game development designer

Chapter 265 The road to development is not smooth sailing

Chu He in the black light studio sat on a chair, looking at the art materials of Red Dead Redemption and the half-moon report.

In addition to the efficient development progress brought about by the huge lineup of development teams, there are also some troublesome things, such as some troubles.

Often it is one of the outsourcing teams that has the problem, and because he is in charge of the development of Red Dead Redemption, it is very likely that Tianhe Network has been directly involved for a long time.

For example, about the addition of some details in the game, and social issues.

There is no doubt that this will be an M-rated game. There will be a lot of violence and rude scenes in the game. According to everyone's discussions at the beginning, there will be some problems that reflect modern society in the game, but the biggest The question is how to find a balance between exaggeration and simplicity in the game's narrative.

At the same time, due to the simultaneous development of two hosts with different platforms, it is very difficult to apply and develop the hardware performance of the two hosts, which is equivalent to doubling the difficulty of the original development. Official help from Microsoft and Sony, but it's still a big puzzle.

Just like the hope Chuhe gave at the beginning, all the people in the production team hope to have a great work in their hands.

But even so, the actual performance will be somewhat different from what they expected at the beginning. Although they have not used all the SPUs on the two mainframes so far, they do not think that the performance of these two mainframes can be achieved. Add everything they want.

On the one hand, it is limited by technical reasons, and on the other hand, it is also the hardware performance of the host platform.

"We need to consider the problem of loading the game. The huge map and complex modeling will make the loading of the game a big problem." This was a very big problem that Chuhe and the others encountered at the beginning Important issues.

According to the previous envisioned design, the entire map of Red Dead Redemption will undoubtedly be a seamless big world, just like the vast majority of game manufacturers in the industry, they use map splicing, which is the so-called building blocks.

Comparing the map to a sand table, when making a sand table, the usual way is to plan the range of each area in advance in the editor, divide the area into blocks, and then use the scene editor by different design teams Make it separately, and then splice it after the production is completed.

This kind of creation is very simple, and the cost required is also very low. It can be said that it is the main method of major game manufacturers at present.

But also if there is not enough technology, the final result will be very rigid.

But Chuhe and the others did not choose this technology.

The import of satellite geological data is the technology used by Chuhe and the others. It is used to directly use satellite geological data. Red Dead Redemption uses GEOEYE's commercial-grade high-resolution satellite map.

After being used for generation, after the later stage of creation, processing and import, at the same time, the fitting of the art height map and high-resolution texture is carried out. It can be said that even if the satellite geological data is imported, the workload is not low, even higher than ordinary The partition splicing is more complicated.

Of course, the cost is also higher, at least according to the current forecast, $[-] million may not be the final development cost of Red Dead Redemption.

However, [-] million US dollars may be a bit arrogant for the current Tianhe Network, but if it is taken out, it will have absolutely no impact.

According to the domestic game market report released by a domestic third party last year, Penguin still ranked the highest in terms of income throughout last year, followed by Wangyi, but the third place is not the former game market boss Shengda, It's not the perfection of rising stars, etc., but Tianhe Network.

Not to mention games such as Road to Survival and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, just one DNF can make Tianhe Network enter the top ten, and this is only about three months after DNF was released last year.

Compared with Tianhe Network, Penguin, which ranks first, and Wangyi, which ranks second, rely more on their almost assembly-line-like games to pile up the amount abruptly.

"The follow-up optimization of the two mainframes is really difficult." Inside the studio, after knocking on the door twice, Plott, who came in, sat down on the sofa and poured himself a glass of water from the water dispenser next to him with a paper cup.

Hearing Plot's complaint, Chuhe also smiled helplessly. What is the gold standard of the game?
Gameplay?
High resolution and stable 60FPS?

Of course it is the latter. After all, no matter how good the gameplay is, most players will probably not be able to persist in the slideshow + mosaic game experience.

Although they already have experience in the research and development of Left [-] Survival, as well as some experience in the development of the console version of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds by EA and Tianhe Network, they still encountered many difficulties in Red Dead Redemption.

First of all, in order to achieve 60FPS, the two platforms need to be slightly optimized on the basis. The Microsoft platform needs to optimize the GPU, while the Sony platform needs to optimize the CPU. No matter which platform it is, the specifications are very limited, and the addressing method is also enough. People scold mothers.

Including picture and content deletion, in order to achieve high resolution and stable FPS is inevitable.

"Delete it if necessary." When he said this sentence, Chuhe was also very helpless.

Compared with the theoretically unlimited PC platform, the functional limitations of the console platform actually make it impossible for game developers to realize many of their ideas.

But even so, compared to the PC version, more game developers are still keen on the development of console games. After all, sales can be guaranteed, not like PC games. If they are targeted by the cracking team, it only takes a day or even release Half an hour after the sale, your game is cracked.

"Is there anything about AI in the game?" Chu He asked while looking at Plot.

After all, this is what he is responsible for.

Hearing Chuhe's question, Plott shook his head: "It's cool according to the actual idea before, but in practice, there are too many difficulties to face. We can only insert enough wires to let them see It looks like a real NPC." Plott shook his head and said.

Technology is one aspect, and functional time limitation is another aspect.

"For example, in the game, if the player does not take a bath for a long time, if it is too dirty, the NPC in the game will dislike the player. For example, the hotel prohibits the player from entering; after the player is found doing bad things, if he is found, he will be wanted, but if Before being officially wanted, kill all the witnesses, then the wanted will be cancelled; the player's reputation is good enough or bad enough, and various NPCs with different personalities in the game will treat the player differently." Pro Te said to Chuhe.

These sound very cool settings, but in fact, according to Plott, they are all triggered by numerical points. This is very similar to the rivers and lakes developed by Chuhe and the others before. Plott’s experience in this regard is very enough.

The only more troublesome thing is that the platform developed this time is the mainframe platform, and just when Chuhe and the others were worrying about some difficulties in the development.

Wu Zifei from the domestic mountain city sent an email to Chuhe, and received capital injection from Tianhe Network. After the studio expanded its scale, the demo version of Paz Meow's new work Portia Time has been produced, and it has also passed the internal first. A round of testing.

(End of this chapter)