Simulation / Modeling / Design

Behind the scenes of Kingsoft Seasun’s JX3 Online

At GTC CHINA – taking place December 16-19 at Suzhou Jinji Lake International Conference Center – Young Yang from NVIDIA, and Ming Dong from Kingsoft, will explain how JX3 Online is using ray tracing for the first time to deliver a top-tier visual experience.

JX3 Online combines world-building with martial arts to provide a game experience like no other. Kingsoft Seasun, the team’s developer, spent six years building the game before launching it.

In advance of their GTC China talk, we talked to Kingsoft Seasun about the project.

NVIDIA:  How has your audience responded to the new, ray-traced look of JX3?

Kingsoft: Most gamers think the image quality has been improved significantly, but some gamers feel they don’t have good enough hardware, and they hope we can focus more on optimization. Overall, players expect to experience a leap in image quality brought by Ray Tracing.

NVIDIA: How did real-time ray tracing improve the look of reflections and caustics in JX3?

Kingsoft:  The scenes and characters will have more realistic reflections, the textures will be improved, and the picture has a “superb feeling”, according to our players.

NVIDIA: JX3 is the first Vulkan game built in China to support ray tracing. Why did your team decide to make this graphical jump?

Kingsoft: We hope to implement cross-platform through Vulkan, and at the same time, we can do ray tracing development on Vulkan.

NVIDIA: Has real-time ray tracing helped drive new players to the game?

Kingsoft: It will attract some high-end users to come in and experience the game. Players in other games will also go to JX3 to see the effects after they have equipped their PCs with NVIDIA RTX GPUs.

NVIDIA: Which environments in the game benefited most from real-time ray tracing?

Kingsoft: The indoor scenes, near the water surface, and the player ’s clothes. We have a lot of translucent materials such as metal and silk. These are very laborious to draw with traditional rasterization methods. With ray tracing, the translucency material performance can be greatly improved. Translucent shadows, translucent AO, transparent and opaque effects, etc. will be published one by one after the ray tracing system is online.

NVIDIA: Which materials were most challenging to work with when real-time ray tracing was turned on?

Kingsoft: The translucent Mila satin is the most difficult ray tracing effect. It is very difficult to achieve in the game and the area is very large.

NVIDIA: How were you able to balance ray-tracing graphical innovations with performance?

Kingsoft: At present, the area is limited, and the player is only drawing RT on their own client. I hope that with the progress of the optimization, the entire game can be gradually covered by RT.

NVIDIA: Your situation is unique in that you are converting a pre-existing game to support ray tracing. If you had built the game from the ground up with ray-tracing in mind, what would you have done differently?

Kingsoft: I guess we would make a game with simpler scene structures, and lots of mirrors and water.

NVIDIA: Can you provide any tips for other developers who are looking to add real-time ray-tracing to their pre-existing titles?

Kingsoft: Control the size of the light chase and the number of objects participating in the RT reflection. The cost of translucency is still high. Use it with caution.

NVIDIA: What has been made easier for your team with the integration of real-time ray tracing?

Kingsoft: After integrating RT, our video group and players can use ray tracing to output better posts and videos, and the quality will be close to CG rendering. This is good for game development and operational promotion.

NVIDIA: Which scenes/environments are particularly optimal for real-time ray tracing?

Kingsoft: Waterside, smooth interior, and the player’s selfie mode. Players can actively control the quality and range of the RT. The selfie mode does not require high frame rates.

NVIDIA: Are you adding real-time ray tracing to any other games in your current portfolio?

Kingsoft: The Legend of Xie Yun Liu, which is using the same engine as JX3

NVIDIA Will all new Kingsoft games on PC support real-time ray tracing?

Kingsoft: Should be.

NVIDIA: What real-time ray tracing effect are you most excited to show off in JX3?

Kingsoft: Support for our translucent clothing. And we have a large number of video editor players, which can use RT to output a lot of high-quality video. With an annual output of 5,000 short films, I hope to have 1w RTX videos in the future

NVIDIA: How have you used DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) in JX3?

Kingsoft: Integration is still WIP and has not been officially opened, the effect is quite good, it has wonderful effects on 4K.


To learn more about JX3 Online, please consider attending GTC CHINA, or go to Next Studios’ website: http://jx3.xoyo.com/

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