Tencent Games unveiled at the 2023 Game Developers Conference, showcasing cutting-edge game technology to the world

Tencent Technology News From March 20 to March 24, local time, the "2023 Game Developers Conference (GDC 2023)", which is regarded as the global game technology vane, was held in San Francisco, USA, and the domestic leading game manufacturer Tencent Games participated in various forms to gather with top game developers, game designers and game publishers from all over the world to share the technical research results of the game industry. Free exchange of cutting-edge technological innovation exploration, and jointly discuss the development trend of the global game industry.

During the five-day conference, Tencent Games brought 18 keynote speeches, demonstrating the cutting-edge application and innovative breakthroughs of self-developed technologies such as AI, rendering, engine, haptic feedback, and audio in head games such as "Honor of Kings", "Peace Elite", "Return to Empire", "Dark Zone Breakthrough", and "PUBG MOBILE".

In addition, the ultra-high-definition "Digital Great Wall" created by Tencent's self-developed CROS engine made its debut, showcasing the innovative application of game technology in the field of digital cultural preservation to the world, attracting attendees to immerse themselves in the Great Wall culture and understand and learn about the protection of the Great Wall. In the exclusive EXPO exhibition area, Tencent Games also showcased the latest game development tools, including Game AIR, a game AI development platform based on machine learning; Artigician, a smart tool for fine art production; and Anti-Cheat Expert (ACE) "Anti-Cheat Expert" of anti-plug-in tools, among others.

Through GDC, the world's most influential game industry summit, Tencent Games fully demonstrates technological innovation, cutting-edge technology exploration, and technology spillover value based on game technology, and exchanges and learning with other participants, hoping to bring better product experience to global players and continue to explore more possibilities of game technology.

A number of technological innovations have boosted the quality and efficiency of game development

For a long time, due to the diversity of mobile devices, how to balance hardware compatibility and performance to ensure the best rendering effect has always been one of the problems that mobile developers must overcome. Honor of Kings breaks the limitations of performance limitations and platform differences by improving Shadow Map technology to improve shadow quality in cross-platform development. High-performance, low-latency dynamic baked global illumination technology makes the game perform well even on low-end mobile devices. At the same time, considering the light leakage problem of IBL, the team used the occlusion of the pre-calculated visibility vertebral to finely repair the picture.

In order to give players the best experience on different devices, developers often use game assets with different levels of detail to balance performance and quality, but how do you achieve automatic adaptation on mobile? According to the technical experts of "Honor of Kings", they innovatively apply artificial intelligence and differentiable rendering theory to the project asset-assisted production.

While traditional rendering techniques are the process of generating images from a given set of scene parameters, differentiable rendering technology can "turn back time" and reverse the set of scene parameters from the generated images. It can be said that differentiable rendering technology bridges the gap between computer vision and computer graphics. At the same time, thanks to the ability to automatically optimize rendering errors for differentiable rendering, it is no longer difficult to automatically and quantitatively produce the best quality game LOD (Level of Detail) assets. On the whole, the production capacity of the pipeline assets is compared with traditional technology, which greatly reduces production costs and increases production capacity by dozens of times, and the visual effect is comparable to that of top high-precision assets.

Honor of Kings, which launched in Brazil on March 8, was first used to allow Brazilian gamers to experience games smoothly even on low-end baseline devices with a 1.3 GHz quad-core processor and 1GB of RAM.

Return to Empire is the first mobile game to achieve a stable frame rate while showing more than 1,000 full 3D soldiers in the same screen battle, which is also the first time in the industry to see Unity DOTS technology applied to such a large-scale scene in a live game. The project team's application and practice of the Unity DOTS technology stack will provide solutions for more games that use the Unity DOTS system and other scenarios facing large-scale intensive computing.

In response to another drawback of the mobile terminal, that is, overheating and CPU downscaling caused by increased power consumption, "Dark Zone Breakout" mobile game has developed a set of highly compatible "performance optimization technology based on frame prediction", which can reduce the power consumption of the game while maintaining the feel, and the distributed GPU baking system enables PVS technology to be quickly iterated and landed in the project, combined with SOC's occlusion rejection technology can further improve the efficiency of rendering, and also makes the ray tracing system easier to land in some high-end models. Take PC-like gaming to the next level.

In large-scale games, the real-time rendering of film-grade, large-scale forests is one of the problems that has plagued the industry for a long time, and it is difficult to balance the picture accuracy and efficient rendering of forest scale in the past. Tencent Games' self-developed BroadLeaf rendering method reduces the geometric complexity and texture scale of plant leaves to achieve fast rendering, and can be directly integrated into large-scale forest scenes, increasing the production capacity by 10 times compared with existing technologies and greatly improving the accuracy rate. In addition, BroadLeaf has reduced its resource footprint, and stress test results show that BroadLeaf can render a forest scene containing 120,000 trees in real time, requiring 1376MB of video memory. AT PRESENT, THIS TECHNOLOGY HAS BEEN USED IN TENCENT START ENGINE.

In addition to its own technological breakthroughs, Tencent Games is also continuously releasing its technical capabilities for industry game developers, and the one-stop game R&D efficiency solution "Cloudflow" is committed to solving the key problems of long links and multiple branches in game R&D, and has helped more than 100 games effectively improve R&D efficiency.

Game and AI "resonate" development Tencent Games shares a number of AI progress

Recently, AI has attracted much attention and the game industry has always been closely integrated. Because of its clear rules, strict boundaries and strong gameplay, video games have naturally become an important tool for researching, testing and verifying artificial intelligence, and the two "resonate" development.

At GDC, a number of Tencent game technology experts shared the latest progress in AI, such as the reinforcement learning AI solution implemented by Photon Studio Group in FPS games, which has shown higher efficiency than imitation learning AI. At present, the winning rate of reinforcement learning AI and traditional behavior tree AI is more than 90%, and its game performance has been widely praised by game developers. In addition, Photon will introduce the YAO system concept using the UGC product editor as an example, so that artificial intelligence technology can be deployed in digital content, such as live streaming a real-life basketball game in the virtual world without marker points or specific scenario requirements. In addition to the player experience, photonics experts explored how machine learning can be used to assist in the calculation of various comprehensive physical reactions, thereby greatly reducing the effort required to implement realistic interactive systems, reducing the complexity of engineering design, and making it more practical.

Under the trend of premiumization, the continuous increase of game assets has brought various challenges to developers. In Dune: Awakening, for example, the Level Infinite technical team helped the studio to accurately preserve the distinctive features of the landscape through a new solution for deep learning model compression and decompression of speech graph textures, meeting the low storage requirements of key games, and integrating it into Unreal Engine, and its machine learning model deployment technology can efficiently convert models to C++, improving performance by 150-500% compared to existing technologies.

Tencent's game CROS self-developed engine made its world premiere Game technology value spillover

In addition to continuously optimizing the performance of game products, game technology is also being more and more widely used in digital cultural protection, digital twins, social welfare and other fields, constantly expanding the boundaries of game value cognition. At GDC, the "Digital Great Wall" created by Tencent's game CROS self-developed engine made a surprise appearance. This is the latest version of the "Great Wall of Digital" released last June. The "Digital Great Wall" is the world's first ultra-high-precision, immersive and interactive digital restoration of cultural heritage through a variety of cutting-edge game technologies.

In the theme sharing, Tencent's game CROS team also introduced how to help achieve large-scale, full-dynamic, ultra-high-definition, ultra-realistic natural environment and Great Wall rendering process with lightweight and modular technical advantages. The digital cultural technology pipeline developed based on the "Digital Great Wall" will also be applied to more diversified digital cultural projects in the future.

Photon's self-developed GVoice AI Codec and haptic feedback technology have been successfully implemented in Peace Elite, but it is also promising in the field of social welfare. The haptic feedback technology has been applied to multiple scenarios such as walking navigation direction reminders, bus and subway travel arrival reminders, and Sogou tactile input, helping to improve the perception of the environment of visually impaired and hearing-impaired groups. This is also the first time that game technology has been exported by a system and applied across borders in the field of accessibility.

The technical strength continues to increase, and domestic games have entered the world stage

The 35th edition of GDC aims to promote the development of game technology and promote in-depth exchanges between game developers, and in recent years, more and more domestic game manufacturers have stood on this top stage in the industry, showing that China's game industry is being widely recognized around the world.

Focusing on China, after nearly 20 years of rapid development, the game industry is entering a new stage, and re-understanding games has become an industry consensus. At the annual meeting of China's game industry held last month, Yang Fang, deputy director of the Publishing Bureau of the Central Propaganda Department, pointed out that games should conform to the development of the times and people's expectations, create hardcore products and core competitiveness, and let the "golden brand" of Chinese games bloom with new brilliance. She said, "We should better play the role of the development of the game industry in promoting scientific and technological progress, increase investment in cutting-edge technology research and development, accelerate breakthroughs in key core technological innovation, and focus on promoting scientific and technological innovation to help scientific and technological breakthroughs." ”

As the integration of digital and real accelerates, as a "super digital scene", games will release diversified value, help promote technological innovation and the development of the digital economy.