The 2022 Game Developers Conference (GDC) will be held in San Francisco from March 21 to 25. Oculus, Meta, Wemade, Unity, Amazon, Microsoft and many other tech and gaming companies are participating, and tens of thousands of game industry professionals from around the world are in attendance.
As a leading game voice interactive service provider, GME, the game multimedia engine of Tencent Cloud, had a face-to-face chat with developers around the world about these issues:
1) How to improve the player’s immersive experience in the game?
2) How can global players communicate in the game?
3) How will my game project be released globally or shipped?
FIG. 1 Tencent Cloud GME answers developers’ questions one by one at GDC San Francisco.
How to enhance the player’s immersive experience?
Anthony Siu, director of Cloud ecosystem technology at Tencent, gave a talk at GDC, revealing the voice core technology behind GME, a gaming multimedia engine.
In terms of voice interaction in games, how to ensure clear and smooth voice quality is a key problem. At the beginning of 2022, Tencent Teana Lab, the real-time audio processing team behind GME, participated in the “DNS 2022 Deep Learning Noise Reduction Challenge” jointly initiated by ICASSP and Microsoft, and won the first total score in the full-band real-time personalized Voice Enhancement Track 2 competition. And in the two core single indicators of sound quality and recognition rate have reached the best level respectively. Tencent Tianlai Lab has successfully eliminated more than 300 kinds of ambient noise through deep learning and AI algorithms, based on thousands of hours of voice noise data. The industry’s top audio processing technologies, such as personalized voice enhancement based on voice print and real-time voice 3D virtualization, have been applied to GME real-time voice, serving the vast number of customers in the game industry, allowing game players to truly and clearly hear conversations, while remote connection with friends seems close to their ears.
FIG. 3· Real-time personalized voice enhancement competition results
In addition to providing players with a smooth and low-delay voice experience, GME also launched a unique solution “GME for Wwise” in collaboration with Wwise engine, which not only fundamentally solved the problems of volume jump and sound quality decline caused by the switch of volume type in traditional voice solutions, but also unlocked a series of new game voice gameplay. The player voice stream is seamlessly plugged into the Wwise audio pipeline, making voice a part of the game’s sound design so that game audiologists and developers can creatively manipulate player voice. For example, the voice can be specially designed according to the character and state changes of the player in the game scene, and the tremolo can be designed to express the pain of the player after being hit by the opponent.
Will mobile, PC, VR and other types of games be able to build game voice?
In his talk, Anthony Siu also mentioned three trends in the global gaming market in recent years: mobile games are growing rapidly, PC and console games are still dominant and stable, and VR games are starting to take off.
Figure 4. Global gaming market revenue trends in recent years, Source: Pelham Smithers and Bloomberg, 2019
FIG. 5 Anthony Siu, Technical Director of Tencent Cloud Ecology, introduces “Voice experience and Solutions for the next generation of games”
Many game developers have two questions: How can voice communication be smooth when players log in from different terminals and devices? How to build an in-game social experience with full coverage? There are thousands of models on the market, how to compatibility and adaptation? Obviously, cross-platform interoperability is a challenge for developers, and GME has the ability to quickly build voice features across all genres and platforms.
At the end of his GDC talk, Anthony mentioned that GME offers solutions for different types of games. Whether you’re a developer of FPS, MOBA, RPG, board game, open world, VR, etc., GME can help you quickly build voice features in your game.
How to ensure that global players can communicate with each other across borders?
GME, the game multimedia engine, is based on the global infrastructure architecture of Tencent Cloud, covering 70+ available areas and 2800+ acceleration nodes. It helps many overseas games to realize the nearby access of players and enables them to experience real-time voice services with low delay and no delay. At the same time, GME can be adapted to more than 20,000 device models, perfect for the world’s complex models and network conditions, for developers to ease the worry.
In addition, GME also provides multilingual communication scenarios, which can convert voice messages and real-time voice streams into text, supporting up to 125 languages, providing low delay return speed and high accuracy recognition results, helping to achieve cross-regional and cross-cultural barrier-free communication in games, truly achieving globalization.
Figure 6. GME serves global gamers
GME has served over 6,000 domestic and overseas game clients.
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