After spending several days visiting the state government and several contractors, we actually found a suitable site.
The archipelago, comprised of several relatively small Delta, is legal and compliant according to official requirements and does not involve any ecological protection issues.
With the Gamenova brand, the legitimacy of their business was practically guaranteed.
The flood and dock issues, which would normally require a great deal of effort to handle, were resolved directly.
This was originally a project slated for development, with most of the infrastructure in good condition. It only needed some finishing touches before it could be put into use immediately.
If Lin Lixin and the others are willing, they can even bring their equipment and move over right now.
The only problem is that the communication network isn't connected yet.
Nexus can handle this part of the work itself, so there's no need to worry about it.
One has to admire the quality of Lucasfilm's props team.
In just one week, they had set up one of the deserted islands from scratch.
Of course, it's basically a trick for visual effects only, capable of fooling the camera.
If a tourist were to land, the deception would be immediately apparent. Everywhere there are walls and fake sets made of colored boards.
To fool people, the props team alone is far from enough; we'll have to wait until Umbrella Corporation has fully started construction before we can say anything.
Having experience in building Western-style mansions, these people are well-suited to working on the "myst" project.
As for other infrastructure issues, they were all handed over to outsourced infrastructure companies.
Once the payment was received, the equipment was transported to the dock and loaded onto the ship that same day.
A massive project involving thousands of people is quite a sight to behold when it actually gets underway.
"It's much more lively than I expected."
Lin Lixin gazed at the ships carrying supplies in the distance.
This project is definitely going to be a long-term project.
After all, it's not like a mansion where you can just do the renovations. I estimate that even if you only solve the basic construction and get the film and television base running, it will take at least a year.
Fortunately, the core components required by the game "myst" can be handled by the item team to prevent slowing down the progress.
After all, they needed to create a complete model for the game. Having a realistic archipelago in the background makes the 3D space design feel more natural.
"Yes, just put a broken stone pillar here... Don't you have any leftover sets from the Raiders of the Lost Ark movie? If you do, just bring them over from the warehouse."
The props team was frantically setting up the studio, their faces flushed with excitement.
Fortunately, filming for " Raiders of the Lost Ark " only took a year, and many of the items are still safely stored in the warehouse.
They can be brought directly from Hollywood and put into use immediately.
"Putting such a vast world into a single game disc, including a large amount of live-action FMV footage, is a huge undertaking, both for the production and development teams."
Looking at the bustling scene, Lucas couldn't help but sigh.
Don't be fooled by the fact that each island isn't very large; there are a lot of puzzles and traps set up on them.
In order to realize the pre-rendered 3D world that Lin Lixin wanted.
Each location requires a fixed camera position to take a large number of photos for post-production compositing.
The sheer size of this island alone is terrifying, as one can foresee.
According to Lin Lixin, the entire game will have about five chapters, which is roughly five times the amount of content. Just thinking about it is quite exaggerated.
"Indeed."
Lin Lixin nodded in agreement.
Fortunately, we had already resolved this part of the problem in advance.
Without previous research on the Vorbis compression algorithm and video compression algorithms, this project would probably have been quite difficult to complete.
But things are better now.
This isn't the first time Gamenova has used live-action FMV footage in games.
While not quite a master, he was certainly quite adept at it.
From Command & Conquer to Biohazard, and now Need for Speed.
Gamenova has its own complete technology stack for fitting as much video as possible into a limited space.
Its audio capabilities are truly unparalleled in the industry.
After years of iteration, Vorbis can achieve near-invisible lossy compression. It can easily compress to one-tenth the size of the master tape while maintaining quality, and even go further by individually adapting feature extraction for different audio files.
With such a sophisticated technology library, it is indeed feasible to pack so much information onto a single CD.
"Capacity isn't really an issue; the current specifications are sufficient. What I'm truly worried about is something else."
"Is there any problem in this world that you can't solve?"
Lucas turned to look at Lin Lixin, somewhat puzzled.
If he had to choose the most reliable person, Lucas would unhesitatingly put Lin Lixin first, even his own father would have to take a backseat.
If even this gentleman is troubled by a problem, how serious must it be?
"I... I can handle it, but the problem isn't with me."
Lin Lixin watched as the photographers frantically burned through their film.
"The real bottleneck... is actually the CD-ROM drive. Software problems can always be solved, but hardware problems can't."
How so?
"The CD drive head's read/write speed is too slow," Lin Lixin sighed.
This can be considered a pitfall that Gamenova dug for itself during its rapid early development.
The widespread use of CD-ROMs is indeed a great thing, but this has also become a constraint.
People who own CD players are unlikely to easily spend an expensive amount of money to buy a new one.
Existing optical disc drives have very limited read speeds.
This is actually the main reason why optical discs have been gradually phased out by SSDs in modern times.
Even the most optimized mechanical motion cannot match the near-instantaneous read speeds of a semiconductor like an SSD.
In terms of random read/write capabilities, both magnetic tapes and optical discs, these sequential storage media, perform disastrously.
For a CD-ROM drive to read files from a CD, it needs the rotation of the spindle and the movement of the read/write head.
The speed at which the read/write head moves and the rotational speed of the optical disc determine the upper limit of its reading speed.
CDs were created for music.
It also performs best in music playback. Because music is sequential content, the CD player can start reading from one place and continue reading until the end, with almost no need to consider changing positions.
But video games are a completely different matter.
It's possible that the data was at the end of the disc one moment, and then it's required to read the data at the beginning the next.
The loading speed was incredibly slow.
Based on the specifications of currently popular CD players, the maximum read speed is only about 150kb/s.
This is truly a matter of life and death.
Even now, in an era when semiconductors are still quite underdeveloped, hard drives can still achieve read speeds of 5MB/s.
To improve the reading speed of a CD/DVD drive, you must Kung-Fu Master on both the spindle speed and the head movement speed.
However, both of these are limited by materials science and mechanical engineering, which are precisely the most difficult paths in the human technology tree.
If the speed is even slightly increased, the powerful centrifugal force and vibration will turn the reading process into a disaster.
The discs can also become severely warped.
According to laboratory results, reaching 2x speed is already the limit for civilian use. Going any higher would make it difficult to guarantee stability, and it can only be used for scientific research and extreme situations.
Even the double-speed version faces numerous difficulties in its rollout.
To reiterate, if single-speed playback works, why spend so much money to buy double-speed playback?
Before this, Lin Lixin's solution was... no solution.
Because both Hermes and NX have sufficiently large amounts of RAM and video memory.
As long as you cache what you need in advance, you won't experience a severe sense of disconnect most of the time.
It's very green, but it works very well.
But this time, this plan is not working.
The amount of data is too large.
The number of registers specified in the machine is insufficient.
Are you suggesting players upgrade their video memory and RAM by 4MB just to play this game?
That was truly hideous. Lucas nodded thoughtfully.
As a pioneering producer, his understanding of computer technology is not particularly superficial.
"What about pre-fetching? Loading and caching the data in advance?"
"Congratulations, you've caught up with our technology from a few years ago."
Lin Lixin made a joke, then shook his head.
"If that solves it, that would be great; the cache capacity is insufficient."
"Okay, I was just saying it offhand."
Lucas shrugged. "Let professionals do what they're good at."
Take him for example. As a producer, managing the filming location well is considered a great achievement.
"Pile all that foam board in the shed on higher ground; it's too damp here..."
He directed a group of people to tidy up the mess scattered on the ground.
Lin Lixin, watching the busy crowd, suddenly had a glint in his eyes. "Hey, I should have thought of that sooner."
What happened this time?
"Optimization? I know how to solve this at the software level."
Lin Lixin looked at the scattered pieces on the ground.
"Our game compilation has always been handled by the compiler, which performs thorough low-level processing of the file system to improve game performance."
"This setup is like... like an engineer and his workbench, with wrenches, screwdrivers, and drill bits scattered everywhere."
"Although it looks messy, the engineers know where everything is and can reach it within easy reach, making them incredibly efficient."
"We can start here: have his mother clean up the workbench."
Listening to Lin Lixin's words, Lucas blinked, completely confused.
Lin Lixin wasn't in a hurry and patiently explained to him:
"You see, Mom and this engineer have different ways of thinking. They sacrifice a little bit of readily available convenience in exchange for extremely rigid 'neatness'."
"The data for the first level is placed in the resource pack for the first level. Within this resource pack, images are grouped together, and sounds are grouped together as well." "In this way, when players enter a scene, most of the resources are tightly packed or even arranged consecutively."