In 06, Blizzard had two big plans, namely Hearthstone and Titan.

The former has already begun to be developed, and as a card game with relatively simple special effects, it is really not difficult to develop, at least for Blizzard.

Coupled with Zhou Fangyuan's mention, there were no detours in the previous life, and there were many fewer attempts, so he went directly in the direction of the final version.

As for the Titans on the other side, because this plan is too big, Zhou Fangyuan is not ready to start directly in a short period of time, make preliminary preparations first, when the opportunity is right, and then it is not too late to launch. Mike initially had an objection to this, and as in his previous life, once he decided to be a Titan, he wanted to start immediately.

"Confused!"

Zhou Fangyuan shook his head helplessly, "Isn't it making trouble for yourself to be a Titan now?" Mike, I'll ask you the simplest question, what are you going to do with the game engine?"

"Game Engine ......"

Mike is stuck.

yes, needless to say, just one problem is enough to push Mike into the corner and not get up and down.

In the previous life, Blizzard did not anticipate that its engine would not be enough, so it blindly launched the development plan. Later, when I realized this, it was too late to regret it.

Now that Zhou Fangyuan directly brought up the problem of the engine, Mike couldn't say it anymore at once.

If you think about it carefully, yes, Titan, as an epoch-making online game in the plan, will be a super MMO game that combines two categories: simulation development and role-playing, and has extremely high requirements for the content of the game, and the requirements for the game engine will naturally not be low.

Speaking of which, Blizzard has never actually had its own exclusive game engine, and many people may not know much about what the engine is, so here is a brief introduction.

Suppose the game is a car, and all the cars can generate power and walk on the road because there is an engine inside it that drives the car as a whole. If a car doesn't have an engine, we might be able to think of other ways to make it move, but in terms of the process, it's a lot of trouble.

The same goes for games.

To put it more technically, a "game engine" is "a core component of an application that has been written to edit a computer game system or some interactive real-time image." ”

It sounds like a mouthful, but it's actually like the engine of a car, but it's an important existence that replaces the object with a game, and connects the various parts of the game into one. Of course, not all games need a game engine, and in the first games, there were very few such things.

Game engines have only been around for a short time, and there was a time when computer games were first introduced, and game developers were just concerned with developing as many new games as possible and selling them to players. Although most games at that time were simple and crude, the average development cycle for each game was more than 8 to 10 months, partly due to technical reasons, and partly because almost every game had to be coded from scratch, resulting in a lot of duplication of effort, and there was no game engine at this time.

Gradually, some experienced developers have figured out a lazy way to borrow some of the code from a previous game of a similar genre as the basic framework for the new game, in order to save development time and development costs. According to Marx's theory of production mechanics, the cost per unit of product is reduced by the increase in the level of productivity, and the craftsmen with a higher degree of automation will eventually eliminate those craftsmen with low productivity, and the concept of the engine was born in the context of this mechanized operation.

Nowadays, almost every game has its own engine, but there aren't many that can actually gain recognition and become the standard. Looking at the development of computer games over the years, we can see that the biggest driving force of the engine comes from 3D games, especially 3D shooters. Although 2D engines like Infinity also have a long history, from the Baldur's Gate series to Outlander Requiem, Icewind Dale, etc., its application scope is limited to "Dungeons & Dragons" style role-playing games, including the Aurora engine used in the critically acclaimed "Neverwinter Nights", they all have a very special purpose, and it is difficult to promote the development of the entire engine technology, which is why sports simulation games, Flight sims and real-time strategy games rarely have engines in the licensed market, and developers struggle to get the desired results even with third-party engines, such as Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds powered by the Age of Empires 2 engine.

So, if you want to look back at the history of engines, the best goal is mainly shooters, and the relationship between action shooters and 3D engines is like twin brothers, they are born together, they grow together, and each other provides each other with the impetus for development.

In 1992, 3D Realms/Apogee released a small game of just over 2 trillion dollars, Wolfenstein, and even more experienced players may remember the excitement they felt when they first encountered it, and the incendiary word "revolution" cannot describe its important place in the history of computer games. The game pioneered a first-person shooter, and more importantly, it added a Z-axis to the X and Y axes, adding a forward-backward depth to the width and height of the plane, which had a huge impact on players who were used to 2D games.

The author of the Wolfenstein 3D engine is the famous John Carmack, the chief programmer of id Software, who has established himself in the gaming world with this Wolfenstein 3D engine. In fact, Wolfenstein is not the first game to feature a first-person perspective, as Origin had already released a first-person role-playing game called Genesis: Underworld a few months before its release, which uses similar technology, but it is quite different from the Wolfenstein 3D engine, for example, The engine supports ramps, floors and ceilings can be of different heights, divided into different levels, players can jump in the game, and can look up and down, all of which the Wolfenstein 3D engine can't do, and visually, Wolfenstein Command is closer to the comic style than the traditional pixel graphics.

Ken Silverman's 1994 development of the Build engine for 3D Realms was an important milestone in the evolution of the engine, and the "flesh" of the Build engine was the household name Duke of Doom. Duke Doom already had all the standard content of today's first-person shooters, such as jumping, 360-degree surround view, and squatting and swimming, plus swapping the flight of Heretics for a jetpack and even adding refreshing features like character reduction.

On the basis of the Build engine, 14 games have been born, such as "Farmer is Crazy", "Shadow Samurai" and "Blood Omen", etc., as well as "Seven Heroes and Five Righteousness" developed by Treasure Island Aisheng Information, which was one of the few 3D shooting games in China at that time. The licensing of the Build engine generated more than $1 million in additional revenue for 3D Realms, making it the first "upstart" in the engine licensing market. However, on the whole, the Build engine did not bring any qualitative changes to the development of the 3D engine, and the breakthrough task was finally completed by id Software's "Quake".

"Thor's Hammer" was released immediately after "Duke of Doom", and the difference between the two became a hot topic among players for a while. Judging from the excitement of the content, "Duke of Doom" surpasses "Thor's Hammer" by a lot, but in terms of advanced technology, "Thor's Hammer" is the undoubted winner. The Quake engine was the first true 3D engine at the time to fully support polygonal models, animations, and particle effects, rather than the 2.5D engines like Doom and Build. In addition, the Quake engine pioneered online gaming, and although Doom a few years ago could also be played via modem, it was Thor's Hammer that finally brought online games into the public eye, and it was it that led to the development of the esports industry.

By the year 2000, the development of game engines had finally slowed down.

The game's graphics have reached a ceiling level in Unreal, and it's clear that the next direction of development is no longer visual. As mentioned earlier, the role of engine technology in games is not limited to the graphics, it also affects the overall style of the game, for example, all games made with the Doom engine, whether it is Heretic or Wizard of Destruction, have similar content, and even the plot is the same. Players are starting to get tired of the monotonous mode of running around with guns, and the developers have to look for something else, thus setting off a new climax in first-person shooters.

Two epoch-making titles appeared in 1998 at the same time, Valve's Half-Life and LookingGlass's Thief: Project Dark, and while previous games such as System Shock brought many new features to the engine, none had as profound an impact on later titles and the evolution of engine technology as Half-Life and Thief.

All in all, game designers can quickly make a game with the "engine" without having to think about other trivial parts of game making. A good game engine can cover almost all the objective factors in a game, such as rendering, physics collisions, sound effects, scripts, and animations. Therefore, developing a high-quality game engine is a very expensive thing to do, once the game engine is not up to par......

Just think about a certain education.,It's claimed to buy a bug and get a game.,It can be seen how easy its game engine is.。

In order to save costs, shorten the cycle and reduce risks, more and more game developers choose to use third-party game engines to make games, such as the "Unreal Engine" mentioned above, according to incomplete statistics, the audience of the games developed by the "Unreal Engine 4" engine alone has exceeded 2 million, not to mention the more famous "Unreal Engine 3".

Of course, in addition to Unreal Engine 4, there are many other great game engines in the game development market today.

FOR EXAMPLE, EVEN IF YOU HAVEN'T HEARD OF THE "UNITY ENGINE" IN UNITY 3D, YOU MUST HAVE SEEN THE "UNITY" LOGO MORE THAN ONCE!

UNITY ENGINE IS A MULTI-PLATFORM COMPREHENSIVE GAME DEVELOPMENT TOOL THAT ALLOWS PLAYERS TO EASILY CREATE INTERACTIVE CONTENT SUCH AS 3D VIDEO GAMES, ARCHITECTURAL VISUALIZATION, REAL-TIME 3D ANIMATION, ETC., AND IS A FULLY INTEGRATED PROFESSIONAL GAME ENGINE. And this game engine is extremely compatible, it can be used for web games, stand-alone games, and mobile games!

THE POPULAR TEMPLE RUN WAS DEVELOPED USING THE UNITY ENGINE.

Another example is the Frost Engine.

"Frost Engine" is a 3D game engine designed by the Swedish DICE game studio for the famous video game series "Battlefield". The engine has been in development since 2006, with the first game using the Frost engine coming out in 2008. The most important feature of this engine is that it can run large, detailed game maps, and at the same time, it can use low system resources to render full destruction of ground, buildings, and debris. To put it bluntly, you can build a big, big game map for players to dismantle, dismantle, and dismantle in it!

By the way, Need for Speed 20 was also developed using the "Frost Engine".

The Source Engine, I don't know if the majority of Dota 2 players know, Dota 2 is developed with the "Source Engine"! The "Source Engine" includes cutting-edge character animation, advanced AI, realistic physics analysis, shader-based graphics, and a highly scalable development environment. In addition, the origin engine appeared very early, as early as 2004, "Half-Life 2" began to be made using the origin engine.

Finally, the Galaxy Editor.

Players who are familiar with Blizzard and love StarCraft 2 must be familiar with it. To be precise, it doesn't count as a complete game engine, as games made using the "Galactic Editor" can only be released and run on the StarCraft 2 Battle.net platform. However, it's the most powerful map editor known!

With the Galaxy Editor, you can create: ACT (Action Game), FTG (Fighting Game), STG (Shooting Game), FPS (First Person Shooter), TPS (Third Person Shooter), ARPG (Action RPG), MMORPG (Online Role Playing), AVG (Text Adventure), ...... Only you can't think of it, you can't do it without the "Galaxy Editor"!

There are even rumors that Blizzard's "Heroes of the Storm" was actually made with the "Galaxy Editor", of course, that's a story for later, but looking at the game graphics and gameplay style of "Heroes of the Storm", this statement is not completely untargeted.

But in general, Blizzard doesn't have its own exclusive game engine, it doesn't provide a game engine with a large framework like UNITY or Unreal, and World of Warcraft only uses the Direct8 game engine, which is not bad, but without its own engine, it will inevitably be constrained after all. Especially for a super-large game like Titan, there is no dedicated engine, and it is not at all like to rely on patchwork. So Blizzard wants to develop Titans? Yes, but before that, Zhou Fangyuan's request is that they develop their own game engine first, which is right?

It's also for Blizzard's good.