Text/Nine Lotus Treasure Lamp

Four months have passed since the last test, and "Infinite Warmth" has opened a new round of testing. But the most obvious difference this time is that this time it's mobile. I didn't expect them to be so fast.

Is it worth the fuss on mobile? For "Infinite Warmth", I think it's worth it. In my opinion, they can do this in a realistic version of "stuffing an elephant in the freezer".

You must know that among the many big world games currently established in China, "Infinite Nuan Nuan" may be the one with the highest requirements for art - "beauty" can be said to be the foundation of this game. The character modeling, costume design, and even the environment of the larger world must be exquisite enough to support its identity as a new installment in the "Nuan Nuan" series.

And in the last PC test, the game can be said to be full of technical power at the level of model rendering. With the blessing of UE5, whether it is "this light, this water", or the fog effect in the scene, the translucent effect of the character's clothing, the visual changes of the characters in the switch between light and dark scenes, etc., it is all surprising.

But the visual performance is so full, which also brings a problem: with the current level of mobile phone hardware, the optimization of the mobile terminal of "Infinite Warmth" cannot be small, but "Infinite Warmth", whether it is the effect of the PC side itself, or the previous work "Shine Warm", which became famous for its technical power on mobile phones, does not allow their art quality to decline.

It is definitely a big challenge to get on the mobile phone again, and the picture quality is as close as possible to the PC level. What level can they achieve?

After being qualified for the test, Grape Jun also experienced the game for the first time, and dug out many technical details behind it from the "Infinite Warmth" project team.

01

Better-than-expected image quality

In this test, the device used by Grape Jun is the iPhone 15 Pro. When I got into the game, I found that the game was more complete than I expected in many places.

The most obvious is the material performance. The materials used in the characters' costumes, whether they are cotton and linen velvet, can be clearly identified. What impressed me the most was that the plot performance would give the protagonist Nuan Nuan and her partner some close-ups many times. In these real-time rendered performances, we can not only feel the material of the cloak worn by Big Meow according to the changes in light, but also identify the textile and silk embroidery techniques used in different parts.

As for warm clothing, it is even more refined. Different materials, transparency, are quite delicate. In particular, many transparent or translucent clothing materials are simply show-off. According to the Papergames technical team, they used an advanced OIT technology in order to correctly express the sequencing problem of transparent clothes.

For example, the sleeves of the character's costume not only achieve the feeling that translucent should be, but we can even see a lot of details depicted.

What amazed me the most was the fully transparent plastic water shoes in the cleaning kit, which represented this material so realistically, which I had never seen in other mobile games.

In the actual experience, the visual effects of rocks, buildings and vegetation in the picture are also very detailed, the lattices of the flower windows have their own volume, and the leaves and grass also have outline details, which is indeed quite close to the performance on the PC at the time of the first test.

Comparison of the screen performance of the PC and the mobile terminal, the following is the mobile terminal

When entering and exiting a cave in the game, the game also simulates the reaction time required by the human eye due to changes in the environment: when you first enter the cave, it is dark inside, but it doesn't take long for the eye to adjust to the light and see inside. When leaving the cave and entering the bright light environment, the picture will also have a brief feeling of visual overexposure.

GIF quality is compressed and does not represent real quality

And even if the picture quality is pulled to this level, the gameplay experience of the mobile game "Infinite Warmth" is still smooth.

In terms of specific gameplay, the core idea of "Infinite Warmth" has not changed much from the first test, and the gameplay still revolves around keywords such as jumping and breaking through levels, exploring and collecting. Players can travel around this fantasy continent and collect various materials in the world by gathering, catching, fishing, etc., and craft a variety of suits.

GIF quality is compressed and does not represent real quality

In a world where exploration is heavy and combat is light, it's important that the jumping experience is silky smooth, as it involves getting the Fantasy Stars that unlock new outfits and abilities. And the mobile terminal of "Infinite Warmth" did not "make it difficult" for me in this regard. The gameplay of the game to collect some resources is also very interesting on the mobile side.

GIF quality is compressed and does not represent real quality

It's also worth mentioning that during this test, new features were also introduced to the game.

The first is that Big Meow's cloak also offers a dress-up option. In the future, when I want to take a screenshot of Nuan Nuan, Da Meow's clothing style can also match the atmosphere at that time.

In addition, the gameplay of taking photos and punching cards has also appeared.

The photo function of "Infinite Warmth" can be said to be the most detailed among many games at present. It integrates all the functions in the front and back of reality photography, you can not only adjust the focal length, aperture, exposure, but also change the lighting to switch various shooting angles, and let the warm and warm switch various poses; You can even adjust color saturation, use a wide variety of filters, and more.

As far as the mobile UI is concerned, it gives me the feeling that it looks a lot like the real shooting function of a smartphone, but with a lot more versatility.

Focusing on the photo function, "Infinite Warmth" also launched a travel handbook, and this time the new "World Tour" check-in gameplay.

The Travel Journals record key moments in the story, while the World Cruise encourages players to take photos with the various sights and attractions in the world. Each time a player collects a check-in location, they can obtain camera-related skill points, further enhancing the shooting-related functions.

This kind of gameplay reminds me of a lot of check-in posts on social platforms. It can also be seen from this feature that "Infinite Warmth" really wants players to do a lot of things that can be done in real life, making this fantasy continent more realistic.

The new "Matchmaker Task" function can more naturally guide players to explore the mysteries of the Miracle Continent step by step.

However, it would be an exaggeration to say that Infinite Warmth is like playing on PC on mobile, and in fact, the game is probably still a little far from being "the best it can be".

For example, in certain situations, the edges of some models occasionally appear jagged; As I played for longer periods of time, I could visibly feel that parts of my phone were starting to get hot. I've heard that there are still some models that are not yet fully adaptable.

However, this is only the first test of Infinite Warmth on mobile, and these issues have not affected the main gameplay experience.

Therefore, in general, there is indeed a gap between the mobile version and the PC version of "Infinite Warmth", the big world of the UE5 engine, but it is not too much to say "close" in many scenes. Not to mention, it's still early, and there are still plenty of opportunities for the game to continue to be optimized.

02

How hard is it to get on mobile?

Since "Infinite Warmth" can do it so quickly, what's so difficult about it?

Hey, they actually have a lot of difficulties:

First, the performance of most mobile phones cannot make the material effect and accuracy at the level of PC. Therefore, if you want to make the graphics as close to PC as possible, especially the characters and suit effects, you need to make a technological breakthrough.

Second, even if you can achieve a good picture effect, it will have a huge impact on power consumption, so you should do everything you can to save power consumption.

Thirdly, compared to PCs, mobile phone memory is very limited. For big world games, this problem is even more serious, if you don't do any optimization and processing, you need to consume 4.6G memory, and many models can't run at all.

In addition, the hardware situation of the mobile terminal is uneven, and different picture modules need to be re-graded and adapted on different performance devices to ensure that the game not only has good visual effects, but also has reasonable power consumption and performance, and has a normal experience of various functions.

"Infinite Warmth" wants to overcome these difficulties, and the hard work cannot be left behind at all. We also learned from our conversations with Papergames that they did a lot of technical work to make the game mobile.

The first is to achieve a PC-level effect on the limited performance of the mobile phone.

For example, the real water surface reflection that is difficult to do in most mobile games due to performance reasons is realized on the mobile terminal of "Infinite Warmth". Papergames told us that they can automatically generate a reflection proxy model of a scene through PCG (Procedural Content Generation). Extremely low computing power is required at the time of operation, which means that even on mobile phones, players will be able to experience the effects of real landscapes.

Another example is hair rendering. This is one of the key points that "Infinite Nuan Nuan" needs to pay attention to, whether it is the hairstyles of various characters in the game such as Nuan Nuan, or various furry animals such as the big meow in the game, they all need to have a good enough hair performance.

To do this, they developed a special hair rendering system. In terms of lighting calculations for hair, they also approximate and simplify them for mobile, using minimal calculations while ensuring that the artistic performance is as close as possible to that of the PC.

Because there is a lot of vegetation in the big world, the texture of the vegetation is particularly important. By compressing GBuffer's limit, they added double-sided vegetation and subsurface scattering materials to the deferred rendering pipeline, which helped a lot to get closer to the phone's graphics and the PC.

The second is to save the power consumption of the mobile phone through various methods.

For example, in some complex foundations, houses and other assets, the material IDs are basically 15, which will generate a lot of DrawCalls, which greatly reduces efficiency; They developed a new rendering pipeline and material that could reduce the number of Material IDs to three, which would reduce the number of DrawCalls; For up to 400,000 surfaces of terrain on the PC side, they also used a special optimization method to accurately remove a large number of triangles, and made special optimizations for terrain digging, and finally optimized to 150,000 faces.

In addition, there are flowers and plants all over the mountains in "Infinite Warmth", and some of the flowers and grasses will be directly attached to the rocks and roads. To this end, they developed a MeshGrass system that can perform real-time rendering generation, greatly reducing memory and improving rendering efficiency.

The rest of the game's rendering process has also been deeply optimized, and a considerable part of these optimizations is close to lossless in visual comparison, which not only ensures the image quality, but also makes the game relatively smooth to render on the phone.

HLOD is used in many large-world games, which can automatically convert some distant high-precision models into low-precision models based on the player's distance from the camera to the object, reducing performance pressure. The HLOD developed by Papergames can reduce the number of rendered faces from 220,000 to 50,000, but it can be as close as possible to the original model without generating additional texture resources, which is too important for the mobile phone, because the memory of the mobile phone is very limited. At the same time, it also supports color changes and variants of assets, thus providing more variety.

The third is to make a better adaptation.

In order to adapt to the loading performance of Infinite Nuan on mobile, they implemented a set of UE5-based large world loading solutions from scratch. It can adapt to high, medium and low configurations and infinitely load various line-of-sight distances on the mobile terminal, and also solve the problem of lag and memory peak caused by the simultaneous loading of a large number of levels from the root.

Importance of the adaptation of the system under different configurations: For animation updates, the power consumption brought by special effect updates is very large; For small animals, Interactive Objects has developed scalable built-in performance options, which can be adapted according to the importance and density of different configurations, which can save a lot of GPU time and reduce power consumption. NPCs switch to offline baked models at medium distances, this baking process is fully automated, the baked model simplifies the material, and merges the material ID, which looks very close to the original model from the view, but this has a great help to the performance, which can be understood as the HLOD of the NPC.

All of this is actually only part of their job, and if I had to break it down and list them one by one, the number would be even more terrifying. But I think that these alone are enough to show how difficult it is for "Infinite Warmth" to be on mobile.

03

Why does Stacked Paper "not eat hard"?

But at the end of the day, since it's so hard to get to mobile, why did Infinite Warmth have to use UE5?

The capabilities of the UE5 engine are indeed recognized by many practitioners, but UE rendering is not common in mobile games. Mainly because UE eats too much performance, and the phone belt doesn't move very much. Although UE5 has improved the performance issues to some extent, in practice, developers will still encounter a lot of trouble. This is the reason why many mobile games prefer to use Unity or self-developed engines. However, PaperStack's new works, "Infinite Warmth" and "Contract of Everything", are both UE5 projects.

In my opinion, Paperfold's seemingly "hard-working" actually means that they are forward-looking in product layout.

Yao Runhao, CEO of Papergames, previously said that after "Miracle Nuannuan", they will generally follow two directions for project establishment, one is to do new things around the content, and the other is to upgrade the technical strength. According to these two directions, Paperstack has made "Love and the Producer" and "Shining Nuan" respectively. And judging from the current development direction of "Infinite Warmth", whether it is the unique open-world gameplay design, or the various work they have done to land on mobile, it is obvious that the same logic is followed.

In an article about "Infinite Warmth" and "Contract of Everything" published on the official account of "Papergames Recruitment", Dharma, the head of Papergames Engine and Technical Art, mentioned that their team already has solid technical reserves in many dimensions, which is due to the company's emphasis on technology.

Lao Yang, the producer of "The Contract of Everything", also mentioned that the technical level of several new works of Paperfold cannot be formed overnight. After they entered Papergames as an "outside team", they found that Papergames had a deep layout on the UE engine, absorbing many first-class graphics and TA talents in China, and it was the best UE middle platform he had ever seen.

Nowadays, multi-terminal games are becoming more and more popular because of the performance of mobile phones. There are even many people who have begun to discuss, simply make the mobile terminal and the PC side into two games, as long as the mobile game can clear the daily life, the complete experience is put on the PC to solve.

It's an imaginative, but it ignores the changing times: now that mobile phones and tablets are capable of covering many people's needs for office and entertainment, more and more young gamers are "native mobile game users" who may not have played games on a PC before, or they don't have a PC yet. Therefore, mobile games pursue better performance and will still have value in the future.

Overall, as the closest domestic large-scale UE5 mobile game to launch, they currently have the potential to raise the visual expression of mobile games to a higher level at the level they have demonstrated during the testing period. Of course, there is still some distance between them and the "best", but they still have a lot of time, and if they can continue to optimize and complete more model adaptations in the future, I really look forward to what kind of height the mobile game visual experience can be brought to by the complete body of the mobile terminal of "Infinite Warmth".

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