think the correspondence is a sufficiently stimulating sense of speed, enough realistic physical feedback, smooth enough operation, and our audiovisual experience is realistic enough, immersive enough.
Then optimizing the experience is a process of continuous polishing, which is a photo of our team members' programs, art, and planning to play ace racing together, and we always look at our products from the perspective of players, which allows us to maintain empathy and sensitivity to the player's feelings, and continue to polish the quality of the game at each stage.
We will continue to uphold this attitude and work with players to improve the game and provide you with a better game experience, thank you!
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