What will happen to game engines in the future?



While Unreal Engine 5 has

been attracting attention by reproducing realistic textures in games, the once prosperous Unity has been criticized by people for its single business reform of price revision. There's no shortage of topics to talk about. Troy Kerwin, an expert at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, analyzed how the game engine, which is the basis of game creation, will change in the future.

Unbundling the Game Engine: The Rise of Next Generation 3D Creation Engines | Andreessen Horowitz
https://a16z.com/unbundling-the-game-engine/



A game engine is a system that can build everything that exists in a game, such as 3D assets such as characters and objects, character movements (animations), physics, sound effects, and visual effects such as smoke and liquid. It may also be used for video production, etc.

Mr. Kerwin and his colleagues position today's game engines as ``technology that allows anyone to create virtual worlds,'' and argue that anyone can now achieve the feat of translating the world they imagine into the real world, something that only a small number of creators were able to do in the past. He points out that the time has come to gain.

Before the 2010s, most game studios developed their own game engines to develop games. However, as the times change, 'general-purpose game engines' such as Unity, Unreal Engine, Roblox, and Godot are born, and in the 2020s, the majority of games other than AAA games will use these third-party game engines. It is made.



When computer graphics first emerged, the technologies, tools, and rendering systems needed to develop games were divided into those needed to develop high visual fidelity, such as animation/VFX, architectural visualization, and advertising. Games were rendered in real time on the user's device based on input, but VFX/animation was rendered offline in a data center.

However, with the advent of Unreal Engine and Pixar's cutting-edge offline renderer for CGI/animation, ``RenderMan'', technological innovation has progressed. Mr. Kerwin and his colleagues analyze that such technological innovations will return with the advent of AI.



In existing game engines, the work of calling objects and models, and the work of placing them is done independently. However, by utilizing machine learning and AI, it is possible to construct a virtual world simply by inputting a scene or world view, or to automatically arrange appropriate objects such as bookshelves and office supplies by simply creating an office and a chair. It may be possible to

In fact, an add-on has already appeared in the 3DCG production software called 'Blender' that uses the large-scale language model 'GPT-4' and allows you to create 3D models simply by entering text prompts such as 'make a sphere.' I am. This add-on is still in its development stage, but with the development of this technology, we may see a time when anyone can create a game just by inputting characters.

Review of the add-on ``BlenderGPT'' that integrates GPT-4 with the 3DCG production software Blender and creates 3D models simply by entering prompts such as ``make a sphere'' - GIGAZINE



Mr. Kerwin and his colleagues pointed out that the next generation game engine will not compete head-on with existing game engines, but may be born from a completely different route from conventional game engines. He said that it is likely to start as a platform specialized for a specific game genre or art style, unlike previous products that try to cover every use case.

Kerwin also expects the emergence of immersive/spatial 3D production applications. It is difficult to develop a 3D space from an existing 2D screen, and existing game engines may not be able to support the full 3D space experience on the upcoming XR devices.



'Soon, game spaces will be generated from a single image or text prompt,' Kerwin et al. The act of exploring such environments will be revolutionary.As such tools mature and their usability becomes more sophisticated, professional use cases will also develop.The State of Game Engines 'We expect this to change dramatically over the next 10 years, changing the face of the entire entertainment industry.'

in Game, Posted by log1p_kr