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Unity CEO John Riccitiello: 创作者能够美化这个世界

发布时间:2017-09-11 15:07:27 Tags:,

原作者:Craig Chapple 译者:Willow Wu

Unity作为手游业内的首选开发引擎,其地位可谓是越发地举足轻重。

在2017年的游戏开发者大会上,Unity的CEO John Riccitiello公布了相关数据:随着技术的发展,手游在2016年的下载量已经达到了160亿次,比2015年增长了31%。

Call of Duty Strike Team(from play.google)

Call of Duty Strike Team(from play.google)

他说由Unity制作的游戏已经占到了全球的38%,这些游戏的运行设备大约有26亿台。

此外,有70%的VR和AR项目都在用这项技术。

近期报道说有超过2百万的用户在使用这个引擎,Unity的开放式版本令人满意。

与中国市场接轨

但是在某种程度上,这是一个永远都无法完成的任务,在Riccitiello的带领下,公司还在沿这条路继续走下去,我接下去会详细解释着这句话的意思。

Unity并没有故步自封,去年他们公布了一些大计划,尤其是和中国手机制造商小米的合作项目。

目的是为了帮助世界各地的开发者通过中国严格的授权程序,让他们的游戏能够在中国本土市场上架。开发者们可以通过应用内支付和Unity广告盈利,但目前为止广告只能由小米商店授权过的第三方才可以投放。

这对于那些之前有意开发中国市场,却对进入市场所需的繁琐官方手续有所犹豫的Unity开发者们是个大好消息。

Riccitiello告诉PocketGamer.biz:“我们免除了很多令人难以置信的繁杂手续。”

“规模比较大的公司可以派遣一队百人商务拓展团去进行协商,即使是这样可能也不会得到我们现在取得的这种成果。我觉得这还是挺了不起的一件事。”

技术难题

进入中国市场的主要壁垒就仅仅是西方和亚洲之间的文化障碍,这种说法Riccitiello认为是错误的。

从物理屏障角度出发,鉴于进入该市场的难度,他认为这是一种技术性难题,而不是文化方面的。

他重点列举了几个以前的游戏:Battlefield, Medal of Honor, Need for Speed, FIFA和World of Warcraft,尽管游戏风格都比较“西方”,但它们都在亚洲市场获得了成功。

“这并不意味着在中国和日本就没有文化差异了,在某种程度上还是有的,”但是之后他补充说这些文化影响也随着时间扩散到各个地区,比如说Street Fighter对格斗游戏的设计有着重要影响。

“事情朝着两个方向发展。其实在实际中看到的情况也是很出乎我的意料,西方游戏进入亚洲市场的数量比亚洲游戏进入西方市场的数量还多。”

团队协作

在2017游戏开发者大会上宣布的另外一个计划就是针对原画师和设计师的。

Unity想要帮助原画师们更佳顺手地使用这个引擎,尤其是程序员们。马上就有一系列的新特色即将加入引擎中,包括全新可编写脚本的渲染管线,名为Cinemachine智能摄像系统,还有基于轨迹的序列化工具,称作Timeline。

Riccitiello称这绝对不是Unity的短板,“有点像是你责怪汽车不能飞的感觉”,他说。但它更多的是承认原画师和设计师所面临的问题,而Unity的目标之一就是为开发团队解决难题。

他还说“现在,随着团队的壮大,最大的问题就是他们会无限地雇佣越来越多的原画师,专业化程度会越来越高,”

“但是还是需要付出很多血汗还有眼泪,因为工具并不是那么好用。”

Riccitiello并没有批判像Maya, Studio Max或者Photoshop这样的工具,但是他的意思要把这些资产融入游戏中,赋予它们生命力,对付别的难题,像是灯光还有游戏内的细节程度。

他说“用一种比较古怪的比喻就是程序员就是原画师手中拿根针的针眼,”

“实际上,程序员们想要的就是成为原画师的画布,让他们可以尽情地表达自己的想法,但是目前还是有些限制。我们正在尝试之前从未做过的东西,就是免除那些约束。”

创作者的世界

现在要进入中国市场没那么难了,加上VR和AR的的用户越来越多,再加上针对设计师和原画师的新特性,让Unity的聚焦回到了各个开发阶段的开放性上。

“我们已经尽可能地提升了引擎的各方面性能,并且我们正着手全力实现。”Riccitiello说。

开放式版本也是Riccitiello的个人抱负,他之前建立了GlassLab,目的是利用游戏带动孩子们去学习现代科技世界中的关键技能。

而且他还在跟Unity一起继续努力实现这个目标,努力去改变他现在眼中的世界——每个创作者都有一大堆的消费者在等着,转变成大多数普通人都能创造自己的技术。

他说:“有件事我深信不疑,我们为教育投入了很多就是因为我相信这个世界还能更加美好——尽管当下社会中还有很多烂摊子,政府扯淡等等,但如果有更多创作者出现的话,其实就不会这么糟糕。”

“要是跟我女儿们的学校来一场辩论,我会说我们不需要教孩子们如何使用上帝之道,他们多少已经了解了,是你们这群人不懂得如何用。”

“我们应该要教他们电视信号是怎么工作的,怎么把画面重现在你家里的设备上,或者我们应该教他们什么是runtime,编程语言是怎么运作的,我们应该教他们相信自己可以进行创作,他们能成为进化的贡献者。”

本文由游戏邦编译,转载请注明来源,或咨询微信zhengjintiao

Unity’s status as the mobile game engine of choice continues to strengthen each year.

At GDC 2017, CEO John Riccitiello revealed that mobile games harnessing the tech had been downloaded 16 billion times in 2016 – representing 31% growth from 2015.

He also claimed that Unity games now make up 38% of all mobile titles globally, while the number of devices these titles reached is thought to be 2.6 billion.

On top of that, he says 70% of all virtual reality and augmented reality projects are using the tech.

And with it last reported that the engine is harnessed by more than two million users, Unity’s vision of the democratisation has been met.

Making China accessible

But in a sense it’s a mission that can never be finished, and under Riccitiello the company is continuing down that road, while continuing to expand on exactly what that means.

Not resting on its laurels, Unity has made some major announcements in the last year, not least its partnership with Chinese mobile phone manufacturer Xiaomi.

The deal aims to help developers across the globe get through China’s strict licensing process to get their games released in the local market. Developers will also be able to monetise through both IAPs and Unity Ads, which is currently the only third-party ad network authorised within the Xiaomi store.

The news is a boon for Unity developers who may previously have looked at the Chinese market and baulked at the red tape they need to overcome to get a foot in the door.

“We’re removing a staggering amount of the complexity for what it takes to get there,” Riccitiello tells PocketGamer.biz.

“Larger companies can send out one of their army of a hundred BD people to go put together a deal, and even then it’s probably not as slick a solution as we’ve got in place now. I think it’s a pretty big deal.”

Technical hurdles

Riccitiello claims it’s a false judgement to suggest that the main barrier to entry in China is simply down to a fundamental cultural impediment between the West and Asia.

He sees it as a technical hurdle, rather than a cultural one, and it’s a belief based on the difficulty of penetrating the market from a physical barrier perspective.

He highlights games in the past such as Battlefield, Medal of Honor, Need for Speed, FIFA and World of Warcraft as examples of games that haven proven successes in Asia, despite having a more ‘Western’ flavour.

“That doesn’t mean there aren’t different cultural cues in China and Japan, there is in a way,” says Riccitiello, but adds that influences have also stretched across regions over the years, such as Street Fighter’s impact on fighting game design.

“Things move in both directions. I think we’ve seen, to my surprise actually, more penetration in Asia of Western titles than the other way around.”

Uniting professions

Another string to Unity’s bow announced during its GDC 2017 address was the new focus on artists and designers.

The company wants to make it easier for artists to use its engine, typically the realm of programmers, and has an upcoming slate of features that includes a new scriptable rendering pipeline, a smart camera system called Cinemachine and a track-based sequencing tool called Timeline.

Riccitiello claims it was never a real weakness for Unity, “it would be a bit like blaming a car for not flying”, he says. But it’s more a recognition of the issues artists and designers face, and is part of Unity’s goal of solving hard problems for development teams.

“Right now, the biggest problem as teams scale up is they’re hiring an infinitely larger number of artists and the specialisations are increasingly fine,” he says.

“Yet it’s still blood, sweat and tears, because the tools aren’t very good.”

Riccitiello isn’t criticising tools like Maya, Studio Max or Photoshop, but he’s referring to getting those assets into a game, animating them and dealing with other complexities such as lighting and level of detail in-game.

“In a weird sort of way, the programmer was the eye of the needle for the artist,” he says.

“Realistically, what the programmer wants is to be the canvas around which the greatest artists can express themselves, and yet there was still a constraint. We’re trying to do something that’s not been done before, which is remove that constraint.”

World of creators

The increased accessibility to China, an expansion in VR and AR, and addition of new features targeted at designers and artists come back to Unity’s focus on democratisation – at all levels of development.

“We’ve taken evolution as far as it can go, and we’re starting to attack revolution,” states Riccitiello.

The goal of democratisation is also a personal ambition of Riccitiello himself, having in the past set up GlassLab, which aims to use games to power the learning of key skills in the modern tech world.

And he’s keen to continue pursuing those goals with Unity to turn what he believes is a world of 999 content consumers for every one content creator, to one where most people can create technology.

“One of the things that I believe, and we’re investing heavily in education and the long arc of democratisation, is I think the world would be a better place – notwithstanding all the crap and politics in the world today – if there were just more creators,” he says.

“The argument I would have with my girls’ schools was, we don’t need to teach them to use Word, they kind of know it already it’s you guys that don’t know how to use it.

“We should teach them how a television signal works and how it’s reproduced on a device in your house, or we should teach them what runtime is, we should teach them how programming languages work, we should teach them to believe that they can create, they can be part of the revolution.(source:pocketgamer.biz


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