"Come on, everything's set up, right? Ah one, ah two, ah three, let's begin!"
"Boom--"
The several sets of speakers, as large as small mountains, suddenly burst into a huge sound, but amidst the loud noise, an extremely catchy and rhythmic melody also followed.
This is a piece of music composed by Lin Lixin himself.
While perhaps not as uniquely personal as Hans Zimmer, his professionalism is absolutely unquestionable.
These days in Hollywood, it's not hard to find a few rock musicians.
Lin Lixin didn't even need to personally search for suitable candidates; there were many talented people among Gamenova's partners alone.
Keanu Reeves started playing bass as early as 1987, and according to the original timeline, he would have formed his own band called Dogstar in 1991.
Before becoming a superstar with " The Matrix," this guy actually did hold various tours and even released his own albums.
Johnny Depp is in the same boat; outside of acting, his biggest dream is actually to become a rock star.
He's been playing guitar on his own since he was a child, and has been involved in bands for a long time, so his skills are quite good.
As for Lin Lixin and Hans Zimmer, the two professional players, there's no need to say more. They just messed around a bit, and unexpectedly, they actually put together a decent rock band.
"Call--"
As the music ended, Lin Lixin let out a long sigh of relief and nodded in satisfaction.
"This is our Supernova Band's first single, ' Supernova.' What do you all think?"
"F**king marvelous!!"
Keanu cheered, seemingly still immersed in the melody he had just heard.
As a bassist by trade, Lin's compositions have a very strong baseline presence, which Keanu really enjoyed playing with.
"Hahaha... That's great, that's the bass! It's awesome!"
Lin Lixin laughed heartily, then his eyes lit up when he caught a glimpse of the helpless Sam and the Asia man in his thirties standing not far away.
" Yu Suzuki, welcome."
In Lin Lixin's view, Yu Suzuki's panel was displayed, and unsurprisingly, it was indeed much higher than that of the young genius, Yuji Naka.
[ Yu Suzuki ] [Overall Rating]: S+ (King of Motion Sensing)
[Programming Development]: 89 (Growth Value: a)
[Game Design]: 108 (Growth Value: S-)
[Graphic Design]: 72 (Growth Value: b)
[Hardware Design]: 114 (Growth Value: S+)
[Series Composition]: 101 (Growth Value: s)
[Social Skills]: 86 (Growth Value: a)
It's clear that computer graphics and programming are his two biggest weaknesses.
This is exactly the opposite of what Yuji Naka did.
That's understandable.
Yu Suzuki is not a "genius" in the traditional sense. On the contrary, he is actually a very traditional and capable person.
With an engineering background, he wrote a large amount of code himself when he first entered the industry in the 1980s.
But now, with the gradual maturation of am2, he no longer needs to write code himself.
There has definitely been a decline in ability, but even with that decline, the foundation is still there, and it won't be lower than that of an average person.
In this respect, he certainly couldn't compare to a genius, monster programmer like Yuji Naka.
But his greatest strengths are actually in hardware capabilities and game design.
From 1983 to the present, he has been responsible for almost all of Sega's blockbuster products.
While Atari was still working on its Night Driver, Sega had already created a next-generation racing game like Outrun.
Motorcycles also have innovative motion-sensing features like "hang-on".
Not to mention After Burner, the predecessor to Ace Combat.
This is a rare talent within Sega, and even in the entire industry, who is proficient in both hardware and software.
And in a few more years, the world's first 3D fighting game, * Virtua Fighter *, and Sega's eternal swan song, * Shenmue *, will also be released. This is something Lin Lixin greatly admires.
Yu Suzuki is truly an "artist" with his own set of goals.
They are willing to invest nearly 70 million US dollars to create a top-tier work of the caliber of Shenmue.
Unfortunately, due to design flaws, it failed to achieve the same success as Morality and Rule of Law, and instead became a major blow to Sega's fortunes.
It received critical acclaim but failed to attract customers, and it also devoured a large amount of resources from Dreamcast, which was already at a disadvantage.
It would be unserious to say that Sega's console business declined without the influence of Shenmue.
But it is indeed a great work.
Lin Lixin's eyes flickered as he closed the panel.
With Gamenova backing it up this time, will Shenmue follow the same old path?
He didn't know, nor did he intend to prematurely kill the project because of its commercial potential.
Sega may not Shenmue Shenmue, but the world does.
The failure of Shenmue was not just a matter of positioning, but more so due to Sony's exaggerated offensive. In the era when it was born, even Nintendo, the absolute hegemon of the 1980s, was unable to go head-to-head with Sony.
The PS1 and PS2 were simply devastating.
It wasn't the main culprit that destroyed Sega, but it was certainly Sega's last-ditch effort against an invincible opponent like Sony.
" Zimmer, why don't you take the guys to the recording studio to practice? While you're at it, write some songs yourself. We can't have all the music for our first album written by me."
Lin Lixin waved to Hans Zimmer, signaling him to take the others to play first.
"We also need to start preparing for project approval."
"Good."
Upon receiving instructions, the group didn't delay and immediately began packing up and leaving, bringing peace back to the chaotic development department.
Lin Lixin looked at Yu Suzuki, who was still standing there at a loss, and said:
"President Nakayama should have told you everything, right?"
"Yes, Mr. Lin, a new flight shooting arcade game with motion controls?"
"That's right, but it might not be what you think." Lin Lixin nodded, gesturing for Yu Suzuki to follow him.
He stopped in front of his workstation and pulled up a program that he had written in advance.
The entire screen was divided into numerous windows, each with something resembling a progress bar and a bunch of meaningless values.
Before Yu Suzuki could ask any questions, Lin Lixin began importing a file.
Then...
"Boom--"
Loud music blared from the speakers.
Lin Lixin quickly adjusted the volume to make sure he and Yu Suzuki wouldn't be deafened.
Several windows on the screen began to fluctuate to varying degrees, with parameters jumping wildly.
"This is... a computer program that analyzes music?"
"Pretty much, FFT (Fast Fourier Transform), which can analyze the spectrum of music into data that is easy for me to process."
Lin Lixin pointed to two low-frequency bands on the screen, "Look, you can clearly see the frequencies of the drums and bass here."
That's very interesting.
Regardless of the type of music, once processed in this way, its current characteristics can be directly analyzed using spectral density.
Computers don't have ears.
To make it "understand music", a lot of mathematical processing is required.
Please, math is really a rock and roll, punk thing.
"Look, even if we turn off the speaker output now, we can easily tell from this spectrum display that... the guitar solo is coming."
"So you mean you can analyze the composition and distribution of musical instruments? I see..."
Yu Suzuki nodded, looking intently at the numbers on the screen.
In addition to the spectrum, he also noted several different parameters.
"Bpm... is this for measuring beat?"
"Yes, this is actually something we learned in the ' Patapon ' project. It can dynamically analyze the beat and rhythm of music, and it's also one of the important indicators of this analysis tool. However, besides FFT and beat, there's another very crucial parameter." Lin Lixin pointed to the waveform graph in the corner.
"I call this RMS, root mean square, or average 'energy'."
Its principle is actually much simpler than the other two; it simply checks the real-time volume of the music and calculates the average value.
But its role is key to this new project.
Looking at the parameters on the screen, Yu Suzuki suddenly guessed why Lin Lixin had called him here.
If we combine all these metrics with the arcade cabinet itself...
"Let the motion-sensing frame actively coordinate with the rhythm! My God, I should have thought of that sooner!"
Yu Suzuki felt a buzzing sound in his head, and his thoughts instantly became much clearer.
music!
I've been ignoring this all along.
Even when MJ collaborated with Sonic the Hedgehog, he never considered music to be anything special.
But looking at these parameters, he suddenly felt a strange sense of enlightenment. Rhythm is the best partner for tactile sensation!
Imagine connecting these parameters directly to his magnificent R360 chassis.
When the music is intense, the frame will vibrate violently, and the intensity of the vibration can vary depending on the energy.
When the rhythm changes, the frame can also rotate actively to match.
When the rhythm perfectly matches the body's sensations, the sense of immersion will experience a tremendous breakthrough like never before.
The new game is a rhythm game.
Lin Lixin began to explain,
"We originally planned to use the approach we took with ' Rocksmith,' creating corresponding sheet music for each song and having the composers collaborate with the songwriters."
"But later I discovered that doing it this way would have a very awkward problem: players would have to wait for a sheet music artist to create the score before they could play a song, which is just too inelegant."
"And then what happens after we have this system?"
Lin Lixin's lips curled into a smile, and Yu Suzuki, having glimpsed a corner of the future from his words, replied with a serious expression:
"Players can play any music... no longer needing official intervention, but all analyzed by the program." Whether it's metal or R&B, jazz or synthwave...
Regardless of time period, place, language, or style...
As long as it is passed to this computer program via a storage medium...
It can generate matching data in real time.
The key is to map this data into the game and make it correspond to the game content.
For example, the energy of music represents the strength of a weapon, and the frequency band corresponds to enemies and various flashy special effects...
"That's right, that's the core idea behind our project."
Lin Lixin smiled and wrote down the project's code name on the paper.
[Beat hazard]
Beat Hazard