Reborn in the red age

On the sofa in the lobby on the first floor, Qingfeng Li discussed in depth with Lei Jun about the future development of the computer industry.

During the conversation, some of the ideas that Lei Jun proposed about the integration of software and hardware, although a little immature, are indeed the future development direction of the industry.

As we chatted, we talked about the current situation of Kingsoft.

Asking for a refill of tea, Li Qingfeng asked, "As far as I know, after Lemon Company turned its attention to the domestic market, the sales of Pangu Office Software, which you invested heavily in, were horrible. Only a few dozen copies were sold nationwide. Do you think you still have a chance in the office software segment?"

After pondering for a long time, Lei Jun smiled bitterly and shook his head slowly: "It's impossible. In the past, your company didn't value the domestic market. When there was no distribution in China, we still had a chance. But now the domestic headquarters of Lemon Company has been established. In the field of Lemon Company's strength, Kingsoft has completely lost its chance."

Kingsoft's competitor in the past was Microsoft Word. Microsoft was a latecomer at that time. When Microsoft entered the Chinese market, Kingsoft had already occupied 70 to 80 percent of the domestic market.

Under such circumstances, Kingsoft, which had taken the lead, was almost wiped out by Microsoft, the latecomer, not to mention Lemon, which is also a Chinese company but more powerful than Microsoft.

In this life, Jinshan has no chance of turning the tables in front of Lemon Company.

Instead of comforting him, Li Qingfeng asked Lei Jun about his next plan, whether to stick with Kingsoft or accept Ding Guangqing's invitation and join Lemon Company to become its technical manager.

"Well, Mr. Li, I personally really want to join Lemon Company, an internationally advanced enterprise, but Mr. Qiu of Kingsoft has been very kind to me. Even if I resign from Kingsoft, I will not be able to join Kingsoft's rival company, so."

Having said that, Lei Jun did not continue speaking. Li Qingfeng also understood what he meant. It was nothing more than to stand by Kingsoft and never betray it even if the company went bankrupt in the future.

Although Li Qingfeng felt a little regretful about Lei Jun's rejection, he didn't care much.

Although Lei Jun is indeed a talent and even a genius, there are many talented people in the country, and Lemon Company is not short of talents. The talents who want to work in Lemon Company can fill the entire Great Wall, and there is really no shortage of people like Lei Jun.

Lemon Company has no shortage of talent, nor does it lack geniuses. If Lei Jun is regarded as a gifted independent cultivator who relied on his unremitting efforts, step by step, to complete the grassroots counterattack and eventually became a grandmaster, then Lemon Company is a huge immortal cultivation sect with a strong foundation and excess resources.

In the sect, those disciples with slightly better talents, relying on the sect's unremitting efforts to devote resources, only need to follow the established training rules, and they have a great chance of becoming a grandmaster like Lei Bushi.

Therefore, whether there is one more Lei Bush or one less Lei Bush makes no difference to Lemon Company.

They exchanged contact information, and in order to express his importance to Lei Jun, Li Qingfeng personally escorted Lei Jun out of the company building.

After all, it was on the first floor, so it was not a big deal to walk two steps.
After seeing off Lei Jun, Li Qingfeng did not go to Huaxin's office, but came to the floor of Lemon Company, which was seldom visited.

Arriving at Ding Guangqing's office, Li Qingfeng smiled and said, "Old Ding, how are things going recently? Have the offices and sales channels in various places been established?"

"Local offices and sales channels have been fully established and are now being rolled out across the country, starting formal operations," said Ding Guangqing with a smile.

"Oh, so fast? How long has it been since the domestic headquarters was established? How come the sales network has been expanded to the whole country so quickly?"

"I took over all the companies that used to sell pirated products in various provinces, cleaned up the internal affairs, fired some of the original middle and senior management, and replaced the middle and lower-level employees with our people in the management. Soon, things stabilized and got back on track."

In order to quickly expand the sales network, Ding Guangqing set his sights on those pirated companies of Lemon Company.

In the past, because Lemon Company did not operate in China, it turned a blind eye to domestic piracy. As long as the pirated version of Lemon software was not replaced with its own brand and was honestly sold, Lemon Company would not crack down on it.

Under such circumstances, several large-scale piracy companies emerged in the country, replacing Lemon Company and spreading its sales network across the country.

After the domestic headquarters was established, Ding Guangqing directly sent people to these pirated companies to negotiate acquisitions, and acquired them at bargain prices of one million, seven hundred thousand, and four hundred thousand RMB depending on the size of the company.

The boss who is willing to sell his company to Lemon Company can just take the money and leave, and Lemon Company will not hold him responsible for piracy.

As for those who do not cooperate, we will not waste time talking and will directly call the police to arrest them. Not only will they be held accountable for their legal responsibilities, but they will also be required to compensate Lemon Company for its economic losses.

Under this combination of kindness and force, all the pirated companies chose to accept the acquisition conditions.

These incorporated companies already had a mature grassroots sales operation model, and their grassroots employees were well aware of the local market conditions, but they lacked formal management and legal products.

After being incorporated and integrated into Lemon Company, they were transformed into a regular army, vigorously promoting Lemon Company's genuine products in various regions across the country, allowing Lemon Company's products to quickly penetrate into markets at all levels.

After listening to this, Li Qingfeng nodded slightly and asked with a smile: "Are there any internal problems in those pirated companies that we have taken over?"

"No, according to the information passed on by the people below, the employees of the original pirated company have been very cooperative after the acquisition. They are afraid of being fired by us, and they work overtime for free every day. They are all very motivated." Ding Guangqing said with a smile.

Li Qingfeng smiled. He could understand these people's mentality.

Lemon Company is one of the top foreign companies in China, and has very strict educational requirements for its employees. Basically, only graduates from the top 50 domestic universities this year are eligible to interview at the company.

There are not many undergraduate and college students in these pirated companies. Most of them are high school students or even junior high school students. Now that they have the opportunity to enter a foreign company, how could they not try their best to stay?

After instructing them not to be too harsh on the former pirated company employees, and to sign formal contracts with them as long as they worked hard and abided by the company's rules and regulations, and not to abandon them after they had done their work, Li Qingfeng, accompanied by Ding Guangqing, went to inspect the electronic game department of Lemon Company.

After Xu Wangyuan from the Hong Kong headquarters' electronic game department completed the multiplayer online role-playing game project, he was transferred from the Hong Kong headquarters to the mainland by Li Qingfeng to work with GPU to design their own 3D game engine and subsequently build the first 3D first-person shooter game based on this engine. Xu Wangyuan, who had been working in the laboratory for a month, appeared in front of Li Qingfeng with dishevelled hair and a dirty face. The first sentence was to excitedly introduce the game engine being designed: "The game department is currently developing the company's and the world's latest generation of true 3D game engines. Once this engine is successfully developed, it will definitely shock the entire game world."

"By then, Wolfenstein 3D and Doom will all be garbage, and all the engines and games in the world will be subjugated to our Lemon Game."

Wolfenstein 3D, whose Chinese name is "Wolfenstein 3D", is the world's first pseudo-3D shooting game developed by the American ID Software company.

Doom was also developed by the American company ID Software in 1993. It is also a pseudo-3D game. Compared with Wolfenstein 3D, it only fixed some defects in the engine.

These two games are just ID Software's trial works. The first game that was truly made using a 3D engine was Quake, which the company released in 1996, which was the next year.

Not to mention Quake, these two trial works alone brought more than $1 billion in profit to a startup like ID Software within three years, far exceeding the profit of the world's first multiplayer online role-playing game released by Lemon Company last year.

This is enough to show how huge the profits of the game are.

Looking silently at the dishevelled Xu Wangyuan in front of him, if it weren't for his respect for this technology fanatic, Li Qingfeng really wanted to take two steps back.

The smell on this guy was so strong that Li Qingfeng didn't dare to breathe when he stood next to him.

Ding Guangqing noticed Li Qingfeng's embarrassment and immediately stepped forward to help: "Xiao Xu, let's not talk about it here. Let's go to the conference room, sit down and demonstrate it in detail to the chairman."

"Okay, Mr. Ding and the chairman will go to the meeting room first. I will sort out the information and will be there soon."

Xu Wangyuan left this sentence and without waiting for the two people's reply, he turned around and walked towards his workstation in a hurry.

Looking at Xu Wangyuan's back, the two of them looked at each other, then chuckled and shook their heads.

"Guangqin, call Sun Kangmei and ask him to come to the conference room of the Electronic Games Department to discuss the progress of both parties."

"Ok"

The 3D game engine being developed by Xu Wangyuan's team is based on the GPU graphics card data being developed by Sun Kangmei's team. The two sides are in a symbiotic state.

If any team lags behind in R&D progress, it will affect the R&D progress of the other party.

He Guangqin, who had gone out to make a phone call, came back and whispered to Li Qingfeng, "Teacher Li, Minister Sun is busy with his work, but he will be here as soon as possible, at most in half an hour."

"Okay, let's first listen to Xiao Xu's research and development results."

As he spoke, Li Qingfeng nodded towards Xu Wangyuan, signaling him to first talk about the development progress of the game engine and the current results that can be achieved.

Xu Wangyuan connected his laptop to a VGA cable, and a complex 3D scene model was displayed on the projector, with detailed images and realistic light and shadow effects.

“This is the basic scene framework for our engine construction. By coordinating with GPU data, it has achieved a major breakthrough in graphics rendering.”

"The scenes of current games on the market, such as Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, are mostly drawn based on simple texture mapping and limited light and shadow effects. Our engine can achieve real-time dynamic light and shadow tracing, so that each beam of light in the scene is accurately reflected and refracted, which greatly enhances the realism and immersion of the scene."

Li Qingfeng nodded secretly while listening to Xu Wangyuan's story. At present, the completion of this 3D engine is already very high. Whether it is from the fineness of the picture, the realism of the light and shadow effects, or the realism of the physical simulation, it has demonstrated potential that far exceeds the products of the same period.

According to the current situation, once this engine is successfully designed, it will be enough to complete the development of "Half-Life", the predecessor of "Counter-Strike" and one of the greatest FPS games in the world.

Unfortunately, the current CPU is still 586, not the mainstream Pentium 98 processor in 2. The performance is twice as bad. The performance of 586 is still not good enough for games. We still need to work on optimization.
If we want to release the game within a year, it depends on whether Sun Kangmei’s team can give us the support.

I had originally wanted to set up a separate game company after the game was successfully developed. After meeting Lei Jun today, I was thinking of asking him to work in this game company.

It's a pity that he wants to work with Kingsoft and doesn't want to work for Lemon Company. We can only talk about this later.

As he was talking, the door of the conference room was pushed open, and Sun Kangmei, carrying a notebook, hurried over: "Sorry, I'm late. I was just dealing with a GPU cooling optimization issue."

"It's okay, work is more important." Li Qingfeng waved his hand: "Kangmei, you came just in time. Minister Xu just showed us the research and development results of the game engine. Can you also tell us about the situation on the GPU side?"

Sun Kangmei opened his notebook, pulled up some data charts and technical information, and began to report: "Teacher Li, the research and development of GPU has entered the final stage of the tough battle. The difficulty is not too great, and it is expected to be completed in another three months. In terms of core performance, we have broken through some key technical bottlenecks and successfully integrated hardware transformation and lighting functions into the GPU, which greatly reduces the burden on the CPU and can significantly improve the efficiency of graphics processing."

"The memory frequency of our GPU is expected to reach 166MHz, and the DDR version is expected to be 150MHz. It is equipped with a 256-bit display architecture and has powerful graphics data processing capabilities."

“Its triangle generation rate is expected to reach 13 million per second, and its pixel fill rate can reach 420 million per second. Such performance will provide strong support for the rendering of game screens.”

"In terms of the pixel shader pipeline, we designed it to have 4 pixel units and 1 material unit for each line, using NSR technology, which not only improves the rendering quality of graphics, but also enhances the details of the picture."

After listening to Sun Kangmei's story, Li Qingfeng felt that sending one hundred students abroad was too few, and he should have sent one thousand.

You should know that GPU research and development is also a very cutting-edge field in the world. With the talent pool in China, if there were no overseas student engineers returning to China, the progress would not be so fast, and the technology would definitely not reach this level. (End of this chapter)