Game Development: Starting with Recreating the Anime Game Style

Chapter 570 Is this still a bit lacking?
The biggest problem isn't technology, but time. The first trailer for the previous film, Black Myth, wasn't released until August 2020, while it's currently March 2018.

There was a two-and-a-half-year gap in between.

Two and a half years is a huge gap for game development, especially for the iteration of game engine technology.

By 2020, Game Science had already achieved some truly stunning results on the Unreal Engine 4.

In 2018, although Game Science had been in intensive development for over a year, they were using the Star Engine.

This is not to say that the StarCraft game engine is weak.

In fact, the reputation of Unreal Engine 4 is not good at present, or rather, the reputation of Unreal Engine has been mediocre since the Unreal Engine 3 era.

From Unreal Engine 3 to Unreal Engine 5, the greatest strength of the Unreal Engine is not its graphics, but its ability to significantly reduce the workload of developers by using its built-in tools.

But at the same time.

This has always put a lot of pressure on Unreal Engine games to optimize, as automatically generated lighting, model optimization, and various special effects place a great strain on players' hardware.

This situation persisted until the Unreal Engine 5 era, when the cost advantages of Unreal Engine's various automated functions became increasingly apparent. Graphics card manufacturers began introducing "frame generation" technologies such as DLSS and FSR, making games "no longer need optimization."

Furthermore, with the success of Unreal Engine 5 games such as Black Myth, many investors realized that such amazing graphics could be created without so many people, and that players could accept them.

Some features enable small and medium-sized teams to create AAA-level visuals using Unreal Engine 5.

Unreal Engine 5 truly stood up after that.

However, in 18, the Unreal Engine was not strong. Many games had better graphics and optimization than Unreal Engine 4 at the time. Almost all the major companies had their own game engines, the most typical example being Red Dead Redemption 2.

Therefore, Game Science's use of the Star Engine is not a negative factor.

Even in 18, Chu Chen had a pioneering edge in many engine technologies, for example, in order to keep up with the world-class standards pursued by the Black Myth production team.

Last year, Chu Chen had the Starry Sky Game Engine's China division establish a technology pioneer team to make breakthroughs in some key technologies that Chu Chen was interested in.

For example, panoramic scanning technology.

Before the "Black Myth" project was launched, the Star Engine did not support this technology. It was under Chu Chen's guidance that Xiong Rui found the person in charge of Suzhou Digital Technology Co., Ltd.

This company is the same one that provided digital scanning modeling for Game Science in its previous life.

Through the combined efforts of both parties, and after about six months of work, they finally achieved a high-precision model that was restored in the game engine.

This is indeed an extremely impressive technology.

This is also a very important technology in the Black Myth project.

However, many things are still limited by the times. For example, current graphics cards struggle to run such high-precision reconstruction models.

Furthermore, because it lacked the Nanite technology from the Unreal Engine 5 era, even with Fuller's help, StarCraft optimized its engine and introduced GPU-driven rendering pipeline technology.

In other words, frustum culling is calculated using a transformation matrix. This method transforms the vertices of the bounding box into the camera's clipping space coordinate system to determine whether an object is visible.
Essentially, this technological path is the same as that of Nanite during the Unreal Engine 5 era, but Fuller isn't a god. He couldn't possibly travel 25 years in one go.

Therefore, the current StarCraft game engine has many features, but that's about it. In addition, motion capture of monsters is a difficult task at present.

Before Black Myth, if you looked closely, you would have noticed that most of the bosses in domestic games were anthropomorphic.

why?
The reason is simply that there is no related industry in China. If you want to do motion capture of animal monsters, there is no one who knows how and no one who does it.

To solve this problem, whether in the previous life or in this timeline, the Black Myth: Wukong team has made many efforts, including collecting motion systems from real animals.

That is, one year, Game Science released a strange motion capture animation that used a cat to simulate a tiger...
However, it turned out that this idea was completely unworkable, and in the end, a series of monster movements were completed through the exploration of motion capture actors.

This is why later generations often say that Black Myth has driven the improvement of not just one game, but the entire Chinese industrial chain.

After all, following Black Myth, if domestic manufacturers want to create a flexible humanoid tiger BOSS, motion capture actors will know exactly how to do it, and there will also be a reference for those who want to create a dragon-shaped motion capture.

One interesting detail is that in the post-Black Myth era action MMORPGs like "Mingchao," the industry upgrade driven by "Black Myth" led to the addition of many non-humanoid bosses.
Many people do not understand what industrial upgrading means.

This is actually industrial upgrading.

The topic seems to have gone off-topic. In short, in Chu Chen's view, Xingchen is still exploring many things in 2018, which is why he made the decision to use "Black Myth" as a demonstration.

But deep down I wasn't really confident.

Objectively speaking, the Starry Sky game engine has developed very rapidly under Chu Chen's direct "tech tree" guidance.

However, Chu Chen had seen the Unreal Engine 4: The Myth of Black in his previous life, and even the final product of Unreal Engine 5.

After seeing those images, and considering the years he'd spent since traveling back in time, coupled with the idealized imagery in his mind, his demands for the graphics that the game engine should display were unreasonably high.
This is why Chu Chen brought a large group of people to Game Science.

Of course, the others were unaware of Chu Chen's "sense of crisis."

Therefore, when a group of people saw the demo presented by Game Science, their expressions were completely different.

The demo starts with a scene demonstration, showing a dilapidated earth god temple.

The temple's stone statues were covered in moss and cracks, and spider webs swayed gently in the wind in the corners. A few rays of sunlight slanted in through the holes in the roof, illuminating the dust floating in the air.

This single shot was enough to make many of those who had come with Chu Chen nod in approval, with Guan Lei even exclaiming "Holy crap!"

The art style and atmosphere of this scene are indeed top-notch in China. The unique Eastern aesthetic of decay, carrying a sense of historical weight and mythological color, is captured perfectly.

But after reading the demo, Chu Chen shook his head and softly uttered a sentence.

"It feels like it's still lacking something."

"Still not quite there." As soon as he said that, everyone instinctively looked at Chu Chen, their eyes full of question marks.

The art style, the atmosphere, the details—any game company in China could boast about this for a year. This is still lacking! ???
(End of this chapter)