206. "Shan Hai Jing" is about to be released

Time flies, and it is December 20, 2003. This day is the day when Bomi will be demoed internally before the launch of the new game as usual.

Because "Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne" needs to be in line with the game platform, it will not be released after half a year of delay.

So now there is only one game that is possible for Bomi to be online-

"Shan Hai Jing"

Finally, I waited for this day.

The Shanhaijing team is located in the business building in Zhongguancun, which is far from the headquarters in Chaoyang District.

However, when Li Lanyun was giving a demonstration, many colleagues rushed over from the headquarters to watch.

The entire conference room was filled with people. To be precise, many people stood against the wall, densely packed, blocking the entire conference room.

This shows the influence of this game in the company.

Countless people came here to see each other and even squeezed out the positions that their colleagues in the Shanhaijing project team should have.

After all, the space in the conference room is limited and can accommodate about 40 people at most, which is still under the premise that everyone has to stand.

So in order to take care of colleagues from other project teams, the "Shan Hai Jing" project itself had to say, "Oh, we have seen enough of it usually. We have been watching it for almost a year. You can go and see it, it is relatively new to you."

But in fact, many colleagues may be familiar with the part of themselves being responsible, but they are not clear about what they look like in general.

For example, if he specializes in the art of Bai Ze's weird AI and skills, he doesn't know much about what other places look like.

Only when the actual game is demonstrated can you see the panoramic view.

So although they said they had seen it usually, they actually wanted to see the actual demonstration of "Shan Hai Jing" this time, but because the space was indeed limited, colleagues from other project teams came over and took care of their emotions first, so everyone suppressed their temperament and sat on the work station and sighed.

"Oh... I want to see it too."

...

Seeing that the time was almost the same and the boss was already in place, Li Lanyun turned on the computer and started his demonstration process.

The Shanhai Jing icon on the desktop is carefully designed, integrating the image of the divine beast Bai Ze with the font of the Shanhai Jing. It looks very freehand and tall.

Li Lanyun double-clicks the icon to start the game.

He followed the process and started with a cutscene, then switched back to the real scene. When the other party talked to the character you were operating, he entered the Creation Interface for the first time.

Because of limited time and the current engine has not yet developed a face-pinching and mouthparts system, the game model is 4-choose 1, two men and two women, plus about 10 sets of hair and hair color matching, players can choose a limited combination to splice into their own character image.

The benefit of doing this is-

Save the difficulty of game development, otherwise it will take a lot of manpower and energy to make a face-pinching system. The face-pinching system is one of the goals of the future engine and there is no need to implement it now.

Then, the several model matching given by the art were carefully selected and carefully designed, so no matter how the players match it, the beauty of the characters is guaranteed, and there will be no strange and strange old cadres in "Monster Hunter: World" in their previous life.

However, Cao Yang was not disgusted with [old cadre]'s face-pinching. Instead, he thought this was a very good marketing method. Some players spontaneously provided their face-pinching parameters online. Whether it is beautiful or ugly, it is always a good gimmick that can trigger topicality.

There are even many players who may not have played Monster Hunter at the beginning, but they only bought it after trying it out after trying it out.

On the one hand, it is topical, and on the other hand, it will lead to traffic.

So if you have time and energy in the future, you will definitely have to be a face-pinching person.

Another important appearance system—

The mouthparts system, as the name suggests, refers to the mouth of the game character imitating normal humans to open and close when he speaks, and he can also vaguely see the tongue inside.

This is to increase the sense of reality, but it is also the problem-

The mouthparts system has a very low cost performance. It takes a lot of time to develop this system. When the mouthparts system reaches its extreme, it actually needs to capture the person's facial expressions through the motion capture system in advance, and then match the pronunciation with the mouth shape. In this way, after the player pinched his face and entered the game to speak, you will find that the shape of his lips actually matches the sound.

It is not difficult to do this, it is just to take time to polish it.

But even if the "Shan Hai Jing" does not do these things, it doesn't matter, because the first generation of the strange hunting did not.

In terms of the picture, "Shan Hai Jing" can now be the first generation of monster hunting.

Cao Yang’s inner evaluation is—

Although affected by hardware, the number of faces of the characters is definitely not too large, which leads to the fact that the character's refinement cannot be high.

However, if we evaluate it from the level of this era, the level that Shanhai Jing can produce now is definitely the world's leading.

With limited number of faces, it is already quite impressive to be able to improve such a good picture feeling.

A large part of this is due to Cao Yang. His art design has greatly made up for the shortage of faces. Although it has been improved for a limited amount, it is already ahead of this era.

After matching the character image, Li Lanyun operated his role, first ran the novice process, then took on the main task, and started the first inevitable plot event.

After the plot event ended, Li Lanyun and Qiongqi had a battle, which ended with the player's victory and Qiongqi's escape.

The program optimization is very accurate. Judging from the battle process with Qiongqi just demonstrated by Li Lanyun, the whole process is very smooth, and the monster's reaction is very agile. The battle process can be described as refreshing and moving.

All the colleagues around have entered the process, which is a great proof:

Prove that this game is indeed very good.

The whole process lasted about half an hour, and Li Lanyun did not continue to demonstrate the following content.

Because time is limited, it will probably take more than 40 hours to complete the main process, so it is definitely not realistic to demonstrate the completeness in the conference room.

So far, the entire "Shan Hai Jing" can only be said to be half completed.

Cao Yang is also planning to only put this part first. Although there is only half of the content, it is relatively complete in terms of the main plot. The subsequent parts can be kept until after the completion of the work next year.

It is best to send it with the game platform, which can also bring a wave of traffic to the game platform.

Even if there is only half of the content now, this half of the content is already quite rich.

So far, "Shan Hai Jing" has developed a large island, which is divided into 4 different map sections, each section has its own characteristics, and the entire ecosystem is very complete, with nearly 50 monsters. Although half of them are distinguished by different dyeing, the types are already quite rich.

There are also various ways to play together - such as collecting plants, which can also be used to arrange traps and make props.

There are different hunting methods according to different attributes of the beast. Players can use their skills to do it or take advantage of the monster's characteristics...

The richness and fun of the game are definitely guaranteed.

Players experience the world in the big world and feel that the world described in "Shan Hai Jing" is like a real existence.

Moreover, the drops in different parts of the monster itself are also different. There are more than 40 equipment that players can use to make matching, and the equipment itself can trigger appearance.

At the same time, you can also use the parts of these monsters to cook and pharmacy, etc.

The game system is very diverse, with the purpose of allowing players to experience a nearly real world of mountain and sea meridians.

After the demonstration was completed, the entire conference room was silent.

Even when Li Lanyun looked up at them, these people had not come to their senses yet.

After a few seconds, I don’t know who took the lead first, and deafening applause rang out from the room.

"Oh my God, this is the game our company makes?!"

“This game is simply amazing.”

"It's over. I feel itchy after watching it. I don't feel like I'm going to die if I don't play this game."

"Oh my God... I suddenly regretted coming here to listen to the demonstration, otherwise I wouldn't have to keep this game in mind every day, but I regret not coming. It's really a lifelong regret not to watch the real-life demonstration as soon as possible."

"I really envy the "Shan Hai Jing" project team. It would be great if I had the honor to participate in the production. It would definitely be a highlight in my life."

The colleague of Shanhaijing who was praised was a little ashamed of being praised and waved his hand a little shyly, "No, there will definitely be a chance to do other royal projects in the future."

Well, at the beginning, everyone was still skeptical, thinking that Chinese companies could not make world-leading game projects.

But when everyone witnessed all this with their own eyes, "Shan Hai Jing" gave Bomi employees great confidence.

Everyone believes that Bomi will do better and better, and there will be more and more projects like Shanhaijing in the future.

...

After the internal demonstration, the next more than a month was the promotion period for "Shan Hai Jing".

At the end of December, "Shan Hai Jing" released a pv.

The so-called PV is actually a promotional trailer, and the market is basically only one minute.

The shots that appear in PV may not necessarily appear in the game, but may be CG animations that cost a lot of money.

For example, the PV of Honor of Kings itself provides high-models - high-fine models for CG. The number of faces may reach 500,000 faces, which looks extremely real, but in fact, there may be less than 1,000 faces in the game, or even less.

The advantage of CG is that the graphics are extremely cool and can make the game's size very high.

The disadvantage is also very obvious, that is, the cost is very high, and it may cost tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands in 1 second.

A 1-minute CG may cost tens of millions.

This thing is really a luxury.

Another disadvantage is that it can easily cause players to have an impression of being inappropriate. It is obvious that CG looks so good, but why does it become a frustrating in the game? Such an obvious contrast may cause players to lose.

CG animation has only emerged in recent years with the development of rendering engines. Especially since Pixar's animation has emerged, people have seen the advantages of CG production, so many film animation industries are trying to use CG for production.

In order to make the game's promotion and promotion look more powerful, domestic games will also try to spend a lot of money to hire a professional CG team to produce promotional videos.

Although rendering takes a lot of time, the final effect is very good.
To be continued...