Stunning, cinematic-level graphics, intense combat scenes, and a unique art style with a distinctly Chinese flavor—these are what you'll find in Black Myth: Wukong, China's first AAA game that's been making waves around the world recently. Pretty mind-blowing, right?

So, how does Black Myth: Wukong manage to recreate real-world scenes with great precision?

Black Myth: Wukong draws its story from Journey to the West, one of China's four great classical novels. To faithfully capture the ancient elements of Chinese mythology, the game developer, Game Science, used AI optical space positioning algorithms,which involve scanning real-world objects like temples, Buddha statues, forests, and rocks with cameras, laser radar and various sensors,and then accurately reconstructing these objects in 3D based on reflective points.

This tech allowed them to realistically recreate 36 famous Chinese landmarks, like the Jade Emperor Temple in Shanxi and Kaiyuan Temple in Fujian, right in the game.

But it wasn’t just about the environments. Bringing the diverse animal characters from Journey to the West to life was another big challenge.

Simulating complex quadruped movement has always been a conundrum in game development.

To get over this hurdle, the team collected massive amounts of random motion capture data from various four-legged animals.

Then, with the help of machine learning and human feedback, they developed a quadruped motion capture simulation system called "Lu Wu" specifically for the game, making sure the movements of four-legged creatures feel lifelike.

once they nailed the faithful recreation of the environments and characters, the next big hurdle was to integrate these assets into the game seamlessly and efficiently.

In August 2021, the Game Science team migrated the game from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5, making it one of the first games to be developed on UE5. Thanks to UE5's built-in Nanite feature, they could directly import movie-quality assets and render them smoothly with high detail.

Another core feature, Lumen, enables real-time global illumination changes in the game. Using ray tracing principles, it calculates direct, reflected, and refracted light in real-time, giving the scenes incredibly realistic lighting effects.

So, when Wukong is in battle, details like fur, clothing, plants, and water all change dynamically—the visuals are breathtaking!

But achieving such technological breakthroughs wasn't easy. It took six years of hard work and overcoming countless challenges, like their own "81 trials," for the Black Myth: Wukong development team to finally capture the hearts of gamers worldwide, making it the single-player game with the highest concurrent players in Steam history.

What's your favorite scene in Black Myth: Wukong?

Drop a comment and let me know!

For more amazing content from the Greater Bay Area metaverse International Communication Lab (GBA MIC Lab), make sure to follow the "GBA_MIC_Lab" account on Bilibili and the "VR Guangdong" channel on YouTube.

更多內容請下載21財經APP