Mike couldn't resist Zhou Fangyuan's gaze in the end.

He can stick to the game and go straight to the development stage, but he also understands that the current Blizzard does need a completely new engine.

Blizzard didn't have this demand before, or the demand has not been large, and it barely survived by just scraping it together. Even like the Warcraft series, using the Galaxy Editor is a good way to express what they want to express, and in this case, you let them spend a lot of money, a lot of time, and a lot of manpower and material resources to develop a game engine?

But now, the Titan project is extremely large, so the original game engine is no longer enough, so it is imperative to develop a new engine.

And for a game company, the importance of game engines is not limited to this.

Before Zhou Fangyuan's rebirth, Unity was neither a game series nor a game genre, but the name of a game engine. This is also one of the most common cross-platform game engines on mobile platforms, which is not only compatible with iOS/Android, but also supports Windows, macOS and other platforms. As small as Temple Run and as big as Hearthstone, they are all classics developed by Unity. In addition to Unity, the game engines commonly used on mobile phones include Cocos, while the game engines commonly used in PC games include Unreal Engine, Frost Engine, etc.

A game engine, as mentioned earlier, refers to the core components of some editable game systems or interactive real-time graphics applications that have been written. These systems provide game designers with the tools they need to write games, and are designed to make it easy and fast for game designers to program games without having to start from scratch. To put it simply, the game engine also determines what the game looks like in the first place.

For game companies, developing games with off-the-shelf game engines is of course a time-saving and labor-saving approach. But if you want to grasp the cornerstone of the industry and strengthen your core competitiveness, then it is necessary to develop your own game engine. The engine is one of the most important underlying technologies in the game industry, which directly affects the R&D process and development efficiency of a project, and is even enough to determine the upper limit of a game's performance.

EA's "Frost Engine" is one of the most prestigious self-developed game engines.

Back in 2006, EA began to develop the "Frost Engine", and since then it has been trying to improve the Battlefield series of games. Originally, Frost 1.0 Engine focused on improving the game's sound effects and adding blasting effects that allowed players to destroy certain buildings, all of which were featured in Battlefield: Rebel Company. After continuous optimization, in 2014, the greatly improved Frost 3 engine can already present amazing graphics, and the effect of building destruction has been greatly enhanced, which is already different from the original version.

EA CEO Andrew Wilson has emphasized the importance of developing its own engines: "In the past, EA used no less than 20 game engines to develop games, and now, we just want to focus on the Frost Engine.

A powerful engine can be applied to game platforms in different periods, creating different types of games to meet the needs of different players. Internationally renowned game companies, such as EA, CAPCOM, Ubisoft and other manufacturers, have self-developed game engines. In China, Wangyi's self-developed game engine is at the forefront. In 2005, NetEase decided to build a game engine for casual game development, and NeoX came into being.

In the beginning, NeoX was relatively simple, using a fixed render pipeline and not having advanced features. However, because of the simplicity of the API, many developers have begun to use the form of Python+NeoX to develop project prototypes, or to make demos to train newcomers. As the use cases expanded, the engine developers added a scene editor, character editor, and effects editor to NeoX, making it more functional and easier to use, and at one point it had more than 30 maintainers—a significant number at the time.

In 2008, NetYi wanted to implement the dress-up function in "Fantasy Journey to the West" and "Journey to the West", but the 2D engine effect was relatively simple and the rendering function was not good, so the project team tried to use NeoX to complete some functions, such as using it to render character pictures in the background, and then render them in memory to the format supported by the 2D engine. In the process, NeoX began to continuously optimize its character rendering capabilities, and the editor became more and more standardized and powerful. With the enhancement of engine functions, there are more and more scenarios in which Fantasy Journey to the West and Journey to the West use NeoX.

Since then, NeoX, which supports arbitrary language plug-ins and supports multi-person collaborative development mode, has become the mainstream engine of NetEase. During the development of "Demon Suppression", NeoX shouldered the responsibility of the main engine for the first time. NetEase has high hopes for "Demon Suppression", and in order to achieve this goal, War Spirit Studio has introduced a variety of functions such as physics engine, normal mapping, deferlighting, light baking, etc., and established a more systematic scene management mechanism. In the end, the game's graphics quality did take a noticeable leap.

During the development of "Demon Suppression Song", at the time of the rise of mobile games, NetEase made NeoX adapt to iOS and Android platforms, and developed games such as "Journey to the West", "Kung Fu Panda 3", and "Onmyoji" based on this. Since then, this engine, which has lasted more than ten years and has undergone many refactorings and iterations, has become one of the mainstream R&D engines of NetEase's 3D mobile games. In the end, during the development of the mobile game "Demon Suppression", War Soul Studio upgraded and iterated for NeoX, and version 2.0 added PBR, that is, physically-based rendering technology, supporting SSS, subsurface scattering, and anisotropic materials, which can make the game present better picture effects.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day's engine is also a NeoX-optimized version, and in addition to PBR, it also has a point cloud-based pre-rendering of scene lighting and a large view-distance foliage system.

In 2013, NetEase was testing the waters of mobile games and trying the cross-platform development of the NeoX engine, and it was also developing a new 3D game engine. They wanted the engine to ditch the baggage of 2D and PC games, and optimize it specifically for mobile platforms to achieve a higher level of artistic effects. With years of technology accumulation, NetEase completed the research and development of Messiah in three years, and won more than 20 original technology patents after the engine came out. The engine supports advanced technologies such as PBR, normal mapping, GPU particles, real-time lighting, and DrawCall (drawing of scene objects) to the thousands, greatly reducing the loss of image detail without losing scene detail.

When the mobile game "Under Heaven" was developed, the mobile games on the market at that time could only achieve 100 drawcalls, which meant that a large number of game details were inevitably lost, and the "Under Heaven" mobile game using the Messiah engine had a primary level of nearly 300,000 and DrawCall had reached the level of thousands.

After the practice and polishing of several products, Messiah, which is becoming more and more mature, has also become the choice of many key products of NetEase. Later, the popular "Chu Liuxiang" is a game work created by the Messiah engine. Messiah also has good multi-threaded parallelism capabilities, and in "Wilderness Action", features such as ultra-long line of sight, multi-person on the same screen, and complex weather are inseparable from Messiah's support. Wilderness Action has also helped Messiah gain more international company fit and support.

In December 2017, Qualcomm and NetEase announced that they would work together to optimize Messiah for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 series mobile platform, and as a result, Wilderness Action can reflect better game graphics on phones equipped with Snapdragon 800 series SoCs.

So, why develop your own game engine?

In the eyes of ordinary people, both Unity and Unreal Engine 4 have been open-sourced and powerful enough, while self-developed engines will consume a lot of manpower and material resources. Why is there a ready-made one, and NetEase will take a few years or even more than ten years to take a road with an uncertain future?

Actually, this is also forced out.

From NetEase's experience, it can be seen that self-developed engines and self-developed games often promote and grow each other.

The demand for games will force the engine to add more features to optimize the user experience, and the engine will improve the efficiency of game development, allowing developers to more freely implement personalized functions and maximize their technical prowess - for example, NeoX's high adaptation to mobile terminals is closely related to the development of the mobile game "Demon Suppression". NetEase is not the only company that insists on developing its own game engine all year round.

NaturalMotion, a subsidiary of Zynga the developer of Dawn of Titans, spent more than 10 years developing the Echo game engine and euphoria technology, achieving a spectacular 7,000 units on the same screen. Perhaps it is precisely because of the emphasis on independent research and development that NetEase Games was able to reach a cooperation with Zynga and finally won the agency of "Dawn of Titans". Although the domestic game market share is the world's first, it is far from reaching the international first-class level in terms of underlying technology.

Perhaps, only by carrying out technological innovation in a down-to-earth manner is the pattern and attitude that China's game enterprises and even Internet companies should have in the long-term world competition.

For Blizzard, the game engine is on the one hand to help the Titan Project continue, and on the other hand, it is also to ensure that it will never be controlled by others again.

In addition, there is another important point.

Since 2001, several engines on the market have continued the development trend of the previous two years, on the one hand, they continue to pursue realistic effects, such as the MAX-FX engine for realistic graphics, the Geo-Mod engine for realistic content, and the GHUL engine for "Military Adventurer" for the reality of death, and on the other hand, continue to explore the direction of the Internet, such as "Horde 2", "Team Fortress 2", and Monolith's large-scale online game that has not yet been announced.

However, due to technical constraints, the idea of putting a first-person shooter into a large network environment was difficult to realize.

It's no secret that the average large-scale online game is a slower-paced role-playing game, and the engines used in these games, whether it's the NetImmerse engine used in Camelot's Dark Ages or the Horizons engine used in Horizon Horizon: Istaria, are said to be able to guarantee that 500,000 people can enjoy the game in the same virtual world without any lag Neither of the BigWorld engine can support a large team dynamic environment where hundreds of players can fight at the same time.

It was with this in mind that idSoftware refocused its attention on the single-player mode, and later announced that Quake 4 and Doom 3 would rebuild a single-player engine. At the same time, old rival Epic Games is also working on a new generation of Unreal and Unreal Tournament 2 engines. While there isn't much specific information about these engines, the few animations that have been shown in real-time rendering with the new engines show that they do outperform other engines on the market and herald a new era of engines.

With the advent of the game "Guild Wars", it has creatively solved the worldwide problem of large-scale multiplayer simultaneous online battles, made it possible to "put first-person shooters into a large-scale network environment", and has become the only full-reality three-dimensional simulation war game in the world so far. The Unity3D game engine technology used in the game is unique in the world. The engine of the game is a product independently developed by the developer with the only intellectual property rights, and it is developed on the basis of the advanced flight simulation software of the United States.

Relying on this world-leading engine technology, the game can accommodate more than 5,000 people online at the same time and fight simultaneously on the same map, multiple battlefields, and ensure that these 5,000 people can play smoothly. And all kinds of weapons are simulated - including the parabola of ammunition ballistics, the thickness and protection performance of different armor, and the aerodynamic performance of the aircraft after wind tunnel tests, etc., all simulate real weapons and equipment, and so on.

Finally, it's important to point out that many good game developers are exiting the game development market and moving into the engine licensing market, which is a red flag. Although the continuous evolution of the engine has made games more and more technical, in the end, it is the people who use the technology, not the technology itself, that determines whether a game is good or not. As mentioned earlier, the engine is equivalent to the framework of the game, after the framework is laid, you only need to fill in the content, here, the framework only provides a possibility that the excitement depends on the content rather than the framework. As the No One Lives Forever development team put it, "It all comes down to one thing ultimately – whether your game is fun or not." ”

However, the problem with Blizzard is that they focus too much on whether the game is fun or not, and instead ignore the more basic, game framework problem.

So this led to the final collapse of the Titan project, ten years of hard work was ruined, not to mention missing the opportunity for the second high-speed development, and let himself fall into a very passive situation.

Therefore, in this life, Zhou Fangyuan's purpose is very simple, that is, to be the engine first.

Since its establishment, Blizzard has never had a real engine of its own, and it is unbelievable that such a large game company, a company that is calling for wind and rain in the global game industry, does not even have a game engine of its own. He even figured out that even if Mike didn't agree, he would force the project, but fortunately, Mike didn't insist too much. When Zhou Fangyuan analyzed the various pros and cons, as well as the problems that may be encountered in the future, Mike also realized the seriousness of the problem.

He immediately halted the early development of the Titan project and began to shift more of the company's efforts to the game engine.