Since Doug and his colleagues crossed the ocean to Funan in November last year and joined the Qingyu Network, in addition to the development of "Eternal War" itself, Ye Shenxi also gave them another task, which is the continuous optimization of the Athena engine.

Not only for the game "Eternal War", but also for the development of more difficult and more technical projects in the future, which is the future of the herring network.

To develop a game, the team has no choice but to buy a commercial engine, use a free and open-source engine, or develop it in-house.

In terms of functional perfection and performance, commercial engines must have advantages over open-source engines, but in fact, game engines are relatively more important, and whether developers can tap the potential of the engine itself as much as possible after tuning it in their hands.

At this point, it is the biggest advantage of the business engine, better after-sales service, technical support, more perfect development tools, and more abundant project examples.

This ensures that the production team can overcome technical hurdles as much as possible during the development process and work more efficiently.

However, how can these compare to their own independent research and development.

When you have an idea and find that the engine doesn't support it, you can either compromise and give up the idea, or wait for a subsequent version update, and people may support that feature.

In the case of satisfying its own conditions, this is why Ye Shenxi wants to have Qingyu Network's own game engine.

Completely optimized for your own projects, meet your needs, flexibly and efficiently adjust for projects under development, provide solutions, and know how to change the bottom layer when there are new features to add.

More importantly, the accumulation of our own company's technical capabilities, and the cultivation of team skills in the continuous maintenance and iteration of our own engines, are the basis for driving innovation in the future.

There are many people who think that buying a tall engine is equivalent to buying technology, but in fact, many times the engine is beyond the team's own technical control ability, and they fantasize about making a tall project worthy of this engine, and the result is that they are mired in the quagmire and end up with a mess.

……

Now, a year later, Doug and his team have also given an answer, a completely upgraded version of Athena 2.0.

The three most striking improvements in version 2.0 from the previous version are a significant increase in graphics rendering capabilities, a more sophisticated physics engine, and visual development tools.

Just like the demo that Doug showed in front of Ye Shenxi now, the scene is densely packed with 200 minions from "Eternal War", a total of 200,000 polygons, in this relatively extreme scene, on Doug's laptop (although it is a high-end laptop), it ran to 60 frames, and it was quite stable.

By the way, the current version of Wrath of the Wrath of the Warcraft Lich King's character model for the gnomes is more than 900 polygons.

What does this feature mean, which means that in the future, the herring network can make complex and grand game scenes.

With the use of LOD technology (hierarchical detail, fast drawing of complex scenes), it is possible to achieve epic war scenes of thousands of units!

Imagine the decisive battle in "The Lord of the Rings 3: The Return of the King", that magnificent confrontation, the herring fish network can at least try.

The rendering capability of Athena 2.0 can compete with the most competitive and influential open source engines in the world in terms of this technology alone.

This is the result of this year, Doug and them.

……

Over the course of the year, Doug's team grew from an American trio to eight now, and work on Eternal War was gradually detached and handed over to colleagues who joined later.

In addition to game development skills, the selection criteria for this group also require sufficient knowledge of the mainstream game engines on the market, at least the most representative of them, and preferably those who have participated in their development.

The five people who joined later were all from several old domestic R&D manufacturers, who had gone through the road of independent research and development of engines, or professionals from the Chinese branches or studios of several international manufacturers, and under the leadership of Doug, more than 300 days of work content were produced in this demo in front of Ye Shenxi.

"That's good." Ye Shenxi patted Doug on the shoulder, signaling that he had worked hard.

Hidden with a little "it was good to meet in Yangcheng at the beginning".

He rarely has such a sincere emotion in front of his employees, anyway...... Doug probably doesn't understand it either.

Doug is just a simple technician, and even sometimes there is a kind of technical nerd's cuteness and "incomprehensible style", and he will not stand at the level of a company to imagine, which is another milestone on the development of the entire company.

Xia Qingyu on the side naturally understood, looked at Ye Shenxi's side, and smiled at him, and the two of them looked at each other with the same relief in their eyes.

The game project itself is not a company's real wealth, active thinking, tacit team, mature technology and even a good cultural atmosphere, these are.

Doug is also enthusiastically introducing the new features added to this version, like introducing the name of his newborn child to his neighbors.

The sense of accomplishment that Athena 2.0 brings him is actually far greater than that of "Eternal War".

The confidence and ambition of the new physics engine, which he named Newton, is evident.

An accurate 3D physics library that can realistically simulate a large number of physical environments in real time, including straight or curved motion trajectories, collisions, explosions, etc., according to various physical properties of objects.

Support the ragdoll system to give objects properties such as mass and shape, and obtain very realistic mechanical dynamic effects; There is also the possibility of making all renderable materials physically specific, such as a stone pavement or a glass boardwalk in the game, on which the character glides with completely different friction.

Not only traditional rigid objects (motion or force without deformation), but also flexible or fluid can be simulated.

In particular, most of the physics engines on the market are simulated and calculated through the CPU, and this Newtonian physics engine can call the graphics card GPU, and the parallel and floating-point computing capabilities directly pull away from the CPU, while the simulation of fluids and flexible objects relies heavily on these two computing capabilities.

How advanced is this technology today?

So far, there is only one physics engine in the world that can support this technology, Invida's PhysX, and another AMD's Bullet physics engine, which is also in development.

And Doug did, and it was enough for him to take out the pretending to be a force and a stinky fart, even in front of the big factories, EA or Yubi who had rejected him before.

Of course, a complete game engine includes too many aspects, and the 2.0 version of Athena also has some flaws in some other places that are still waiting for subsequent optimization and improvement, such as light and shadow, weather effects, and the AI engine, which is also relatively simple, and cannot support more complex levels for the time being.

And a lot more......

But the above two points can already be called the world's first-class level.

If you want to give it a comprehensive assessment, the overall estimate is that it is about the level of the international second-tier, and it should belong to the level that it will be used if it is released. However, it certainly does not mean that it is now, mainly because there is no project support, and there is no technical staff in the market who are familiar with it.

I don't plan to release it for the time being......

……

As for the third most important function, visual development, this is Ye Shenxi's previous separate request to Doug, simply put, it provides the ability to make games without writing code, of course, not all modules. It's actually a supplement that allows more people to be involved in the development process.

This is the answer that Doug and his team handed in after this year.

Ye Shenxi was quite satisfied.

When he saw Doug demonstrate the explosion of a stone brick, the debris flew sideways, the scattered fragments hit the wall and bounced, fell to the ground and rolled, until finally stopped, he knew that this engine was at least in a crushing position among the engines independently developed by many domestic manufacturers, such as Guaniu's Flexi, E space-time Angelica 3D, and Jin Toad's kingine......

Well, that's a bit short-sighted.

The goal of the herring network should not be in China, at least the release of Athena 2.0 means that it has taken a solid step in the direction of internationalization.

……

The legendary Eternal Tower is finally live, and Korean players have been waiting for this orange-level MMORPG for a long time.

And the head-to-head showdown between the two games of China and South Korea, which was played up by the Korean media some time ago, also kicked off.

Not only Korean players and media, but even many people in China are paying attention, and some are a little worried about the away disadvantage of "Eternal War", calling on everyone to go to Hanbok to contribute to the bricks and win glory for the country...... Even with this "Aion" (Eternal Tower), it has become quite popular in China for a while.

Of course, there is also the media, or other manufacturers behind the scenes.

For example, Shengda, last month, they also announced at the same time that they will be the full agent of South Korea's Nsoft "Aion" in the operation of the national server, and it is expected to start the internal test at the beginning of next year.

Agency Fees...... 50 million US dollars, although Shengda has not officially announced, but there are always various people familiar with the matter revealed that the gossip has flowed out, and this figure has not only caused an uproar in South Korea.

This includes a $10 million licensing fee, a $9 million acquisition of a 30% stake in Nsoft's China subsidiary, and a $31 million minimum deposit.

Although it is a little bit worse than the $51.3 million in 04 when Stone City won the three-year agency of "Warcraft" in the mainland region, Stone City is a total amount of more than four years in the form of quarterly payments.

Strictly speaking, this is by far the most expensive agency fee in the history of Chinese gaming.

South Koreans suddenly felt that "Aion" had won the battle against "ONE".

Ye Shenxi also downloaded and experienced this game, although he couldn't understand it in Korean. Overall, Eternal Tower is indeed a game of high overall quality, a comprehensive MMORPG that tries to encompass everything.

The four-year R&D cycle is enough to show Nsoft's ambitions, and the capacity of 13 gigabytes is currently only comparable to the 15G version of Wrath of the Lich King in Warcraft.

In many ways, this game is on par with Warcraft, the agency fee is also, and the game volume is also.

Some South Korean media have begun to report that with the launch of "The Eternal Tower", South Korea's local computer hardware industry has been significantly driven. The game's large-scale fortress battles are indeed a challenge to the hardware and operating system, which also reflects its popularity from the side.

Maybe I don't appreciate it much, but Ye Shenxi also admires Nsoft, they are indeed the ones who are currently the leaders of Korean game manufacturers.

A week after the launch of "Eternal Tower", it was logical that it directly entered the top 10 of the Internet café game chart, and Nsoft also made three games on the list at the same time, namely "Lineage" at No. 5, Lineage 2 at No. 6, and "Timeless Tower" at No. 8.

Qingyu Network's "Eternal War" has now rushed to the 3rd position, just squeezing out the perennial top three "Warcraft Wars 3", only behind "Raid" and "Interstellar Wars", occupying 11% of the share, at this time it has just been online for 35 days.

It's a bit of a fairy fight.

……

On October 8th, the Korean e-sports club eMade FOX announced the establishment of the "Eternal War" division, and announced their five team members, including KT Rolster's "Star Wars" project player Bottle.

This is the first non-Chinese Eternal War team, and the company behind this club, emade, happens to be the developer of Legend 2, and shares the rights to the series with Actoz, the developer of Legend 1.

"Legend 2" is called "Legend of Blood" in China.

Under the guidance of this leading role, several other traditional esports clubs have also begun to announce the recruitment of players to prepare to form the "Eternal War" team.

At this time, KeSpa and CJ E&M jointly announced that they have obtained the authorization of Seoul Blue Fish to start the "Eternal War" professional league in mid-November, and the details of the specific format and schedule will be announced later.