Tencent Cloud Showcases Advanced Technologies and Discusses Common Challenges Faced by Global Game Developers at the 2022 Game Developers Conference (GDC)
2022 Game Developers Conference (GDC), the world’s largest and longest-running event serving professionals dedicated to the art and science of making games, was successfully held in San Francisco, USA on March 21-25. The international game developer event was attended by many technology and game companies, as well as tens of thousands of game industry practitioners from all over the world.
Tencent Cloud provides the world's leading products and services in cloud computing, security, AI and big data, empowering many game companies and developers from the globe. At the GDC, Tencent Cloud showcased its advanced game products such as Game Multimedia Engine (GME), mobile game security solution Anti-Cheat Expert (ACE) and game quality assurance solution WeTest, sharing experiences of global games publishing and discussing a number of issues with global developers:
How to enhance the player's immersive game experience?
How to ensure global players can communicate seamlessly in the game?
How to better publish a game globally?
How to combat the rising trend of global game cheats?
How to help mobile game developers improve players’ performance experience?
As a leading game voice solution provider, Tencent Cloud introduced its NextGen in-game voice chat experience and solution, combining various capabilities and technologies of GME and Tencent Ethereal Audio Lab, to global game developers at the event.
How to enhance the player's immersive experience in the game?
Anthony Siu, Head of Ecosystems and Partnerships at Tencent Cloud International, revealed the voice technologies behind GME at GDC.
When it comes to game voice interaction, ensuring a clear and smooth voice quality is key. In early 2022, Tencent Ethereal Audio Lab, the real-time audio processing team behind GME, participated in the "Deep Noise Suppression (DNS) Challenge 2022" organized by ICASSP and Microsoft, and won the first place in real-time personalized speech enhancement track 2 competition in real-time across the full frequency band, and reached the best level in the two core single indicators of sound quality and recognition rate respectively. Leveraging thousands of hours of speech noise data, Tencent Ethereal Audio Lab has successfully eliminated more than 300 kinds of environmental noises through deep learning and AI algorithms. Tencent Ethereal Audio Lab’s industry-leading audio processing technologies, including the personalized audio enhancement based on voiceprint and real-time 3D audio virtualization, have been adopted in GME’s real-time voice chat and served numerous clients in the game industry. Players can listen to the realistic and crystal-clear audio in in-game communication. Despite the remote connection, the gamers can hear their friends like they are just next to them.
Tencent Ethereal Audio Lab
Real-time personalized speech enhancement competition results
In addition to providing players with a smooth and low-latency voice chat experience, GME has also launched a unique solution "GME for Wwise" in conjunction with the Wwise engine, which not only fundamentally solves the problems of sound effect decline caused by volume type switching in traditional voice solutions but have also unlocked a series of new gameplays for game voice. Player voice streams are seamlessly connected to the Wwise audio pipeline, making player voice a part of game sound design, allowing game audio engineers and developers to creatively process player voice. For example, the voice can be specially designed according to some personality and state changes of the player in the game scene, and the vibrato can be designed to express the pain of the player after being hit by an opponent.
An overseas game developer experiences the GME Demo effects at the booth.
Can mobile, PC, VR and other types of games build game voice functions?
In his presentation, Anthony highlighted three major trends in the global game market in recent years: mobile games are growing rapidly; PC and console games still account for a large and stable proportion; and VR games have also started to rise. Many game developers have these questions in mind: How can smooth voice communication be achieved even when players log in through different terminals and devices? How can a full-coverage in-game social experience be created? And with thousands of device models on the market, how can they be compatible? Apparently, cross-platform interoperability has become a challenge that developers need to face, and GME has strong multi-terminal compatibility, helping games of all types and terminals to quickly build game voice functions.
At the end of his presentation, Anthony also mentioned that GME provides corresponding solutions for different game types. Whether you are a developer of FPS, MOBA, RPG, board game, open world, VR or other types of games, GME can help you quickly complete the construction of your game’s voice function.
Anthony Siu, Head of Ecosystems and Partnerships at Tencent Cloud International, introduces the NextGen In-game voice chat experience and solution.
How to ensure a transnational borderless communication for worldwide gamers in the game?
Backed by Tencent Cloud’s over 2,800 CDN nodes deployed in more than 70 countries and regions, GME enables nearby access to provide low-latency and lag-free real-time voice chat service. At the same time, GME is also compatible with over 20,000 device models, which perfectly adapts to the complex diversity of models and networks worldwide.
Moreover, GME also offers a solution to multilingual communication scenarios. Its voice messaging and speech-to-text conversion features support 125 languages, implementing barrier-free communications among global players. Tencent Cloud’s game voice solution GME has already served more than 6,000 global game customers.
Amid the rising concerns on game security and growing demands for game experience, Tencent Cloud specifically highlighted two game products, Anti-Cheat Expert (ACE) and WeTest Game Quality Assurance, and shared Tencent Games’ rich experience in anti-cheat solution and game quality assurance in presentations titled “How Tencent Protects Worldwide FPS Games with Advanced
Anti-Cheat Solutions” and “PerfDog: A Full Mobile Platform Performance Test & Analysis Solution”.
How to combat the new rising trend of global game cheating?
Cheatware has long been plaguing the game industry. Xin Li, a Security Product Expert of ACE said that the number of cheats is increasing exponentially, and the number of detected cheats exceeded 18,000 in 2021. Meanwhile, the battle against cheating is getting tougher as the technology used in the cheatware continuously advances with updates rolling out frequently. The cheat functions are innovating constantly and the mechanism is also getting more unpredictable. For instance, some players take advantage of their team member’s activation of cheating to achieve victory, instead of using the cheatware themselves (so-called trailers). Take PUBG Mobile as an example: Tencent has detected a fourfold increase in the number of cheats, but ACE helped PUBGM decrease the number of reported cheats by 50-90% in 2021, showing a very prominent effectiveness.
Another expert engineer of ACE, Qingbai Peng, shared the evolving trends of cheating in FPS games and ACE’s automated evidence-collecting system designed specifically for FPS games. For example, the ESP (extra sensory perception) function will retrieve and tag the locations of the enemies. The exposure of this information is unavoidable since the game client must obtain the enemy’s in-game location. Besides this type of cheating mechanism, ACE also detected another cloud cheatware, which automatically downloads the newest shellcode upon execution and alters the VAD tree by hiding the shellcode in another memory block. This cheatware has no characteristics in terms of strings, which makes its visibility harder and raises the difficulty and cost of countering this type of cheats by analyzing the major codes.
Facing such conditions in fighting against cheatware, Anti-Cheat Expert has set up a one-stop evidence collection platform and automated analysis system – ACE Tianyan. This system is equipped with brand-new core technological functions, such as precisely capturing the shellcode of cheatware, monitoring key data reading and writing, automatically analyzing the drawing method, etc. By testing the cheatware once, the system can automatically produce an analysis of the operating mechanism of the cheat, maximizing the efficiency in distinguishing and providing evidence of cheatware usage.
Tom Petreca, Lead Technology Strategist of Tencent Cloud International, introduced the establishment of this structured anti-cheat solution developed by the ACE team for game developers worldwide. The solution includes functions such as threshold protection, loopholes discovery, collecting and monitoring of cheatware, analysis and dynamic countering of customized cheats, combat by Replay tactics, player operations and risk management strategies, etc.
How to support mobile game developers in Game Quality Assurance?
According to Newzoo, in 2021 the mobile game market worldwide already accounted for 52 percent of the global game market. As mobile gameplay gets more innovative and more diverse, there is a higher demand for the rendering performance and quality of the game client. At the same time, gamers' tolerance for issues such as freezes, forced quits, and crashes during the game is getting lower. In the presentation, Petreca introduced PerfDog, a sublime tool developed by WeTest, to game developers worldwide.
Since November 2019, PerfDog has been specializing in exploring user scenarios and launched the PerfDog and PerfDog Service in different occasions to offer game developers an accurate performance indicator with plug-and-play and a less than one percent performance loss rate. In the meantime, based on the profound experience gained from serving hundreds of Tencent’s mobile games, PerfDog can show parametric data to game developers, such as screenshots, FPS, Jank, FTime, CPU, GPU, Memory, Battery, Network, CTemp, etc. Currently, PerfDog has active users around the globe, serving around 500,000 developers and having up to a thousand collaborating parties. Petreca also mentioned that PerfDog would soon support an in-depth analysis function, which will enable games from performance testing to in-depth analysis, from operating system to engine. It will display CPU scheduling, thread status, function-level execution time and call stack information. These functions help game developers to quickly position on codes that needs to be optimized.
Tencent Cloud provides strong support for game companies
Following the players’ rising demand on boutique games and the industry’s increasing sourcing cost, the game industry has entered an era in which strengthening innovation and improving operations are paramount. Based on its technological innovation in the game industry, profound experience in R&D and operation and an extensive network around the globe, Tencent Cloud strongly backs up game companies in areas, such as recruiting users, improving the R&D and operation efficiency of games and making them available overseas, by providing Tencent Cloud’s Gaming Solution which is particularly designed for games.
In the future, Tencent Cloud will continue to provide more comprehensive gaming solutions to the game industry in different gaming aspects, such as basic resources, deployment, big data and sales & marketing, and experience enhancement. This simplifies the research and operation of games and allows companies to concentrate on developing game contents and gameplay, collaboratively promoting the steady development of the game industry.