A while ago, Guo Weiwei, CEO of Xishanju, chatted with Grape Jun: "The cost of MMO is too high. 1.500 million, 2 billion, basically can't escape this number. After the rising cost, many manufacturers are trying to innovate and explore the evolution of categories.
Unfortunately, Grape King has not observed any products that can bring about breakthrough changes. Perhaps as Guo Weiwei said, "MMO mobile games haven't got the best solution". This situation makes some practitioners have new ideas: the reform of MMO may start from the underlying architecture. British technology company implementable has made an exploration in this respect.
Source: InBev official website
Simply put, the SpatialOS developed by InBev is not a game engine, but a game development environment based on the underlying public cloud resources. With the help of the cloud distributed platform of SpatialOS, multiplayer game development teams can reduce the investment in the game background, promote rapid experimental innovation and efficient development, and explore novel game modes.
Up to now, Yingbo has received a strategic investment of 50 million US dollars from Netease and a series B financing of 502 million US dollars from Softbank. What is the technology of this company and why is it favored by capital?
Yingbo Shanghai office
Four problems of multiplayer online games and the value of InBev
Through the four major problems of multiplayer online games, we may be able to analyze the value of InBev.
The first question: cost. The development of multiplayer online games requires many technicians to be responsible for background setting and management games. For some small and medium-sized developers, this cost is unbearable. Therefore, SpatialOS provides an online development platform and tool chain, which aims to help customers simplify the back-end network infrastructure, thus lowering the development threshold and speeding up the development process.
Take InBev's Chinese Entertainment Studio as an example. This studio with about 30 people is developing a multiplayer online shooting product called scavenger, which contains elements such as exploration, survival and fighting. During the development process, they handed over copy management, player identity and external database integration, networking and server hosting to SpatialOS, which not only saved expenses, but also focused on the game creativity itself.
scavenger
The second question: the limitations of the solution. At present, there are two mainstream solutions for multiplayer online games, each with its own advantages and disadvantages: 1, DedicatedServer (DS), that is, the room system represented by eating chicken. 2. Traditional C/S (Client/Server), the representative of this scheme is MMORPG.
Source: InBev's sharing in unreal related activities
What SpatialOS wants to do is to combine the advantages of high fidelity and fast iteration of DS with the advantages of traditional C/S distributed computing, high concurrent connection and persistent world, and bring more possibilities for multiplayer online games from the underlying architecture.
Specifically, SpatialOS adopts distributed DS architecture, and a large number of DS nodes are deployed in the cloud, and each DS node simulates a part of the game world. With the help of seamless partition technology, players can switch between multiple DS nodes unconsciously. Compared with the previous DS single-node architecture, this increases the maximum number of players the game can carry and accommodates more players.
Distributed DS architecture
On this basis, SpatialOS also provides a set of dynamic load balancing development interfaces for developers. That is, when a node has a heavy load, the developer can choose to turn off the migration function of the node, control the player traffic, and dynamically adjust the load of the node.
In addition to increasing the maximum number of players, SpatialOS also achieves AI load distribution through its unique DS architecture. Specifically, different back-end service processes (simulation layers) can be used to simulate a game playing system by implementing different logics through different "layers". Since SpatialOS allows the number of service processes to increase linearly, developers can add more game content by adding more layers.
Illustration of artificial intelligence load shunting technology
Simply put, with this technology, more NPCs, more complex AI systems and richer in-game systems can be added to the game, and even the logic of a tree and a cat can be realized by layers alone. This provides more design space for game developers.
Take the theater mode of Halo 5 as an example. The maximum number of players in this mode is 24, and the number of AI, carriers and targets are limited accordingly to ensure that the maximum capacity of the server will not be exceeded, which will affect the game experience. To this end, "Halo 5" simplifies the logic of AI, and the intelligence or reaction degree of AI is weaker than that of campaign mode. With the distributed DS architecture of SpatialOS, this limitation will no longer exist.
It is worth mentioning that InBev once again improved the effect of AI load splitting in the latest version of SpatialOS unreal engine 2020.2 released yesterday. At present, in the 3x3 km map, they have been able to achieve the ratio of intelligent AI to players of 5: 1.
Improvement of AI splitting effect
In short, with SpatialOS, millions of players can interact more in the same big world without loading. At present, SpatialOS has been applied to many games, such as Scavengers, Home of Netease, Odyssey and so on.
The third question: multiplayer online games often need repeated testing, and the cost of gameplay innovation is high. To this end, SpatialOS provides a cloud platform and service test distribution tools, which can help developers to conduct large-scale playability tests as early as possible in the initial stage of research and development.
Visual testing tool
Thanks to this, developers can see the visual adjustment effect in real time when adjusting and testing the game, and can adjust common parameters such as weapon damage value without a separate game patch. Ying Bo said that with SpatialOS, the game team can even change the core gameplay halfway without changing the underlying architecture.
The fourth question: the whole platform and globalization. Multi-player online games are now developing in the direction of multi-platform and multi-region, but some small and medium-sized manufacturers do not have this ability. To this end, InBev and its professional server hosting company zeuz have deployed cloud servers around the world to provide developers with cross-platform development, global deployment and sea support.
InBev overseas server deployment
In terms of ease of use, INBOR also developed a special GDK for the unreal and Unity engines commonly used by developers. The latest version of SpatialOS unreal engine 2020.2 also officially opened the preview version of mobile game development for development teams to develop and test games on iOS and Android. It can be said that the ultimate goal of SpatialOS is to make the production of multiplayer games less complicated and provide more possibilities for the development of multiplayer online games.
The possibility brought by InBev
According to the data of InBev official website, since the establishment of 20 12, InBev has acquired zeuz, a game server hosting service company, and TheMultiplayerGuys, a multiplayer game service company, through investment and mergers and acquisitions. They now have more than 600 employees around the world, and besides the British headquarters in London, they also have offices in the United States, Canada and China.
InBev's development potential has also been affirmed by the capital market. Up to now, InBev's accumulated financing amount has reached US$ 602 million, of which the second round of financing was led by Japan's Softbank Group, and AndreessenHorowitz and Victoria Harbour invested with it, amounting to US$ 502 million.
In the past two years, InBev has a very close relationship with the game market in China. For example, they obtained a strategic investment of $50 million from Netease, and jointly launched the "Boyun Plan" with Tencent Cloud. They plan to provide game developers who develop and launch games through SpatialOS deployed on Tencent Cloud with a total value of about 72 million RMB.
Answer Zhi Qian, vice president of Tencent Cloud, and Peter Lipka, co-founder and CEO of InBev Asia.
At the beginning of this year, InBev Shanghai, as one of the major foreign investment projects in Jing 'an District of Shanghai, participated in the signing ceremony organized by the Shanghai Municipal Government, and was recognized as the headquarters of China District by the Shanghai Municipal Government.
Looking at these technology sharing and capital trends alone, Grape Jun seems to see another possibility in the game industry. Although it is not as impressive as the demonstration of Fantasy 5, it also gives me a new imagination of the future game form: thousands of people explore a real world similar to The Legend of Zelda: The Breath of the Wilderness.
Of course, there are always risks in innovation. SpatialOS needs to use public cloud resources, and cloud game development itself is still in the early stage of development. A positive trend is that the discussion and exploration of cloud games in China is quite enthusiastic, and manufacturers such as Unity are also trying to use cloud services to lower the threshold for game developers to develop in the cloud, which may mean that this direction is feasible.
In my opinion, these possibilities are the greatest pleasure that the game industry can bring to practitioners.
During 2020ChinaJoy and CGDC, readers can also go to InBev booth (booth W4B705 of Shanghai New International Expo Center) to experience the latest function demonstration provided by SpatialOS2020.2 version 2020.2, and get a more intuitive and in-depth understanding.