作者：Kris Graft

Epic Games的游戏几乎都有着粗暴的角色，他们擅于用强大的武器残忍地消灭对手，这些游戏给公司带来了巨大的财富。

不过《战争机器》和虚幻引擎3开发商Epic Games创始人和首席执行官Tim Sweeney看上却很友好，完全不同于Marcus Fenix（游戏邦注：《战争机器》中的主角）。

Sweeney在采访中谦逊地回答提问，毫不费力地探讨游戏行业以及未来将驱动行业发展的技术。

我对Epic的工作动态很感兴趣。你是否整天都躲在办公室中编写代码？

是的，大部分时间是如此。Epic的精妙之处在于，从公司成立之处我的哲学是为公司的所有关键岗位寻找最佳人选，替代我完成必要的工作。

首款游戏完全由我自己编写而成，随后我找到了比自己能力更强的美术设计师，于是我就不再做美工。Cliff Bleszinski负责设计，Mike Capps和Rod Fergusson负责公司和产品的管理，Mark Rein负责销售。

所以，现在Epic任何项目的关键环节都基本不再需要我亲自参与，这确实是件很棒的事情，因为我可以掌控整个项目流程，参与到任何需要改进的环节中。所以，我在公司中主要把控每个团队和虚幻引擎4的方向及其技术战略，确保所有的系统都朝恰当的方向发展。我认为，不成为关键环节的一部分确实很有帮助，我可以抽身来维持公司的宏观愿景。

在2月的DICE Summit演讲中，你讨论的是电子游戏用高级图像和技术来模拟生活。电子游戏的最终目标是什么？精确地模拟现实生活？

电子游戏要实现对生活的模拟，需要面对两个不同的挑战。其一是拥有生活化的现实主义图像，如果我们有足够的运算能力，就知道如何解决这个问题。这主要是开发层面的问题，每年我们都在创新图像运算法则和等待硬件性能的提升。

另一个挑战是计算AI，这个挑战要困难得多。要在游戏中模拟人工智能，包括现实主义角色AI和现实主义对话，这些都需要依靠新的运算法则。这些运算法则还未有人发明出来，因为没有人知道要如何模拟人类的思想。我期望在接下来数十年里，这方面能够取得明显的突破。

我们的期望是合理的，因为我们已经看到有些公司开始处理这个问题，也就是人类思想这个核心问题。我可以拿起自己的iPhone，询问Siri某地的方向，计算是人类世界的尖端产业，这确实是件令人兴奋的事情。

如果要恰当模拟人类的思想和反应，需要取得何种突破？还是说这是个可以循序渐进而实现的目标？

这一点很难预测。有个想法是，将来可能会出现这样一种事件：将来有人会取得瞬间改变世界的计算机智能领域的突破。这种情况有可能发生，我们现在看到，朝这个方向努力的现象越来越多。

谷歌的搜索运算法则已经实现了某些令人印象深刻的数学概念，能够使搜索变得更加高效。这是该领域内引起我注意的变化之一。另一个是语音识别系统Siri。它们不仅有着某些精妙的运算法则，而且有个庞大的问题和答案数据库，帮助系统对问题做出正确的回答。

所以，我觉得最可能出现的情况是，未来数年内人工智能方面会不断出现阶段性进展，这些相互独立领域会随时间各自缓慢升级，最终构建成更大的产物。

Epic对AI的重视程度如何？许多人在提及Epic的技术时，他们想到的主要是精美的图像技术。AI方面的情况如何呢？

Epic的游戏玩法团队在探索游戏角色模拟方面花了很大的精力，包括游戏中玩家的好友和对手，所以我们已经开发出许多有助于提升AI的有趣解决方案。

导航网帮助每个角色知道如何在关卡中行走，以及如何理解关卡中的不同部分。如果敌人觉得自己需要与你战斗，那么他就会想：“我可以爬上这些台阶，然后从上方向他开火，这是个较好的攻击角度。”

公司里有许多类似的基础系统，但是最终游戏玩法团队会针对每个角色设计独特AI以及不同的动作和场景。这是个相当特殊的例子，不能算是对智能的通用模拟。

你是否在游戏行业之外的领域中发现能够给自己的工作带来灵感的技术？

有什么东西令我印象深刻？过去十多年来，谷歌搜索的精确给我带来了很多灵感，当然还有近期的Siri语音识别。

《Word Lens》这款iPhone应用让我颇为着迷。你拿出自己的iPhone，将其指向某个方向，摄像头便会自动捕捉文字内容，将其翻译后呈现在你面前。但是，应用并不是在底部显示翻译后的内容，而是直接将翻译过的文字覆盖在原文字之上。

这是个令人惊奇的飞跃。看到这款应用，让我开始设想接下来数年内增强现实应用的发展将改变我们与计算机互动的方法。

谷歌Goggles让你可以通过拍摄照片进行搜索。所以，它们在图片调查方面也能起到很大的作用。

是的，亚马逊也有个类似的服务。看到这项服务时，我想：“哇，这真是个令人惊叹的运算法则！”你使用的是款亚马逊应用，你拍下物品的照片，数秒或数分钟后它会向你发送该产品在Amazon.com上的链接。当我看到这样的效果时，产生的想法是：哇，他们运用了令人惊叹的图片识别追踪技术！但事实并非如此，而是该公司雇佣了大量人群查看你的照片，然后在Amazon.com上搜索合适的产品，将链接用邮件发送给你。

什么？

（笑）我知道，你觉得这就像是我们当初调侃Siri的说法，不是吗？有人说Siri真正的原理是，该公司在中国雇佣了大量员工回答你的问题。

那么，你对浏览器有何看法？浏览器与你们对虚幻引擎的使用有更大的关联。你觉得游戏行业中浏览器未来将如何发展？

我们或许会看到网页浏览器成为另一个平台。你应当可以在网页浏览器上玩PS3或iOS等平台上的任意游戏。

我们正渐渐朝这个方向前进。近期，Adobe Flash有所改变。近十多年来，Adobe Flash只是个小型脚本语言，使用专有浏览器插件来制作出更多的互动网页，但是近期Adobe制作了一个翻译器。

你向它提交虚幻引擎3等任何C++程序，它会将其翻译成在Flash中运行的平台独立应用程序，可以在任何可运行Flash的网页浏览器或平台上呈现。

所以，现在任何支持Flash的浏览器能够玩所有以虚幻引擎3或其他可实现与Flash兼容的引擎来构建的网页游戏。

但是，我认为下个发展阶段是，交叉编译用C++或其他语言编写的游戏，直接将其以本地HTML5和JavaScript应用程序的形式在任何标准网页浏览器中运行。现在，从理论上来说已经可以实现这个目标，但是得到的结果运行缓慢且不稳定，原因在于JavaScript执行的不成熟、性能限制和当前网页浏览器自身的不足。

再过数年时间，我想上述期望将变成现实。这样，网页将成为平台，你可以在网页浏览器上体验到全功能应用程序，而且非常流畅。当你使用非安装主流的平台时，网页体验并不令人满意，但是我觉得在接下来数年时间里会有很大的提升。

我知道虚幻引擎4还正处在开发中，但你们或许已经对它颇为满意。

是的，我们开始让部分开发商试用引擎，这是我们早期测试循环的一部分。针对虚幻引擎3，我们在2003和2004年也进行了这种循环。我们会在时机恰当时公开该引擎，这在开发商发布用该引擎制成的游戏时会达到顶峰，但现在还不是合适的时机。我们制定了很高的目标，该引擎的意向平台也还未被公开。

那么，我们考虑个理论化问题，我确信这种情况已经在现实生活中发生过了。假设微软或索尼问你：“在我们的下一代主机中，需要提供何种产品才能让你更完善地优化游戏？”你会怎么回答他们？

对我们来说，如果主机市场要发展，需要两个必要的改进。其一是整合游戏玩家在当前所有卓越平台中喜欢的功能，满足玩家对游戏平台的所有期望，不是吗？

游戏整合Facebook，让你可以通过社交网络站点找到同趣好友。如果下一代的游戏和主机能够实现这个目标，那确实是件很有价值的事情。

如果将来的主机能够让我们更容易地购买和下载游戏，就像我们在iOS App Store中所做的那样，这对我们开发商来说有很高的价值，使得我们可以更容易地向消费者呈现我们的游戏作品，而不用去再借助那些塑料盒子。

所以，借鉴游戏行业中所有玩家的期望和最佳做法，将其整合到主机平台上，这是相当重要的事情。就当代主机而言，它们已经从小型电视连接设备转变为网络化游戏设备，你可以连接网络同好友一起玩游戏、对游戏进行更新甚至用Xbox 360观看电影。

我们喜欢这样的整合，我觉得服务概念的进一步扩展将是下一代主机的重要发展机遇。这样，主机将成为与你的社交圈有所关联的主流计算机设备。

其二是原始性能。主机与《FarmVille》的不同之处在于，主机瞄准的是高端游戏体验。如果你想要寻找当前游戏行业图像最佳的作品，你会将视线转向Xbox 360和PlayStation 3，这些平台上的游戏才能满足你的需求。所以，未来主机的机遇在于将原始计算能力提升到新的层次。

我们过去以每秒浮点运算次数来衡量性能，而现在我们衡量的标准是teraflops，也就是每秒浮点运算兆次数。我们想要的是在消费者经济能够承受的情况下尽可能将teraflop提升到最高，因为这样我们就能够创造出更棒的游戏体验，这样也能够驱动消费者购买新的设备。这是新一代主机将面临的挑战，因为消费者需要放弃当前主机上所有安装的内容，一切都要从头开始。所以，你必须说服消费者购买新硬件设备。

要实现这个目标，你需要有令人惊叹的游戏，其图像逼真程度前所未见，甚至是玩家从未想象过的。

有开发者曾经跟我说，他们不需要完全开放的主机，但是他们希望下一代的主机能够比当前主机更加开放。大量新游戏可以依靠社区，可以更容易地与玩家互动，根据玩家的反馈做出修改，这一切都在主机上完成。那么，新主机是否应当变得比现在更加开放呢？

你必须找到一个恰当的开放点。现在最开放的平台是Android，但它显得颇为混乱。要让游戏在大量Android设备上都能有效运转，这是件相当困难的事情，因为该设备种类过多，而且缺乏应用程序认证过程。我们不希望主机像Android这样开放，这对项目运营来说简直是场灾难。

当然，我们也需要较为开放的生态系统。问题在于，我们究竟需要其开放性达到何种程度？iOS的做法可以借鉴，其所处的位置介于Android的过于开放和当前主机的过于严格之间，苹果会审核所有的应用，无漏洞的应用就可以通过审核，这个过程比起当今主机平台来略显宽松。

我觉得这是个有趣的方向，尤其是对小产品来说，因为它会减少将产品投放到市场上的成本。我觉得，主机产商是应该在iOS和当前主机的处理方式之间找到恰当的开放点，这样才能让主机成为健康发展的媒介。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

The Future According to Epic’s Tim Sweeney

Kris Graft

Epic Games has made its fortune with games that feature surly, grunting men whose adeptness at blowing people in half with powerful weapons greatly outweighs their negotiating skills.

In an interview with Gamasutra earlier this year, Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of the Gears of War and Unreal Engine 3 developer, did not seem surly, he was not (visibly) armed, and he did not grunt once. He’s pretty much the anti-Marcus Fenix.

For someone so soft-spoken and unassuming, Sweeney gives a fascinating interview, effortlessly opening up about the game industry and the technology that will drive it in the future.

I’m interested about the work dynamic at Epic. Are you just holed up in an office coding all day?

Tim Sweeney: Yeah, largely. The great thing about Epic is that from the beginning I’ve had a philosophy of finding the best people for all of the key areas of the company, and then one by one, my expertise has been replaced.

The first game I wrote was all my own, and then I brought in an artist who was much better than me, and from then on I was not doing any artwork. And Cliff Bleszinski took over design, and then Mike Capps and Rod Fergusson took over the management of the company and production. Mark Rein took over sales.

And so I’m not needed as a critical path resource on any project at Epic right now, which is really cool; it enables me to go around and participate wherever I can add input. So I’ve been mainly involved in every team, and direction with Unreal Engine 4, their technical strategy, and making sure all our systems are going in the right direction. Not being in the critical path, I think, is really helpful, in being able to maintain the big overall perspective of the company.

At your DICE Summit presentation in February, you talked about video games simulating life with advanced graphics and technology. Is that some kind of holy grail or ultimate goal that video games can accomplish — an exact simulation of life?

TS: Well, there are two separate challenges. One is having a lifelike graphical realism, and that’s something that we know how to solve given enough computing power. And so largely it’s a matter of developing, coming up with innovative new graphics algorithms and waiting for the hardware to increase in performance every year.

The other area of computing [AI] is much, much more difficult. Trying to simulate human intelligence in the game — realistic character AI and realistic conversations — something like that relies on algorithms that nobody has invented yet, because nobody knows how to simulate human thought. I expect over the next few decades, really, there’s going to be an incredible innovation there.

I expect that to happen because we’re seeing some companies really starting to address that — that core problem of human thought. I can pick up my iPhone now and ask Siri for directions to someplace, or ask it some really complicated query, and it’ll parse it correctly and give me a result. So really, computing is on the cusp of grasping the human world, and that’s a really exciting thing.

What kind of breakthrough is it going to take to accurately simulate how people think and react? Or is it going to be more of a gradual building-upon of everybody’s work?

TS: It’s hard to predict. The one idea is that there’s going to be this singularity — that someone in the future will trigger this judgment day where somebody creates a breakthrough in computer intelligence that suddenly changes the world. And that could happen, but what we’ve seen is much, much more gradual and incremental progress towards that.

Google, with its search algorithms, has come up with some really impressive mathematical notions to represent knowledge, and be able to search it efficiently. That’s one of the things that’s impressed me in that area. The other is a Siri, with voice recognition. It turns out that they some smart algorithms, but they also have a gigantic dataset of queries and responses to help steer it in the right direction.

So I think the most likely scenario is a path works, and progress over the next few years will continue piece by piece, advancing in isolated areas that go on over time slowly, building up into something bigger.

How much emphasis on AI is there at Epic? Because a lot of people, when they think of Epic’s tech, they think of nice graphics. What about the AI side?

TS: Well, the gameplay team at Epic puts a lot of thought into simulating characters in our games — you know, your friends in the game and enemy opponents — and so we’ve developed a lot of interesting solutions that help with AI.

There’s a navigation mesh which gives each character an overview of how to walk through the level, and how to understand different parts of the level. If an enemy decides he needs to fight you then he’ll realize, “Oh, I need to run up these stairs, and then fight him from above where I have a better angle to fire on him from.”

There are a lot of basic systems like that, but ultimately it comes down to the gameplay team designing custom AI for each character and the various actions and scenarios that are carried out. It’s a pretty special case; it’s not a general simulation of intelligence by any means.

Is there any tech that you see happening outside of the games industry that inspires you with your own job?

TS: What’s really impressed me? In the last decade, Google search and its uncanny ability to find what you actually mean that you’re looking for; there’s Siri’s voice recognition.

Word Lens, this iPhone app; it’s magic to me. You take out your iPhone and you point it in some direction and basically the camera takes a live feed, a video of the world, and it projects it onto the screen in front of you with all of the words translated from one language to another. But not just translated with captions at the bottom, it’s translating like if you have a big red stop sign it’s translating “Stop” to Spanish and putting it in the proper perspective with the proper lighting in the scene.

And that’s a crazy advancement. Just seeing that makes me think that we’re on the cusp of seeing a whole generation of augmented reality apps over the next few years that will change the way we interact with computers. Just a few pieces of growth algorithms have shown through like that over the last few years.

Google Goggles lets you do a search by taking a picture. So they’re working on image-based inquiries as well.

TS: Oh yeah, and Amazon had a service like that, too; I thought, “Wow, that’s an amazing algorithm there!” What you do is there is an Amazon app, you take a picture of an object and a few seconds or a few minutes later it sends you a link to that product on Amazon.com. When I saw that it’s like, “Wow! They’re doing some amazing image recognition tracking technology!” But no, they have an army of people who watch your pictures and then look up the appropriate thing on Amazon.com and email it to you.

What?! [laughs]

TS: I know! It’s the joke about Siri, right? That the real trick is that that they have a warehouse full of people in China who are typing away at your translations.

So what about the browser? That’s something that relates more to something specific that you guys are working on with Unreal Engine. Where do you see the future of the browser in games?

TS: Well, we would like to see the web browser as another platform. You should be able to take any game — a PlayStation 3 or iOS game, for example — and just go to that and play it from any web browser.

We’re slowly heading in that direction as an industry. One thing that’s happened recently is Adobe Flash. For a decade or more, Adobe Flash was a little scripting language for creating more interactive webpages using a proprietary browser plug-in, but more recently Adobe created a translator.

You give it any C++ program, like Unreal Engine 3, and it translates it to a platform-independent application that can run within Flash, within any web browser or on any platform where Flash runs.

And so now any browser that supports Flash can play any web game that’s built with Unreal Engine 3, or any other engine that’s cross-compatible with Flash. That’s an awesome breakthrough; it shows you the possibilities.

But I think the next step in that is cross-compiling games from C++ or whatever and directly running them as native HTML5 and JavaScript applications within any standard web browser. And you can do that in theory today, but it ends up being slow and unstable just because of the early state of JavaScript implementations, and limited performance, and current web browsers.

In another few years, I think that’s going to be a very realistic scenario. And so the web will generally be a platform, and you can have a real application with a full feature set that runs within a web browser; that’ll be very welcome. The web is a fairly awkward experience when you use a platform that’s not the majority of the install base, and I think we’re going to see big improvements there in the next few years.

I know it’s under wraps, but you guys are probably feeling pretty okay about Unreal Engine 4.

TS: Yeah, we’re starting a behind-closed-doors showing of the engine to developers; this is part of our very early ramp-up cycle. We went through this cycle with Unreal Engine 3 starting in 2003 and 2004. At some point we’ll make public announcements and ramp up to the point where developers are shipping games, but it’s very early right now. We’re aiming very high, and the intended platforms this is aimed at haven’t even been announced.

So here’s a theoretical question for you — even though I’m sure that this situation has happened in real life. Say Microsoft or Sony come to you and ask, “What do we need to provide you, with our next generation of consoles, to help you make games better?” What would you tell them?

TS: Really for us, there are two things that are going to be essential for the console market going forward. One is that to bring together all of the features and expectations that gamers have built up from all the great platforms out there today, right?

There are great games with Facebook integration that enable you to hook up to social network sites and find your friends in there. To be able to do that from next generation games and consoles will be really valuable.

To be able to go and easily buy and download games like we do in the iOS App Store on future consoles will be incredibly valuable to us as developers, and make it that much easier to get our games out without over-reliance on manufacturing a whole bunch of pieces of spinning plastic to ship to consumers.

So having all of the things that you expect from the game industry as a whole and the best that’s been done elsewhere, and to bring that together on a console platform is really important. We saw with the current generation, we went from consoles as a little fixed, TV connected device to an online network of gaming devices where you can play with your friends over the internet, get updates, even watch movies on Xbox 360.

We love that, and I think a huge portion of the business opportunity in the next generation is extending that concept even further forward. So this is a mainstream computing device that hooks into all of your social circles as well.

Number two is raw performance. The thing that separates consoles from FarmVille is the fact that consoles define the high-end gaming experience. When you look for the best graphics available in the whole game industry today, you look at Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and those games are the best out there, bar none. And so the big opportunities for future consoles is to bring that to an entirely new level by delivering a dramatic increase in raw computing power.

We measure that in floating-point operations per second, and now we talk about teraflops — trillions of floating-point operations per second. What we want is as many teraflops as is economically possible to deliver to consumers, because that enables us to create the best quality experience as possible, and that will drive people to buy a new machine. That’s a big challenge with a new console — that you reset your install base from millions and millions of what you have today with current consoles back to zero. Then you have to convince everybody to buy the new hardware.

To do that you need awesome games that provide a level of graphical fidelity that people have just not seen or even imagined previously.

Developers have told me that they don’t want a completely open console, but they were hoping that next-gen consoles would be more open than current consoles. A lot of new games are going to rely on communities, and being able to react to and interact with players more easily, through a console. But there’s a decent amount of bureaucracy involved when dealing with consoles. Should the new consoles be a little bit more open than they are now?

TS: Well, you have to draw a fine line in there. If you look at the most open platform today — that’s Android — Android is anarchy. It’s extremely hard to ship a game that actually works on a large number of Android devices, because there’s so much variety and so much openness and a lack of cohesive certification process for applications. We do not want open as in Android — that would be a disaster for the business.

So you certainly want an ecosystem that’s curated. The question is, how much do you want it to be curated? iOS is an interesting medium point in between the anarchy of the world and the highly-curated approach of Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, where Apple certifies all apps, they verify if the app isn’t terribly buggy, but it’s a less rigorous process than we have on consoles today.

I think it’s an interesting direction, especially for smaller products, because it reduces the overhead of bringing something to market. I think you certainly want something somewhere in the spectrum between current consoles and iOS, in terms of curation. Somewhere in there, so it’s a healthy medium. (Source: Gamasutra)