In February 2018, an Up master named Dakuan Physics uploaded a video on Station B using "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild" as a practical case to explain physics problems. Five years later, in February 2023, he finally brought the case to the formal middle school physics class.
In many people's minds, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is one of the most successful open-world games in the world, if not one. One of the big reasons it's been so successful is that the game has a well-tuned physics engine.
And in the sequel "Tears of the Kingdom", the physics engine tuning is more realistic than "Breath of the Wild", which makes the game circle in the past few days fall into a "whole life" carnival like the New Year.
For example, "crossing the river", the eternal topic of the Hailaru continent, many players toss for forty or fifty minutes, cutting trees, building bridges, building cars, shipbuilding, building aircraft, and even starting to make rail transit, which can be called "everything is used".
Players build planes in Kingdom Tears
This high degree of freedom, built on a great game engine, is at the heart of the success of the Zelda series. In this world, chickens will croak at dawn, the post station after the snow will not shine because the roof cloth is covered with snow, and if you walk in the wilderness with a big sword in a thunderstorm, you will find yourself suddenly electrostatic, and then be killed by lightning on the spot...
Many people say that Zelda will make you really feel like you have entered another world, as if any brain-opening gameplay will become real and reasonable. The tools that developers use to create this world are called game engines.
From electronic table tennis to 3D display
What is the primary form of video games? The answer is a collection of code.
Just saying this, I'm afraid that few people will have intuitive feelings, so let's take a look at the interface of a niche hardcore game "Dwarf Fortress" with a high status in the history of games:
The game interface of Dwarf Fortress
Without the blessing of the visual engine, then the interface of a video game might be like the picture above - I don't mean to despise the understanding of your readers and friends, I mean in this room, I believe none of you can understand what this thing is.
Without a doubt, this is the closest thing to the original form of video games. In the early days of video games, all developers had to do was open the programming software and start typing from the first line of code.
In 1972, Nolan Bushnell, the father of video games, founded Atari and together with designer Alan Elken made the first game that could verify the commercialization of video games, the original name of the game was "Pong". Simply put, it is an electronic table tennis ball, except that the "ball" in the middle is square.
Once people become legends, many things become urban legends. For example, it was once rumored that this square "ball" was a classic design that the two masters thought the square ball was cooler, so they deliberately made it. Decades later, Bushnell and Elken thought it funny to think of this statement, because the only reason square table tennis appeared was because the display technology of the time could not make round balls.
Nolan Bushnell and Alan Elken play Pong on an original arcade machine
The shape of the ball is square
In addition to the game content, even the display of graphics is based on code. It's not hard to explain why there is a game like Fortress Dwarf: during the game's 20 years of development, only two brothers were writing code. All-encompassing content already means an extremely large amount of code, and it is difficult for them to have the energy to balance the larger amount of code at the graphical display level.
In the '80s, there were a whole bunch of games that really didn't want you to play for the same reason. One of the representative works is the famous "Rogue", which later developed into one of the most popular game categories today: Roguelike.
The interface of Rouge's game
The exploration of computer graphics was put in the hands of one of the most important geniuses in the history of gaming: John Carmack.
In 1992, Wolfenstein 3D (German Headquarters 3D), a mini-game with just over 2 trillions, was officially released by 3D Realms/Apogee. This is the first first-person "3D" shooter in human history, the reason why "3D" is put in quotation marks, because the hardware at that time could not actually support the real 3D display, this game actually used 2D pictures to show 3D perspective effect, to achieve "deception of human eyes" pseudo-3D.
This was possible because Carmack abandoned traditional practices. Instead of directly using code to "describe" the world he wants to create, it wrote a basic set of "display rules" that stipulate that the computer emits rays in all directions, based on the player's position in the game, generating a series of vertical lines on the screen based on the distance the rays collide with obstacles. The closer you are to the collision point, the longer the vertical line, and visually speaking, you will feel the closer the "wall" formed by the vertical line is to you.
This creative approach of "rules first, then build game content on top of the rules" has ushered the gaming industry into a whole new era. Carmack standardized this methodology, encapsulated all the basic rules that a large number of games need to follow, and made a set of development software that can be continuously reused in many games, and named the software: game engine.
Before the birth of game engines, games were collections of code, and developing games was more about describing a world of numbers with code.
In this process, there may be a lot of basic code that can be reused, such as there are always grass and flowers, guns and cannons in the game, and moving villains. The way developers reduce their work burden is to package and aggregate these frequently used basic codes, and directly "glue" them when they need to be used.
After the birth of the game engine, the underlying logic of developing games has completely changed: it has become a encapsulation of the "rules of the world". The most typical of these is the physics engine.
Rule-makers in the digital world
In the red and white machine era of "Contra" and "Super Mario", the height of the character's jump, the arc drawn after the jump, are all prescribed, and it actually follows not the rules of physics, but a line drawn in advance by the program.
But in the days of physics engines this was not the case. Every character who jumps in the picture, she follows the G=mg physics formula, and the parameters adjusted by the developer background are no longer the arc itself, but the mass of the character, the gravity parameters of the planet, the momentum change caused by the collision between objects...
Even though there is not much difference in the effects presented, the emergence of game engines has actually revolutionized the way humans view and build virtual worlds.
Take the "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom" we mentioned at the beginning, in the beginning of the game, there is a "cliff" that many people have played until they collapse, and there are several long planks on the edge of the cliff that you can use to bridge through. This sounds simple, but why do so many people break down?
Because all planks follow the laws of physics: there is a "center of gravity". So you will see countless people building bridges in countless bizarre postures, such as this:
Or like this:
In a game world without a physics engine, this was originally just a small obstacle that could be successfully passed by moving item A to location B. But when it comes to realistic physics engines, Link falls off cliffs or traverses canyons, just like the real world, as if there are countless possibilities. Some players even simply use the shift in the center of gravity, imitating the catapult principle of ancient siege, and directly launch themselves to the "opposite side" like a cannonball.
Just the rich gameplay brought by the physics engine has made Kingdom Tears the existence of various game communities these days. The physics engine is just one of dozens of modules in a game engine.
A complete game engine, including rendering engine, physics engine, collision detection system, sound effect engine, script engine, animation engine, artificial intelligence engine, network engine, scene management engine and a series of core modules.
These modules encapsulate the rules of different fields and are all-encompassing. When the rules and data encapsulated in the game engine can get closer and closer to the real world, then the stage of the game engine is destined to be limited to the game.
Today, what we call digital twins and high-simulation simulations are natural application scenarios. Even the application of game engines is likely to bring subversive changes to the pattern of many industries in the future.
For example, in the past, the pain point of the entire autonomous driving industry was the lack of road test conditions: it was necessary to ensure safety before it could be on the road, but if it was not on the road, it was impossible to accumulate data to improve safety, so it became an endless cycle.
According to research by the RAND Corporation of the United States, self-driving cars need at least 17.7 billion kilometers of test data to be more reliable than human drivers, assuming a fleet of 100 vehicles, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, uninterrupted at an average speed of 28 miles per hour, it will take about 500 years to complete this test, and the total mileage is equivalent to running more than 3,400 laps on the roads of all China.
Today's autonomous driving research teams have almost all begun to use game engines to build test environments, simulate realistic road environments 1:1, and accumulate test data. The scene can also directly simulate a large number of extreme weather and interaction situations for testing extreme conditions.
For example, tornadoes, extreme rainstorms, blizzards, dense fog and other natural weather simulations; Another example is the simulation of interaction between pedestrians suddenly running red lights, sudden lane changes of cars, small animals suddenly rushing out from the side of the road, and so on. Testing in a virtual environment accumulates data and security.
Full Flight Simulator (FFS) is also an important application scenario. This kind of simulator can replace the real aircraft for civil aviation pilot training, is a high-precision technical equipment in the field of aviation manufacturing, can realistically simulate the take-off, landing and other flight attitudes and actions and special emergencies, providing pilots with the most realistic training experience.
In the development of FFS, the vision system is an important component. China Southern Airlines Xiangyi cooperated with Tencent Games to develop a complete visual system based on Tencent Games' self-developed CROS engine. This engine mainly focuses on 3A-level rendering effects and cross-platform capabilities, focusing on large-scale rendering, realistic visual effects and online and offline generation of digital content; And with innovative architecture to maximize the power of the latest CPUs and GPUs.
Game engines are fully and deeply involved in the digital upgrade and cutting-edge technology exploration of all walks of life, and a large number of scenes in The Wandering Earth 2 are built with Unreal Engine, and the shooting scene is no longer a green screen, but the production team combines camera tracing paths and XR virtual production to generate images, almost subverting the traditional industrial process of science fiction films.
In the EDA software that is often mentioned recently, a great difficulty for domestic manufacturers to break through the blockade is that in the past three decades, overseas giants have accumulated a huge amount of process data and various rule documents and manufacturing parameters. Based on these experiences and data, a powerful simulation capability has been built.
This capability allows them to better complete the simulation of real production conditions through algorithms on the software side, helping chip manufacturers reduce the number and cost of actual tape-outs. This alone can open a huge cost gap with domestic emerging manufacturers, and become a difficult competitive barrier on the road to chip localization.
But what if in the future, it is possible to directly simulate the manufacturing of chips through game engines and quickly iterate on the process? Perhaps this will become a shortcut to catch up with chip localization.
The road to domestic game engines
In 2003, two projects, "Research and Demonstration Product Development of General Engine for Online Games" and "Intelligent Human-Computer Interaction Network Demonstration Application", were officially included in the National 863 Plan. They are all affiliated with the comprehensive demonstration and application of Chinese processing and human-computer interaction technology. This is the first time that the mainland has incorporated game technology into its national science and technology plan.
Lei Jun, then president of Kingsoft, who undertook the project, said that the online game development engine is like a commonly used machine tool in the processing industry. This analogy is actually quite apt.
It was 22 years after Nolan Bushnell founded Atari that the first original game, Condor Commando, was born in China. During this period, the overseas mainstream game industry experienced three generations of giants, two technological revolutions, and a shift in the industrial center. (See our previous article "The Right Posture for Chinese Games to Harvest Foreign Chives").
Missing these 22 years, China's game industry has lacked a complete industrialization foundation for a long time. As the "mother machine" of the game industry, the development of game engines has also encountered various difficulties in the overall tortuous development path of the game industry.
This is originally a field of research with a very high technical threshold. Taking rendering alone, its most basic rendering equation looks like this:
Station B has a popular science up master in order to make a game engine for graphics rendering principle of popular science video, a full five months, after the video was sent out in the introduction sighed: its difficulty is not only the abstraction of theory, but also the complexity of engineering.
And he's just looking at how one of the rendering-focused modules of a huge game engine system works. In addition, the game engine also contains huge underlying components such as physics, sound effects, artificial intelligence, and mission systems. In a way, how complex the world is, and how complex the game engine that tries to "create" will be.
Take the vision system of the full-flight simulator we mentioned above. Tencent's game CROS self-developed engine adapts to the core requirements of the vision system for the engine:
One is earth-level rendering capabilities (surface rendering at more complex latitudes in a wider space, and needs to be consistent with the real earth coordinate system, stars, atmosphere, weather, curvature calibration, etc.); The other is the world-class ability to truly rebuild digital assets. It simulates the first-hand view of civil aviation pilots and real-time dynamics of aircraft takeoff, landing, cruise and other periods, as well as the seasonal and night changes of airports, weather, and the earth environment.
At the same time, based on the CROS self-developed engine, in almost half a day, an area of 1,000 square kilometers can be rebuilt, including the runway, taxiway, apron, etc. of Bao'an Airport, as well as 15w+ buildings, 65w trees, mountain river overpasses and other urban landscape assets.
Before the cross-border application of CROS self-developed game engine, the image generation subsystem of the visual system also had a localization scheme, but the engine of pure self-developed technology was never used to realize the creation and use of the entire visual system. Therefore, China Southern Airlines Xiangyi and Tencent Games developed a complete set of vision systems based on self-developed engines, which solved the self-developed breakthroughs in the core technology fields of mainland civil aviation equipment.
As the world's first high-level full-flight simulator vision system built with game technology, behind the continuous exploration of Tencent's game CROS self-developed engine team for nearly three years. In addition to the cross-border application in the aviation field, another application of the CROS self-developed engine is the "Cloud Touring Great Wall" (space-time version) in the field of digital cultural preservation.
From asset production to screen rendering, interactive processing and other links are based on this self-developed engine, and through global dynamic lighting SmartGI, computer simulation physical atmospheric system, virtual geometry and multi-quadrant map and other technologies, users can enjoy the day and night changes of the Great Wall and the effect of snow cover anytime, anywhere.
The "Cloud Great Wall" ontology model has reached 1 billion surfaces, and the amount of textures is about 80-90 G, which means that after the optimization of self-developed engine technology and the blessing of Tencent Games' self-developed cloud games, such a huge amount of resources can already run smoothly on ordinary PC graphics cards.
In terms of classification, game engines are becoming more and more difficult to classify as ordinary "game technology". When you're going to create a world with airplanes, all the airplane-related knowledge and "rules" have to be encapsulated in the game engine. The aforementioned vision system actually belongs to the category of high-end equipment manufacturing, involving aviation technology, information technology, computer software, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and automatic control and other disciplines.
epilogue
In 1947, artificial intelligence pioneer Alan Turing wrote the first line of game code in human history in order to advance the research of artificial intelligence. In his seminal paper "Intelligent Machinery," he put board games into an important demonstration of AI's "thinking ability." The battle between man and machine on the chessboard never stopped.
There is no doubt that from the beginning of the birth of video games, this is an industry at the forefront of accessible technology, undertaking the mission of promoting human scientific and technological progress, but it is often overlooked.
For example, few people realize that the earliest AI application of humans appeared in the arcade game "Pac-Man" developed by Namco in 1980, and the "ghosts" wandering on the map in the game have different "personalities" and activity paths according to color, which is the enlightenment of AI as an NPC in the game.
So it's not hard to understand why the founder of OpenAI has said more than once in interviews that it was games that drove the birth of ChatGPT.
Today's China is setting off the world's largest wave of industrial digitalization, and game technology represented by game engines is becoming the lowest key technical tool in the global technology competition in the digital era.