To become the richest man from the beginning of the game

Chapter 1210 The new achievements of the horse laboratory

October 9th, Thursday.

In Chixing Studio, the employees are busy developing the new VR game "Real Estate Agency Simulator".

After the tempering and running-in of "Animal Island", the entire development team has made significant progress, the cooperation is more tacit, and the development process is smoother.

Even Cai Jiadong, the main designer, is more comfortable.

He seemed to gradually get the idea and method of Tengda's design, more and more matched with Lin Wan's idea, and gradually became a qualified chief designer.

After working on the computer for a while, he took the printed document and went to report to Lin Wan.

At this time, Lin Wan was concentrating on the computer screen, frowning slightly, as if thinking about something very important.

Seeing Cai Jiadong coming, Lin Wan temporarily looked away from the computer screen.

"Mr. Lin, have you read the small program sent by the Numa Artificial Intelligence Laboratory that is still in the experimental stage? How do you feel?"

"If it can be used, it will not only greatly shorten the development time of our entire project, but also may have a certain impact on the specific design of the game."

Lin Wan was stunned for a moment: "Oh, I've been thinking about other things recently, and I haven't had time to watch it yet. What do you think of the effect?"

Cai Jiadong replied truthfully: "I think... the effect is unexpectedly good."

Lin Wan didn't expect Cai Jiadong to give such a high evaluation.

This small program was just sent by Numa Lab to the two departments of Tenda Games and Shangyang Games two days ago, saying that it is an artificial intelligence program that is still in the experimental stage, let them try it out first, and give comments.

Because Lin Wan has a close relationship with Shangyang Games, this program was naturally sent to Chixing Studio.

Anyway, it is Tenda's internal industry, and one family does not speak two languages.

Lin Wan has been a little busy these two days, so she hasn't had time to watch it yet.

The reason why she didn't pay much attention was mainly because she felt that this thing would definitely not be very reliable.

The current interactive movie games, or some RPG games that have more dialogues and need to express the character's expression and speech at close range, all use motion capture technology and use actors to play.

Motion capture technology can not only capture body movements, but also subtle facial expressions.In the process of the actor speaking the lines, the face is captured while recording, and then the data is applied to the model created based on the actor, which can show a very realistic effect in the game.

Of course, if you are not satisfied with the actor's line skills, you can also find someone else to dub to achieve better results.

But this approach also has a problem, that is, the workload is too large, and it is not very free.

Once the plot dialogue is finalized, it cannot be changed randomly, otherwise, even if it is just to add a sentence, the motion capture actors will have to be invited to re-record.

The program of Numa Artificial Intelligence Lab is said to be an alternative to facial motion capture technology. The specific principle is to automatically generate facial motions of characters through intelligent analysis of voice content and comprehensive past motion capture data in the editor.In other words, it can also be considered as automatic lip-syncing.

It's roughly the same as some software that makes photos sing, but it is said to work better.

Lin Wan was a little skeptical about this.

Can it be a concept that is automatically generated by a program and performed by a motion-captured actor?

Mr. Pei has very high requirements for the game "Real Estate Agency Simulator". It must be modeled with the same high precision as "Struggle". The real feeling of being there.

If the NPC's movements are stiff and the expressions are distorted, then there will be more scenes, and the whole game will be flawed.

Maybe it will trigger the uncanny valley effect and scare the players.

After all, the sense of substitution of VR games is far from comparable to that of conventional games.

But now, according to Cai Jiadong, the effect is unexpectedly good?
Lin Wan couldn't help being interested, and checked on her computer.

The game "Real Estate Agency Simulator" has been developed for a month, and so far a lot of character models have been made.

Due to the existence of official platform simulators, making this kind of character model is actually a process of pinching people, and there is no need to do everything from scratch.Moreover, although most of the game "Struggle" made by President Pei are Westerners, many characters can still be used directly after a little modification.

As soon as he got the program, Cai Jiadong arranged for the designer to make a few cutscenes with the existing models and recorded them.

Lin Wan quickly finished watching the cutscene, and asked after a moment of silence: "Is this automatically generated with a new program? Isn't it motion capture?"

Cai Jiadong nodded: "It is completely automatically generated. However, the current support for foreign languages ​​is not particularly good."

Lin Wan fell silent.

It doesn't matter if the foreign language support is good or not, anyway, the game "Real Estate Agency Simulator" was originally only for domestic players.Even if the response of the game is very good, a multi-language version is going to be released, it will have to be a few months after the release.

This effect is really amazing!

The expressions of the characters in the game are very natural, and there is no feeling of rigid movements or distorted expressions.

Of course, it is impossible to be as seamless as real-life motion capture, where the voice and facial movements are perfectly coordinated.

But as long as you don't stare at the character's lips with all your attention, you will basically not notice anything unusual.

In fact, it is enough to do this. After all, many foreign film and television dramas are re-dubbed, and the mouth shapes are completely out of sync. The audience will not find it strange after getting used to it.And the facial expressions automatically generated by this program are much more natural than this re-dubbed film and television drama.

"Judging from the current situation, this technology can be directly used in "Real Estate Agency Simulator"."

"and……"

Lin Wan's eyes suddenly brightened: "Isn't this just a solution to the problem that has been bothering us before?"

"No wonder. Before, we always felt that this problem could not be solved well, and we were not at ease. Now it seems that Mr. Pei has not been prepared long ago, knowing that this new achievement of the Numa Lab can solve this problem?"

The emergence of a new technology often affects the thinking of game design.

Before, Lin Wan and Cai Jiadong were very worried about the design details of the core gameplay in "Real Estate Agency Simulator".

According to the original setting, one of the core gameplays of this game is to sell houses.

The basic process of this gameplay is that the player gets a new house type, remodels and rearranges the house, uses the funds in his hand to repair it, replace the furniture, and then goes to receive guests, answering different questions during the introduction process, In the end, the price was adjusted to a certain extent to facilitate the transaction.

This gameplay runs throughout the game, but at the beginning, there may be no funds on hand, unable to make changes to the room, and after being picked out by customers, the rent can only be reduced to facilitate the transaction.In the later stage, the problems of the house can be discovered in advance and solved before the customer comes to see the house.

But in the process of designing this core gameplay, Lin Wan and Cai Jiadong encountered a little problem.

Obviously, this is a repetitive gameplay that, if done poorly, can quickly tire the player.

Assuming that the customers who come every time look the same, ask the same questions, and have similar dialogues, actions, and behaviors, then players may soon get bored, and this core gameplay cannot support the game experience at all.

Therefore, how to make this game like a MOBA game, no matter how many times it is repeated, still have a sense of freshness, at least let players feel that every customer they meet will be brand new, and they are full of expectations for the next customer. This is a decision. At the heart of the gaming experience.

The problem is multifaceted.

To solve the problem of appearance, the appearance of customers can be automatically generated through the program.

There are similar functions in the face pinching system of many games, and it is not difficult to do.

Of course, the face automatically generated by the face pinching system may be rather incongruous. For example, she is obviously a woman in business attire, but has a mohawk hairstyle, earrings, and an exaggerated tattoo on her forehead. What must be wrong? See how strange.

Therefore, some patches have to be applied to this system to limit the identity of this person through an algorithm, and correspondingly lock some specific elements in the face pinching, so that the appearance of the character will not deviate too far from the original design.

The problem of appearance is solved, and the next step is action.

This is relatively easy to solve. After all, in the room, the NPC can do only a few actions: sitting on the sofa, drinking tea, looking at the window, leaning over to observe the corner, and so on.

These actions can be arranged in advance, and several matching actions can be performed according to the gender, body shape, and age of the character, and it can be automatically triggered in the room according to the algorithm.

In addition, NPCs will also have corresponding body movements when speaking, which is also very easy to handle.

In short, these are all problems that can be solved with heaps.

As long as the amount of action is piled up, automatically extracted through a random algorithm, and combined with different appearances, body shapes and other factors, it can be done to a good degree.

The most critical issue is the content of the speech.

In the core gameplay of the game, each house has corresponding problems, such as impenetrable north and south, too small bedrooms, dirty bathrooms, poor sound insulation of windows, and so on.

Of course, there are also corresponding advantages.

Before the customers come, players can check the house by themselves.After reading it, the system will give several options for players to choose, such as whether the room is square, whether it is transparent from north to south, how the lighting is, and so on.

The player's choice at this time represents the correctness of the player's understanding of this house, and will also affect the options when answering NPC questions.

When taking the NPC to see the house, the NPC will ask questions about the house, and the player needs to choose the corresponding option to respond.If you choose the right one, it will be fine. If you choose the wrong one, it will lower the customer's evaluation of the house. At that time, the price will either be reduced, or the transaction will fail.

Of course, these questions are also set, using a lot of professional knowledge.

These contents are not difficult to do. After more communication with the sloth apartment, you can set a standard answer for each apartment type.

But the biggest problem is... NPCs express these problems, how to deal with the specific words and sentences used?

For the same question, different people must have different answers.

For example, some people may say "the house is not well lit", some people may say "it's too dark here", and some people may say "the building opposite is blocked" and so on.

It would be very stiff if all the NPCs said "the house is not well lit".

But this problem cannot be solved by stacking.

If you still use the previous method of motion capture, then you need to re-capture the motion every time you change the wording. People of different sizes have different facial expressions when speaking, and motion capture cannot be mixed. Then the same meaning below Various expressions may need to be recorded several times.

If it is another interactive game driven by the plot, this is not a big problem, it is nothing more than more workload and recording several times.

But "Real Estate Agency Simulator" is different. There are too many problems and too much volume, but there is no key improvement to the game experience.

If you don’t do it, it’s not perfect enough, it’s not perfect enough, and it’s easy for players to play;

To do it, the resources paid are too many, too many to bear, and the cost performance is extremely low.

So I was embarrassed, it was inappropriate to do it, and it was inappropriate not to do it.

But now with this artificial intelligence program from the Numa Lab, this problem can be solved at once!
In this way, there is no need to motion capture every sentence, and only the voice-over will suffice.

The workload of simple dubbing is too small, and you can even go to the Internet to solicit directly, so that many enthusiastic players can help with dubbing.After these dubbings are imported, the program will automatically generate the facial movements of the characters based on the audio, and then match certain body language and movements to create a feeling of thousands of faces.

Cai Jiadong said with emotion: "I'll just say it! When I was working on the design details of this piece before, I wondered that this problem could not be solved under the existing conditions! Could it be that when Mr. Pei designed this game, there was no Think of that?"

"Now it seems that Mr. Pei has obviously thought about it a long time ago. He must know the recent research results of the Numa Lab, so we let us make such a game!"

Lin Wan nodded: "That's for sure."

"Then don't hesitate, just do this!"

"By the way, the Sloth Apartment has sent a new batch of room type information. You can check it and hand it over to the designers."

Cai Jiadong nodded and said, "Okay."

After setting up the project to develop this game, Lin Wan directly approached Liang Qingfan and asked him to cooperate with the development.

Speaking of this knowledge, who can be more professional than Liang Qingfan?

There are many architects and designers in the sloth apartment, who specialize in research on how to renovate the house types. As long as they send people to collect information on various house types on the Internet, and then sort out the advantages and disadvantages of these house types, they can send them to Chi Go to the studio and do it directly in the game.

Of course, Lin Wan doesn't need to worry about these things, it's the job of Cai Jiadong, the chief designer.

Watching Cai Jiadong leave, Lin Wan leaned back on the chair and let out a sigh of relief.

"Huh... Fortunately, Liang Qingfan was not taken away."

"If he is taken away, although he can go to the sloth apartment to find another architect, he is definitely not as reliable as him."

"Speaking of which... Boss Pei suddenly arrested the people in charge for special training. What's going on..."

Yesterday, Lin Wan felt something was wrong.

Although she has come to Chixing studio, she is still in the chat group of the people in charge of Tenda.

Usually, when everyone has something to do, they often share the current situation of various departments in the water, and the group is quite lively.

As a result, yesterday, the whole group suddenly became deserted, and the few people who usually bubbly a lot didn't even say a word.

Lin Wan felt something was wrong. After asking Wang Xiaobin today, I found out that the heads of the ten core departments, including Ye Zhizhou, had all been arrested...

Lin Wan was taken aback, thinking that Mr. Pei had caught this group of people doing bad things behind their backs, but when she asked carefully, they turned out to be taken to the special training base...

Including the Numa Artificial Intelligence Laboratory who helped a lot not long ago, Shen Renjie, the director, was also taken away by the same set as the other leaders.

Fortunately, Liang Qingfan of the Sloth Apartment survived, otherwise the game development of Chixing Studio would have been affected.

Lin Wan's sense was very keen, and she immediately felt that this matter was no small matter.

After a little questioning in the group, I successfully got the first batch of lists of the special training base, a total of ten people, namely Huang Sibo, Hu Xianbin, Xiao Peng, Rui Yuchen, Ye Zhizhou, Shen Renjie, Guo Licheng, He Desheng, Chen Yufeng, A herd of horses.

"The special training base has just opened, and it has to be done step by step. You can't train too many people at once, so it's reasonable to only have ten people in the first batch."

"But...why are these ten people and not others?"

"There are so many people in charge of each department of Tengda, there must be a corresponding criterion for judging, right?"

"Boss Pei attaches great importance to this matter, and he has arranged all the heads of the core departments to be involved at the expense of temporarily affecting the work. Obviously, it is for some special purpose. And this purpose is even more important than short-term work or even profit. important."

"Just to support Bao Xu's work? That's definitely impossible. Pei is always a person who distinguishes between public and private, and what he does is ultimately beneficial to Tengda."

"If it looks bad in the short term, it means it will be beneficial in the long run."

"What is Mr. Pei's real intention..."

"Well, maybe we should start with this list. As long as you understand the criteria Mr. Pei selected for this list, you should be able to roughly infer Mr. Pei's real intention..."

Lin Wan looked at the computer screen again, lost in thought.

Although she is no longer the person in charge of Tenda, she has been paying attention to the internal trends of Tenda.After all, all the disturbances in Tengda represent Mr. Pei's will, and Mr. Pei's behavior often implies deep meaning, so learning more will definitely be beneficial.

　The tentative surroundings are Mr. Pei’s small blanket, Tengda spirit manual, question mark hat, character original painting album, and Li Shi’s soup bowl. The main reason is that these are easier to make and easy to produce results. Backpacks and the like are not so good. I will temporarily deny it~ During this period of time, I may need to do some design and communication on these peripherals, such as re-reading the content of the Tenda Spirit Manual, and I will go to Shanghai for business in two days, so this The update may not be stable for a while
　　
　
(End of this chapter)