Whether it is filming "Dream of Red Mansions" or making a strategy game of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", they are all part of Gu Ao's national cultural industry.

However, he also knew that in order to take the "savable game" to the next level, it would not be enough to rely on the initial enthusiasm to support it. Even if this inspires the belief of the people to grit their teeth and consume, if it cannot be internationalized, this card will never be played for long.

Gu Biao couldn't help but think: In the late 80s and even the early 90s, what categories did history rely on to support this industry?

American RPGs are more action-oriented. Even if you can kill monsters and level up archives, it is only in the late 90s, WINDOWS98 and later eras, and in the 21st century, that it is awesome.

Don't think that only Assassin's Creed, Watchdogs, and Wizard Hunt GTA, a generation of American role-play games, have action elements. The "Prince of Persia" in the 90s is also like this, which can be regarded as the distant ancestor of the style of the Assassin's Creed watchdog wizard.

And these things, at least on the Tiankun learning machine, which is still relatively primitive at present, and even on the 16-bit game console that will benchmark Sega MD in the future, it is obviously untenable.

How can you get the PS era, in order to have a smooth "action element + leveling + save" American game.

Therefore, in the difficult period of 86~92, if you want to carry forward the advantages of the save function of the game console, you have to count on Japanese-style turn-based RPGs and those strategy games.

said that my Three Kingdoms-themed "Devouring Heaven and Earth" series and "Fire Emblem" series were all supported on the original platform of 8-bit consoles before the appearance of the Sega MD game console in 88.

In the first few years after the advent of 16-bit machines, there were also popular models such as "Dream Simulation Battle", "Age of Discovery", "Grand Strategy", "Robot Wars" and so on.

Although later turn-based strategy games were generally abandoned, because the smoothness and combat coolness were not good. However, the low performance requirements of turn-based game consoles doomed them to be popular for many years in the special transition era.

Therefore, at the end of the inspection of Hanle Electronics, Gu Biao put forward his own requirements for the development plan of the game software supporting the learning machine:

"Romance of the Three Kingdoms is just a stepping stone for us to define new categories and inspire third-party collaborators. The follow-up supply chain management department should take "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and talk to upstream third-party game developers to give more briefings.

Tell them that strategy and turn-based RPGs will be a big hit in the next two years, so that more foreign developers can join in. Because Nintendo is not so quick to react, it is certainly impossible for Nintendo to follow up on the 'savable game development plan' on the basis of FC in the second half of this year and even most of next year.

This period of time is the window period for us to exert our strength, in the rest of the world market outside of the world, we want to further widen the gap with Nintendo's market share, our eight, Nintendo II's existing pattern, is definitely not enough to satisfy me. Even in the current market, the current market share of Nintendo VII and our III, I hope to get some back. At least pull back to four or six, preferably five or five.

In addition, starting this month, I think we should set up a new studio in the software department in the mainland special zone or Qiantang to develop turn-based role-playing and strategy games in full swing. Nowadays, the top universities in China have set up computer majors for several years, and for games development, the work of software engineers is more 'manual work', which is not so difficult, and can be piled up with cheap software labor.

However, for the leadership position of the art department, as well as the script and planner, I decided to recruit people from Yuben to work in China, because Chinese art school graduates have not experienced international modern aesthetic education, and they can't even draw Japanese comics. And everyone is ashamed of the escalation of obscenity and monsters, and it is estimated that they will not be able to do game planning and scripting for the time being. ”

After Gu Biao said this, Yang Hao raised his hand to say that he had something to say, and Gu Biao nodded to indicate that he could speak.

"Boss, we already have a semi-formal outsourcing studio at Zhejiang University, have you forgotten that a few years ago, you sponsored us to go to Stanford for exchange students for four places a year, leaving a lot of outsourcing channels. At present, our software company still often looks for outsourcing there - so it is better to formalize those outsourcing into studios, and there is no need to go to the SAR to start anew.

However, as far as I know, not only do I get paid well, but they also have a higher promise of sending people to the third world than they do to work in their home countries -- that is, if they hire someone from Tokyo to work in Qiantang, the salary will be more expensive than in Tokyo! They feel that going to a poor country will make life inconvenient for their employees, so they have to pay more money than they do in their home country.

Obviously, when they go to China, they can enjoy much lower prices and save more money, but they actually have higher salaries! It is better to ask the Chinese to work overtime themselves. ”

"That is, let the students of Gome come to the software company to work as artists, as long as they give themselves one-tenth of their salary, they will not be allowed to work three shifts 24 hours a day. Lu Yunda of the hardware department read in a low voice.

Because his wife is from the Academy of Fine Arts, he did the "Plants vs. Zombies" electric art back then. Back then, Tian Kun was still making the first generation of arcade machines, so he was also a veteran in the company's art field, regardless of the artistic level.

But Gu Biao is very courageous: "Labor cost is a problem I have to consider, you don't have to think about it." I ask me to say that even if the price is temporarily high, it will not exceed three years. By the 90s, I wanted to fully localize my game planner, script, and artists. Instead of worrying about this, we should think about how to make the newly recruited people work hard to learn from me, learn their skills, and completely bridge the gap with the international advanced concepts. ”

Gu Biao said this, and no one will refute it anymore, after all, the contradiction of the problem is pushed to "whether the Chinese employees who follow me work hard and whether they learn their skills as soon as possible". After learning the hand, it is the day when I leave.

The late '80s was the craziest time in the economy and the most awesome pay for employees in the tech industry. If you find a planner or artist who has worked in the Tokyo industry for a few years and worked in Akihabara, you won't be able to get it without a monthly salary of 500,000 yen.

Coupled with the appreciation of the yen after October last year, the black market exchange rate against the renminbi has now risen above the 20 to 1 mark. Then count "to work in a poor country with a poor living environment, you have to pay extra money".

This means that Gu Biao may have to spend a monthly salary equivalent to 350,000 yuan to invite a person. But when these people go to China, they actually enjoy the price of pork for 1 yuan and 5 dimes, which is like living in paradise.

I hope that this gap can allow the Chinese artists and planners next to them to catch up, throw away the traditional festival of "inducing players to be too embarrassed to fight monsters and upgrade", completely shatter the shelf they are holding, and enter the bloody market competition state of selling cool, selling cute, selling and killing as soon as possible.

So,The heads and backbones of the software department who attended the meeting,In front of Gu Biao, I asked for some details,Discussed,It was decided to merge the previously mentioned Tiankun's department in charge of sinicization,Also merge into this studio。

Gu Biao opened his mouth, but finally did not refute.

In his impression, he vaguely remembered that the wave of people who began to engage in Hanka and Chinese WPS in China in 87 seemed to be the same period as the establishment of Zhongguancun in the capital and fled the capital south to the special zone to seek development.

Therefore, Gu Xiao's original intention was to gather the project teams engaged in sinicization and Chinese WPS to the Special Economic Zone in order to seek to recruit enough talents.

He was afraid that there would be no one available in a small rural place like Qiantang.

However, since the Zhejiang University-Stanford Commission Training Exchange Program in the past few years, as well as Tiankun's original outsourcing studio, have a foundation in Qiantang, and the centralized office is indeed more conducive to management and growth and progress.

"Then let's do it, Qiantang will be Qiantang. Originally, I was inclined to be in the Special Administrative Region, where there are many talents. However, if you put out the signboard of Tiankun and make more recruitment advertisements, you should be able to attract those universities and research institutes in the capital to go to the sea. ”

Gu Biao groaned self-deprecatingly, which can be regarded as a clapstick approving this arrangement.

When his subordinates heard this, they all felt that Gu Biao was too worried, and they all smiled and patted their asses easily: "Although the Special Economic Zone is attractive, the current software-related industries in China are not as good as our Tiankun when they are tied together." Where Tiankun is going to be, of course the talents will come - those peers in the capital can't pull people at all. ”

In the past two years of 86 and 87, the domestic software-related industry has really started.

There are many companies that do practical things, such as Tsinghua Electronic Technology and Tsinghua Scientific Research Corporation (later Tsinghua Unigroup), which will be established in two years, which still really want to engage in hardware, chips, or at least embedded systems.

Of course, there are many businesses that start with "sinicization, computer installation, and tinkering after the import of foreign computer brands".

For example, the marketing god of the legal department in later generations, and the association that is inconvenient to evaluate, all came out in the past two years. Speaking from the heart, the forces of the three central and central Qing Dynasty in the north of the Qing Dynasty are still relatively strong.

And because of the emergence of industrial clusters, the capital will officially develop Zhongguancun in 87 as a centralized development zone for the software technology industry.

Therefore, after 87 years, there will be an obvious agglomeration effect of domestic software and computer talents compared with the embryonic period of the previous two years. If you want to do brokerage business, you have no choice, you have to gather in Zhongguancun and help foreign computers to land in China, it doesn't matter if you want to do something else to work your own, then you will all go south to the Special Economic Zone.

At that time, other cities in China did not have the slightest atmosphere of computer and software industry, not even Hujiang. At that time, there was no Pudong development, let alone Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park.

Gu Biao also respected this historical trend and didn't want to change anything.

However, his subordinates seem to be too blindly confident because they don't know history.

Then let it go and let the market test the results. Anyway, Gu Biao has a lot of money, even if there is a small layout mistake, he can afford to lose.

……

After finishing the inspection and meeting in Hanle Electronics and giving comprehensive instructions for the follow-up development, Gu Biao asked the secretary to bring back a few samples of the learning machine.

Before leaving, Gu Biao took care of Shi Yuzhu: In the past few months, pay attention to the market feedback data in a timely manner and directly copy a report to him.

According to the company's original management level, Shi Yuzhu was not qualified to report directly to Gu Biao, he should report to Schulhoff. Gu Biao's arrangement is also because he attaches great importance to the performance of the Tiankun learning machine in the mainland market.

After all this, Gu Biao drove back to Xiangjiang from the Special Economic Zone.

——

PS: The above is already 3000 words, and the following answers to a technical detail that yesterday's readers questioned a lot.

Some readers say that "Chinese characters use 16*16 a total of 256 pixels to store their glyph information, so the glyph of a character needs 16 bytes" (usually 1 byte of the letter and 2 bytes of the Chinese character refer to "quote", not the glyph itself)

This is not wrong now, because there are many fonts and storage space is not worth much, and it is indeed possible to do so. And now pull a font bar of WORD, we can see "Songti, Imitation Song, Heiti, Yahei, Youyuan"...... There are hundreds of glyphs, and the artistic beauty and pen handling are all different. Therefore, it is cost-effective to store the whole pixel of each glyph.

But in the 70's and early 90's, you couldn't do that, when storage space was valuable, so it had to be more efficient, and at that time there was only one glyph in Song style.

Since Wang Xuan, Chinese scientists have thought of a route: instead of storing the pixel lattice of each Chinese character, the pixel lattice of all the strokes to be used in the Chinese character is stored.

Because the total number of strokes must be at least dozens of times less than the total number of commonly used Chinese characters, and a single stroke is at most dozens of pixels, without 256 points, it also saves space.

Strokes are not only horizontal and vertical skimming dots and folds, but also exhaust the glyphs of all strokes in Chinese characters. For example, in the word 'Gu', the first stroke is an apostrophe, and the penultimate stroke in the 'page' is also an apostrophe, but the two apostrophe shapes are different, and they must be stored separately in the font at that time. There are three horizontal strokes of the word 'Gu', but the length of the horizontal is different, which corresponds to several codes. In this way, there are dozens or hundreds of strokes of Chinese characters.

Then, when storing each glyph, it is to take a storage bit first, store how many strokes there are in this character, and then each byte can record the starting pixel of the two strokes, and the shape of the stroke called by the stroke. In this way, it saves several times the space compared to storing 256 pixels per word. (Later, in the early days of the Chinese input method, the invention of the 'five-stroke typing' input method actually followed this idea downward, because at that time, each Chinese character had a stroke call relationship that could be retrieved.) In the font library, Chinese characters not only have corresponding pinyin, but also corresponding stroke library. After the 90s, it is estimated that they have not used five strokes of typing).

For example, a "Gu" character 10 strokes, according to the overall pixel storage is 256 bits, now use the "stroke citation method", the first bit represents the "starting point of the apostrophe", and the second digit means "long"

(In fact, about the deeds from Wang Xuan, I remember that there are detailed records in the high school Chinese extracurricular books taught by Renjiao, and even the technical details of the early Chinese phototypesetting are said.) The article is called "Farewell to Lead and Fire, Ushering in Light and Electricity", and this article has a history and was reprinted from the "Xinhua Daily" that year.

When Wang Xuan won the National Science and Technology Award, he was a great man at the same level as Yuan Longping. Now the post-90s and post-00s readers don't know this person, and I'm actually quite sorry.

Of course, it may be that the language is more official, not as easy to understand as I said. So, it's shameless to think that I'm not water, after all, it's also a kind of ability to relay difficult things in layman's terms. ）