The Fantasy Entertainment Empire

When "Rise of the Lich King" was killing the Quartet all over the world, something very big happened.

After two or three years of planning and building, Dimension Entertainment's supercomputing center was finally completed.

To the outside world, this is not big news. It has not been a year or two since China has been engaged in supercomputing. There have been many supercomputing records, all of which were broken by China.

Moreover, in addition to government-led supercomputing projects, many universities and some business companies that provide cloud computing services will also set up their own supercomputing centers.

This is nothing new.

Of course, it is relatively rare for a cultural and creative enterprise like Dimension Entertainment to also engage in supercomputing. This thing is a big investment, and it is actually not that necessary for entertainment companies. After all, they don't need to use supercomputing all the time throughout the year, generally they need to use it for large-scale rendering business. With such a small amount of usage, it is obviously a much more cost-effective choice to rent those commercial supercomputing centers outside.

This is true even if the business demand of Dimension Entertainment is relatively large.

No one knows why the boss of Dimension Entertainment, that is, Fan Zhe, made such a choice.

Fan Zhe also gave his own explanation later.

On the one hand, Dimension Entertainment has more and more demand for computing power, which is the basis for building its own supercomputing center. In addition, their supercomputer is specially designed for visual rendering and visual shaping. In terms of performance in this aspect, it will be more professional than ordinary commercial supercomputers. This is the power of specialization.

And considering the domestic demand in this area, with the vigorous development of the film market, it will become bigger and bigger. They can take orders from other entertainment companies and do some commercial supercomputing business.

Of course, these statements, whether internal or external, are only one reason. These things accounted for a relatively small proportion of the reasons why Fan Zhe decided to build his own supercomputing center.

He wants to develop his own supercomputing, the most important factor, of course, is for the 'dimension' system.

Indeed, there is a lot of rendering work in the works they make, but for this reason, it is necessary to invest hundreds of millions of real costs to build a supercomputing center? That is definitely not necessary.

The most important thing is to allow the 'dimension' system to obtain stronger computing support when performing related calculations.

And this reason is impossible for Fan Zhe to tell anyone.

This is his biggest secret, and it is impossible for him to safely load this system on a hardware computer that he cannot fully control.

So, making one yourself is the best option.

As for taking other people's orders... Well, indeed, the domestic entertainment film industry is developing better and better, and more and more blockbuster films are being produced. In the long run, the rendering business will also become more and more abundant. But it can be seen that, at least for now, if you want to make money by taking orders in this area, you may not even be able to pay the electricity bill--Suosuan is a big consumer of electricity.

So far, after Dimension Entertainment has its own supercomputing center, all projects are directly loaded on the supercomputing center.

Immediately, the development speed of the entire project became extremely fast in the blink of an eye.

Among them, the one that can enjoy this benefit the most is a work that Dimension Entertainment itself is about to complete - "Steam Daming".

...

When the screening of "The Rise of the Lich King" entered the final stage, a person who had a little relationship with this work came to China from North America.

Activision Blizzard executive, Arnold.

However, the purpose of his coming this time has nothing to do with "The Lich King" or the "Warcraft" series.

His goal is Dimension Entertainment's new game.

In the past period of time, Dimension Entertainment has not been silent in terms of games.

After "Taiwu Painted Scroll 2", they launched two mobile games, both of which performed well in the market.

However, things like mobile games are not what the game market expects from Dimension Entertainment. What everyone is looking forward to most is that they can once again come up with a high-quality, even groundbreaking work like "Taiwu 2".

That is the so-called 3A masterpiece.

Dimension Entertainment certainly has such a project, and "Steam Daming", which has entered the production process more than two years ago, is such a work.

Dimension Entertainment works very quickly on projects, but game projects are different from movies, drama series, and animations.

Especially this kind of 3A level works.

Needless to say anything else, just the art resources needed for such a work are already very, very huge.

Regardless of whether it is Dimension Entertainment's current or all past projects, the work "Steam Daming" has the most manpower employed by the company, and the entire development cycle is also the longest.

It is longer than "Taiwu Painting Scroll 2".

"Taiwu 2" also requires a lot of art resources, which mainly focus on the action design of martial arts. In other parts, the investment is not that big.

The map of "Taiwu 2", and even the entire world, is very large. The entire map has a large scale, many different terrains, large cities...

However, it is impossible to model the art resources of these cities individually.

Otherwise, even with the 'dimension' system, it would be difficult to complete this workload.

In terms of the calculation of the 'dimension' system, of course, it is not a big problem, at best, more resources need to be called, and other projects have to be delayed.

However, if it were to be done that way, there would be too many art resources and not enough artists.

In order for the project to be released in time, Dimension Entertainment has completed the construction of the entire world by building templates and randomly refreshing maps.

In "Taiwu 2", except for places and buildings that are very important in the plot or in the design, most of the other vast maps are actually quickly generated through models.

This is actually the solution adopted by most games.

But "Steam Daming" is different.

In this work, in order to show the magically reformed and dreamy last years of the Ming Dynasty, Dimension Entertainment put too much effort into the structure of the entire world.

Let alone the gameplay, at least this work, in terms of the accumulation of art resources, is definitely the pinnacle of the current game industry.

Coupled with a large number of non-patterned characters, a large number of art resources for equipment objects, a large number of resources for spells and tricks...

Even with the blessing of the 'dimension' system, the art resources needed for this work are too huge. Moreover, many original designs cannot be completely solved by the calculation of the "dimension" system, and still require human creativity to carry out corresponding design work.

At the same time, the artistic carrier of games is quite different from pure visual art. After all, the ninth art that needs to be paid attention to is the interaction with the player.

In these respects, the help that the 'dimension' system can provide is relatively small, and it depends more on the ideas of the designers and the degree of technical realization.

The entire game market and many gamers around the world are looking forward to their new works as soon as possible.

The main reason, of course, is that the performance of "Taiwu 2" was so amazing that people are so amazing that even now, several years have passed, this game still has a certain degree of popularity on all major platforms. sales. When nothing new has been made, it occasionally hits the sales charts in some places.

In this case, this work, which has been on sale for some years, can still provide stable cash flow income for Dimension Entertainment.

After Dimension Entertainment released such a work that attracted the tastes of a large number of players from all over the world, their new work deservedly attracted the attention of all.

This doesn't even require Dimension Entertainment to do too much promotion on its own. The discussions in the players' own internal groups will invisibly spread the reputation of the new work that Dimension Entertainment is producing to the four directions.

Also, they don't really do nothing.

In the production process of the work in the past two to three years, they did not cover the work too closely. Occasionally, some relevant information will be released, such as some design drawings, some preview videos and the like.

Recently, this kind of stuff has been released more and more frequently, and the content has become more and more explosive. Especially a one-minute bird's-eye view of the whole area, like a drone lens, gliding over the steampunk version of BJ City in the Ming Dynasty.

In this video, this special capital is really quite magical.

Dimension Entertainment's art design skills never need to worry. Under the pens of their painters, a city that combines traditional Chinese flavor and full of steampunk flavor is displayed here.

Among them, the most impressive is the Forbidden City.

In the bird's-eye view, anyone who has a little knowledge of the Forbidden City can recognize the appearance of the largest existing ancient palace complex in the world. For the general appearance of the Forbidden City, Dimension Entertainment has not changed it, enough for people to see it.

However, looking at the high-definition picture quality, in the zoomed-in images of the Forbidden City, it is obvious that Dimension Entertainment has subverted the Forbidden City while maintaining the style of the Forbidden City and the design style of the ancient palaces. remodel.

The outer wall of the Forbidden City is still an atmospheric red wall, but if you look closely, it is full of metal flavor. There are many other structures on the city wall that shouldn't exist, such as mechanical elevators, mechanical equipment whose purpose is temporarily unknown...

And when the camera is zoomed out, the whole capital has a special smell.

This taste makes people feel familiar and full of fantasy.

Under the promotional video released by Dimension Entertainment, players from all over the world gave it high praise. In particular, Dimension Entertainment also made it clear that this is not a CG-produced effect, but a serious live-action video of the game, which makes people even more climaxed.

For foreign players, this may be relatively good. They are simply excited that they will be able to play such an excellent masterpiece soon, and they are also excited because of this strange and exotic style.

But Chinese players are really excited.

"I once assassinated important officials in Notre Dame Cathedral in "Assassin's Creed: Revolution"; I experienced the ability of Victorian London gangsters in "Syndicate"; I experienced the rebellious spirit of modern American culture in the "GTA" series; In "Red Dead Redemption", I seem to have traveled to the western United States in the gold rush era; in the "God of War" series, I challenged the Greek and Nordic gods..."

"Thank you for playing so many important roles in my life and taking me through so many wonderful journeys. But I still have irreparable regrets in my heart."

"Compared to climbing up and down Notre Dame de Paris, I would like to carry out assassination missions in the Forbidden City; rather than challenge the gods of the West, I would like to see the power of Mantianxian Buddha?"

"Dimension Entertainment satisfies my fantasy of martial arts with a "Taiwu Painting Scroll 2"; and now, you are about to take me back to the late Ming Dynasty in the seventeenth century, and it is such a fantasy-filled late Ming Dynasty."

"Although "Steam Daming" has not yet been released, I believe it will be a masterpiece."

"This is a major step forward for China in the field of culture."

"Don't think that 3A games are just as simple as games."

"Video games are called the ninth art. Games are the only form that can include the top eight arts. From an artistic point of view, it is no exaggeration to say that video games are the highest form of modern art. 3A There are too many aspects involved in games: art, architecture, physics, computer technologies, AI, human-computer interaction, game hardware peripherals, CG performances, music and sound effects, motion capture, facial capture, biology, geography, screenwriting , psychology, etc.

"Don't think that the technical content required by 3A is comparable to online games and mobile games. There is nothing to look down on online games and mobile games here, but 3A games are indeed the ultimate art palace in the current game industry, and even the world, because games are not just one It is an independent art. Creating a game is more like creating a virtual world, no matter how small and fake the world is, it still has all the internal organs, which is why games can include the first eight arts.”

"Any 3A-level game presents you with a small world. This is an illusory world built by game practitioners from scratch. This world is every bit from the physical rules to the final effect. Produced, this is the ultimate meaning of a 3A game."

"And what he represents is that we finally have the ability to export our art, our thoughts, and our culture to the world. This is the charm of 3A games."