Game Engine Competition Upgrades

Ulrich

As mobile gaming becomes the hottest app on the mobile internet, mobile browser giants are vying for a new game engine. Using a browser to build HTML5 (a markup language for describing Web documents), gathering a large number of game developers, is the inevitable way for mobile browser manufacturers to transform, which is the further transformation after they launched the "platform" movement.

February 26, Opera Oupeng, the world's largest mobile browser maker, released a game-processing engine product, Oupeng Sphinx, at the 2013 World Mobile Communications Conference (MWC), held in Spain. The creation of the world's first HTML5 game-processing engine based on hardware rendering will greatly enhance HTML5 performance and expressiveness, allowing HTML5 to achieve the performance of native games.

Oupeng CEO Song Lin's explanation for the strategic plan for attacking the game engine is to pave the road for HTML5 's growth. In his view, HTML5 after 2012 years of enthusiastic pursuit of the industry, this year will usher in a new climax of the market, and if you want to get users welcome, but also need an important outbreak point. Just as the "Crazy Bird" has successfully pried the ipad out of the world, if it wants to make mobile internet users fall in love with HTML5, a creative killer app is needed, in which case a game engine that is better able to show the creative HTML5 game developers becomes an inevitable choice.

Only two days later, UC announced on February 28 that it would release the HTML5 game Engine "X-canvas". UC Yu, chairman and chief executive, said UC browsers will continue to build an open platform in 2013, and the game is expected to be divided into 300 million.

Technical challenges

Clearly, the strong demand for the underlying technology by game developers is the main reason why the game engine is on the verge of war.

Early last year, many game developers found Oupeng. They think that although everyone is concerned about HTML5, it is found that HTML5 is not as good as imagined. Oupeng chief Technology Officer Lo Zhiyu points out that because the browser itself is optimized for text and static pictures, the game is about frame rate, how many times per frame can be refreshed. This contradiction has led to a lot of HTML5 games in the browser can not run the status quo.

It is in this case that Oupeng decided to develop a game engine. Lo Zhiyu has formed a secret research and development team of more than 10 people to assume the global research and development task of Oupeng game engine. Lo Zhiyu admits that the game market is very hot, but also very messy, many developers want to come in, indeed there are a lot of games can make money, but most of the game does not make money. and Oupeng Development Game engine reason is, although the whole mobile internet HTML5 evaluation and expectations are very high, but the current development of the HTML5 game is still a big obstacle, the first is the performance of the game, that is, the game's expressiveness, including the screen of the degree of smoothness, the smooth degree of operation. These are related to the browser's rendering capabilities and the ability to invoke the phone's hardware. He points out that the biggest demand for mobile game developers is technical support, and the biggest challenge is the lack of distribution channels and how to make a profit. From the current point of view, the cooperation with the browser vendors, channel partitioning is a more feasible solution.

In fact, the whole research and development technology is very difficult. The game engine has made a huge difference to the entire kernel architecture of the browser. Lo Zhiyu recalls the whole research and development process, said, the biggest difficulty is how to overcome the bottleneck of graphics performance, other competitors are pondering how to improve. Because the traditional browser rendering model is too biased text, so the graphics is very difficult to optimize, for this reason, Oupeng did a lot of innovation and try, and even redesigned the entire rendering model to achieve the best performance. This is actually a vast project.

Song Lin describes the commercial value of Sphinx: "First, its accelerated support for hardware rendering will greatly increase the speed of HTML5 games, which run faster than 2-3 times the speed of Chrome (a browser technology), and more than 5 times times faster than traditional mobile browsers." Secondly, Oupeng hopes to attract more developers and vendors to participate by Sphinx to solve the development core obstacles and reduce the difficulty of development. It is reported that the current number of mainstream HTML5 game manufacturers and Oupeng on the use of Sphinx game engine to reach a cooperative intention. In the past, the performance of HTML5 games has been not satisfactory, and Sphinx is to solve these bottlenecks, accelerate the birth of HTML5 Star Game application, thus promoting the maturation and eruption of HTML5 industry.

Business model

"China's game industry, lack of good game planning or good art, the real weakness is the lack of such as virtual game development engine such as high-quality low-level game development technology." "said one of Tencent insiders.

The game engine is a tool for game designers to provide the tools needed to write games, including the edited computer game system or some interactive real-time image application of the core components, so that the game designers can quickly make the game program, without everything from scratch.

One industry personage has done this figuratively, the game engine is like the engine of the car. The engine is the heart of the racing car, which determines the performance and stability of the car, the speed of the car, the sense of manipulation, which is directly related to the driver, based on the engine. The game is also the case, the players experience such as the plot, level, art, music, operation and other content are directly controlled by the engine of the game, it plays the role of the central midfield, the game of all the elements bundled together in the backstage command them at the same time, orderly work.

Obviously, the engine is equivalent to the frame of the game, after the frame is set up, level designers, modelers, animators just fill in the content. Therefore, in the development of 3D games, the production of the engine often takes up a lot of time. The action game "Payne", developed by Remedy Entertainment, has released three versions, and its MAX-FX engine has spent more than four years from the original final reality to the final finished product.

And another famous game engine "Lithtech" is the monolith company time consuming 5 years, cost 7 million dollars development. Monolith, the boss of the Lithtech engine, Jensen Holl even regrets: "It's impossible for us to do such a stupid thing if we realize that it costs so much to make our own engines." No one is going to anticipate what the market will be like in five years. ”

But on the other hand, game developers are increasingly demanding for game engines because of cost savings, shorter cycles, and less risk, so a huge engine licensing market has emerged. Game engine developers are racking their brains to design an engine that can save a lot of development costs and cycles. Industry insiders revealed that the cost of the business game engine generally consists of the following parts: Basic purchase costs, based on the number of selling game royalties, support for multi-platform features (which means that the more platforms the game wants to support, the more you have to pay) Some engine creators require that the company that buys the engine pay for it based on the number of developers who will use the engine development environment.

Competitive upgrades

Clearly, the foray into the game engine field is a new campaign for mobile browser vendors to implement HTML5 platform competition. Behind this is the mobile browser manufacturers to further upgrade the transformation. Most of the answers in 2009, when Google launched a video camera in Times Square and asked passers-by what the browser was, were quite comical: Some said it was a search engine, some said it was broadband, and some even said it was Yahoo.

But even if consumers don't know what a Web browser is, browsers have become an important business for High-tech companies such as Google and Microsoft. Because browsers are now more than just a network entry point, they are an entry point for all online storage, such as Web applications, documents, and photos. As Yu says, as mobile and browser capabilities rise, apps can be implemented in a mobile browser, so the status of PC-era browsers can be reproduced on the mobile web.

Song Lin that the future of the browser itself can occur a lot of changes, it does not have to look like the eyes of the browser, that is familiar with the browser box, the form of the URL. Browsers appear in a variety of shapes, sometimes it looks like a fun game, the user doesn't know it's a browser behind it, or you think you're seeing a local app, but it's actually just part of the browser.

Recently, the Oupeng global synchronization has released a new generation of mobile browsers. A new generation of mobile browsers has redesigned the user interface and launched a brand-new "discovery" channel where users can simply swipe their thumbs to the left to find their own categories of information and see what is going on in the world. Also, if a user browses to a page that you don't want to be known by others, you can use the Stealth browsing feature. Click on the tab interface function key, select "New Stealth Tag", you can browse any page, no longer worry about privacy has been found.

However, the focus on privacy protection and personalized design is only one of the trends in mobile browsers. The changes in the browser's business model also include enabling Internet companies to better control the way users use their products and use web data to improve their products and enhance their advertising visibility; faster browsing speeds will allow users to gain more access to the web, bringing more revenue to internet companies. Amazon, for example, has developed the Kindle browser silk in order to control the user experience as much as possible. Google's Chrome browser can make Google search faster and more concise, users can directly in the Address bar input search query Google's application.

Ryan Gavin, general manager of Microsoft's IE business, said: "In fact, users do not care about the browser itself, they only care about content on the Web." ”

Because of this, the hottest apps on the mobile internet-the game engine behind mobile games-is a battleground. The game application content is rich, the interaction is strong. After the HTML5 to the market, the game will be the first burst of growth. "In the long run, in the HTML5 era, for mobile browser manufacturers, through the transfer of the way to compress the flow of the means is not meaningful, because this technical way is difficult to adapt to the 3G era of large screen, strong processing capacity of the demand." Lo Zhiyu pointed out that the future with the increase in bandwidth, WiFi popularity, mobile browser manufacturers are competing for the display of the Web page, but no longer "save money and traffic."