Visual China.
On December 14, the 2023 China Game Industry Annual Conference kicked off in Guangzhou. Among them, in the sub-forum with the theme of "Super Digital Scenarios Drive Future Digital Productivity - Game Re-cognition Forum", front-line practitioners and researchers in the game industry gathered together to discuss topics such as the re-understanding of games, the close relationship between games and technology, and how AIGC can improve game efficiency.
What comes to mind when you think of games?The fierce battle in King's Canyon, or the launch of Genshin Impact?Perhaps few people know that games have penetrated into the field of cutting-edge technology, playing an important role in artificial intelligence, chips, cloud computing, mobile phones, XR (virtual reality) industries, autonomous driving, telemedicine, aerospace, and machinery manufacturing.
At the sub-forum, Yang Lei, head of the Science and Technology Innovation Department of China Southern Airlines Zhuhai Xiangyi, shared a vivid case of the important role of games in science and technology.
Aviation training is an indispensable part of the flight and can effectively improve the safety of pilots while flying. In aviation training, flight simulators worth hundreds of millions of dollars are necessary training tools for pilots before flying aircraft, among which the fineness and degree of the generated pictures seen by pilots in flight simulators have been lacking in the past.
With the advancement of technology, aviation training is constantly changing, and game engines are playing an important role in this change. The so-called game engine can be compared to the engine of a car, which is the most core and dominant existence in a game. The addition of the game engine has greatly improved the visual deficiencies in aviation training in the past.
In June this year, China Southern Airlines and Tencent established the Tencent Aviation Safety and Research Lab of China Southern Airlines, which developed a visual system based on the capabilities of the game engine and the use of game technologies such as physically realistic lighting and rendering. According to Yang Lei, this visual system not only greatly improves the fineness and authenticity of the visual generation of some specific simulators, but also greatly improves the production efficiency of the visual - the airport vision that used to take three months to complete now only takes three days, while in the past an airport vision can be sold for 300,000 yuan.
But the combination of technology and gaming hasn't been all smooth sailing. Wu Yu, Director of R&D Performance Department and Engine Technology Center of Tencent Interactive Entertainment Business Group, talked about the problems that may be faced when integrating technology and games, citing the different frame rate requirements for games and aviation training as examples.
Wu Yu said that when game manufacturers test a game under development through mainstream PCs or mobile phones, if the game can stabilize at 59A frame rate of 5 frames per second is already a very good result. And the higher the frame rate, the smoother the game graphics and the better the player experience. But in the aerospace field, on the huge screen of the flight simulator, this frame rate is not enough, "we need to do a very deep transformation of the engine to make it always maintain a straight line at 60 frames in very large scenes, and we cite a lot of technologies including XR".
The combination of games and technology is so close, and it is natural that it has also been swept by the AI wave set off by ChatGPT this year. Among them, AIGC is bringing more imagination to the imaginative art of games.
Lu Tangjie, head of AI technology at NetEase's Fuxi Lab, said that games and AI have always been complementary to each other. For example, OpenAI and Deep Mind, two well-known companies in the AI field, have conducted technical research in the field of games. The establishment of NetEase Fuxi Lab was also influenced by Alpha Go, which defeated humans in Go.
As we all know, AIGC can improve efficiency and reduce costs in game creation, but when it comes to more detailed operations, how does AIGC play a role, or how can it play a role?
PCG (Programmatic Content Generation Framework) + AIGC is a direction worth looking forward to, this is Kure's point of view. AI cannot solve all problems, and the emergence of AI in the details of the creative process seems to be a bit excessive, squeezing the imagination and control ability of creators. What can we do when a la carte idea becomes difficult?So Wu Yu proposed PCG+AIGC, "You describe what kind of thing you want to do, let it (PCG) spell out this magic spell, and then use AI to generate it."
Lv Tangjie also said that in practical applications, the combination of PCG and AIGC is very important, and when making 3D assets, Lv Tangjie's team usually makes PCG generate controllable atomic components, and AIGC plays more of a role in aesthetic judgment.