Cocos. When I first heard this term, my first reaction was “coconut.”
However, Cocos is actually a digital interactive content development platform company that provides open-source digital engines, development tools, and other solutions. In short, they make basic digital engines. Actually, at this point, I believe most people still don’t know what Cocos does. Let me put it this way, have you played “Fishing Joy”, “Happy Elimination”, or have you seen others play these games before? No? Then what about “Journey to the West”, “The King of Fighters”, and “Game of Thrones”? You must have heard of them, right? They all use the Cocos game engine.
What is a game engine?
In Cocos’ words:
The so-called game engine can be understood as a tool software similar to Office or Photoshop, which empowers developers.
Still don’t understand? Then you can open B station, directly search for Cocos. You will see them live, teaching you how to use Cocos’ engine to develop and produce games. And producing these useful tools and platforms is their main work.
Imaginations open up a bit, we are the new energy vehicle channel, why would I talk about game engines for no reason? I am a very professional auto person!
What is Cocos?
Before we move on to the car part, everyone calm down, we need to first understand what Cocos does.
To answer this question, we can actually imagine ourselves as the director of a movie, and how to make a good movie is our job content. In principle, making a good movie is similar to making a good game.
After confirming the script (world view/storyline) and doing all the preparation work, we need to enter the filming stage. Theoretically, it is best to use one’s own scene to shoot one’s own movie, but to be honest, not everyone is like Chen Kaige, who can find a very rich investor to support you to buy land from scratch and build a construction scene that costs tens of billions.
So, the filming of most movies is actually in someone else’s location, such as the very famous Hengdian Film and Television City, Shanghai Film and Television Park, Changying Century City, and so on. Despite borrowing someone else’s scene, the soft furnishings, props, costumes of the scene can be changed, or I can find someone to make them. This ensures that I can use the platform provided by the film base to complete the filming of a movie with lower costs.In game development, apart from interesting plots and world settings, the most important thing is to use technical means to create and showcase them in the virtual world for users. At this stage, a problem similar to that of movie production arises – whether to choose to invest in creating an engine to support game development or simply use mature game engines and accompanying tools to achieve game production faster and at lower cost.
In fact, both options have always existed. For instance, game companies like Chen Kaige’s use self-developed game engines for all-around control, while most game companies actually choose to develop games based on existing and more universal game engines. This not only ensures that their games have top quality from the beginning, but also saves the huge capital and time investment required in building a game engine.
Meanwhile, Cocos, Unity 3D, and Unreal are the three major game engines in the world. Therefore, we can see Cocos as a “world-class film and TV base” that provides rich services such as tools for game production. By the way, many special effects, monsters, and so on in movies are now produced using these game engines, which is a track that future game engines will focus on.
Advantages of Cocos
Complete game production tools and services
Cocos has a long history, dating back to 2010, and has been around for 12 years now. When Cocos was just getting started, its founder was determined to create a global game engine. As a result, there was no Chinese language documentation for Cocos at the beginning, which led to many people not realizing that it was a purely domestic engine.
During Cocos’s 12 years of development, it has improved its entire range of game production services, from development tool Cocos Creator to tool library Cocos Store. Developers can get one-stop services from Cocos. Furthermore, Cocos actively promotes the use of this tool set and helps developers become familiar with and adept at using it, as can be seen from Cocos’s conscientious live streams on Bilibili.
Large number of developers
Cocos has a large, active community of developers on Bilibili and abroad, contributing to Cocos’s development, support, and optimization.After years of accumulation, Cocos now supports all major platforms, including Web, iOS, Android, Windows, Mac OS, XR, and various small game platforms. It is worth mentioning that Cocos is the first game engine to support HarmonyOS and has deep cooperation with Huawei Hisilicon.
Games developed with the Cocos engine cover all product categories and account for 40% of the domestic market share and 20% of the global market share in the mobile game market.
Cocos’ customers include many game giants at home and abroad, covering 203 countries and regions around the world, such as Tencent, Netease, Shengqu, Lilith Games, 37 Interactive Entertainment, Giant Network, and Palm Fun overseas, such as Nintendo, Ubisoft, LINE, BANDAI NAMCO, and SQAURE ENIX. So far, Cocos has more than 1.5 million registered developers worldwide, covering more than 1.6 billion end-users worldwide.
The perfect game creation tools and services, as well as a large number of developers and years of experience in game engine development, have become the unique advantages of Cocos.
Why enter the automotive field?
At the “2022 Automotive Metaverse Cloud Forum” on July 28th, Cocos CEO Lin Shun explained the reasons for entering the automotive cockpit. The first and foremost reason is the hardware computing power of the automotive cockpit chip, which is sufficient to support the content of platform development to achieve richer and more interesting functions than now.
The hardware platform of the car, especially after various OEMs are crazy about chasing the hardware of autonomous driving, suddenly discovered that the next place to roll is the cockpit. Then, starting this year, 8155 began to be the standard configuration for brand flagship models, one is not enough, and two are used. Then Qualcomm’s next-generation cockpit chip 8295 also needs to be “pre-installed”.
At one time, the car machine that had been humiliated for more than ten years suddenly caught up with the phone in terms of cockpit computing power and was considered to be regaining face. Of course, I want to criticize Qualcomm Snapdragon’s flagship chips in recent years, from 888 to 8 Gen 1, which are surprisingly hot, although the “Fire Dragon” blames Samsung’s “5 nm” process, but the fact is too strenuous, which also makes the entire Android camp flagship collectively weakened, and Apple continues to erode the high-end market, even “Fat Brother” (MediaTek) also started to stir, and hits the high-end market for the second time.Talking about in-car systems, besides the underlying support offered by the computing chips, the car cabin also provides a relatively closed environment and the basis for multimodal interaction devices. For example, while a mobile phone has only around twenty sensors, a car has more than ten times as many sensors. Many of these sensors can be linked with various functions of the car cabin, which brings tremendous imagination and innovation opportunities in developing new features.
In addition to furiously piling up chips, automakers are also considering that their car cabins can support more advanced and interesting functions besides displaying navigation and high-resolution movies. There are two main challenges: firstly, building their own ecosystem requires the development of one app after another, which is a tedious and time-consuming task; secondly, with the high computing power of chips, the smoothness of the in-car system is the first level of user requirement, while the second level requirement is for more delicate design and a richer application ecosystem.
As mentioned earlier, one of the advantages of Cocos is the large number of developers distributed worldwide. On one hand, these game companies are actually raring to get on board, so Cocos needs to preemptively claim its place. On the other hand, from the perspective of the end users, carmakers are still “lusting after” Cocos due to its high-quality gaming content distribution platform. Such a high-quality and massive gaming platform is a rare find.
One foreseeable situation is that, as computing power becomes even higher, some classic AAA and mobile games will be the first to be transplanted to the in-car system. This can be seen from the official advertising poster of Tesla’s new Model S Plaid, where Tesla even directly installed the PC’s AMD processor. This big step is perhaps a bit too fast for most carmakers, but the trend is clear: it will be playing games in cars in the future, and they will be high-quality games.
Of course, for now, the most cost-effective solution is still the ideal L9, which projects games directly onto a large screen through a C-to-C cable, fully preserving the richness of content and quality of games, while also permanently resolving authorization issues.When it comes to the landing of the metaverse in vehicles, one of Cocos’ competitors, EPIC, has also entered the automotive market using Unreal Engine, as I have previously reported: “Volvo announced a cooperation with EPIC to use UE5 to develop human-machine interfaces.” The most basic cooperation is to improve the vehicle’s human-machine interaction interface, such as smoothness and rendering effects, including the creation of transitional animations and 3D car models. Furthermore, a closer step is the visualization of autonomous driving. During the meeting, Lin Shun showed us some parts of the content, a large amount of which supports vehicle companies in customization, such as the arrangement of displayed information and placement of architecture within the environment. However, presenting the perceived environment requires vehicle companies to open their interfaces. Virtual brand images are also being carried, with cartoon and Z-generation types having already been developed. Additionally, Lin Shun also demonstrated some of the games that can be played in-vehicle, as well as their in-house developed 3D floating lyrics display. Cocos has accumulated profound technical knowledge in XR, so Lin Shun’s preferred direction of business is actually in the application of AR. This trend is evident from the Mercedes-Benz EQS to the recent RisingAuto R7, and we have already seen the beginning of it. Of course, there is an issue that cannot be ignored: the suspension of game approvals in China since August 2021, which has triggered a winter for the entire domestic gaming industry with thousands of gaming companies going bankrupt, gradually eroding Cocos’ core business. Therefore, expanding the company’s business branches becomes particularly important, and the maturation of intelligent cockpit technology provides Cocos with the opportunity to enter the automotive industry.At the meeting, although Lin Shun did not disclose specific cooperation models or brands, he said that he has cooperated with more than half of the domestic car companies, including joint ventures and independent brands, and many cases are even entering the proof-of-concept (PoC) phase.
Currently, the main focus of Cocos’ cooperation with car companies is still on the car-machine interaction interface, which is consistent with EPIC, its competitor. However, this does not fully demonstrate the power of the “metaverse”.
For example, at Tesla’s AI Day last year, Tesla’s AP software director Ashok Elluswamy emphasized the use of software simulation to create training data by introducing how Tesla built 2,000 miles of roads and even let a group of “couples” and “dogs” run in the middle of the road to simulate the chaotic real world. Many L4 Robotaxi companies also emphasize their virtual driving mileage.
Another example is the application of “digital factories”. To improve production efficiency, ensure production quality and safety, Tesla, General Motors, BMW, and other car companies have adopted this technology. In short, a virtual factory is operated in a virtual world through real-time data feedback. As a manager, you can monitor the progress of parts assembly and employee status anytime, anywhere.
However, Cocos has not yet intervened in autonomous driving training and building a complete digital twin factory within the “metaverse”.
Conclusion
With the advancement of autonomous driving technology, competition in this field has become intense. However, the ability of autonomous driving requires the accumulation of time and mileage to slowly advance the algorithm. At this time, attention from car companies and consumers is shifting from hardware-dominant autonomous driving to the intelligent cockpit used from the moment you get in the car.
Currently, cutting-edge players are rapidly advancing and exploring new interaction methods, such as voice, gesture control, large-screen touch logic, and more. But in reality, it is difficult for the majority of existing car products to reach a first-tier level in basic UI design and virtual imaging in the short term. Thus, companies like Cocos can perfectly fill this gap, providing a high-quality “film and television base” to facilitate car companies in quickly achieving a high level of car-machine status.
Of course, as time goes by, the debate between self-built and cooperation will become more serious. However, this does not prevent car companies from integrating and colliding with various Internet companies in the trend of intelligence, leading to diverse and interesting results.
This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.