160: Chapter 160 The Awakening of the Candle Dragon Team

In the open-plan office area of the Xingchen Entertainment development department, the atmosphere was somewhat oppressive.

Lu Zhao's "Zhulong" team, along with thirty other newly recruited top-tier developers, were staring blankly at the three monitors in front of each of them.

On the screens was the development interface of the "Luoshu" language, which was so simple it bordered on primitive.

There were no dense lines of code, no complex lists of function libraries, only a pure white input box and, beside it, the constantly rotating logo of the "Taiyi" AI core.

These "veterans," who had spent ten or even twenty years immersed in the field of traditional programming, felt lost for the first time.

They were accustomed to using lines of code, precise down to the semicolon, to define every parameter, control every action, and build underlying rules.

But the logic of "Luoshu" was completely the opposite.

A programmer responsible for character animation attempted to create a basic "character walking" action.

Following his past experience, he entered instructions into the input box: "Define a character with a height of 1.8 meters, have him move forward at a speed of 1.5 meters per second, stride length 0.6 meters, step frequency..."

The AI immediately generated a character model in the preview window.

But the character just stiffly slid across the ground, with no movement from its legs.

"Wrong! This is wrong!" the programmer was nearly tearing his hair out. "I need skeletal animation! I need muscle traction effects that conform to kinematics! I need IK inverse kinematics!"

He was incredibly frustrated, staring at the input box.

The AI core's logo rotated for a moment, and a line of text appeared on the screen: [Please use natural language to describe the final effect you want.]

The programmer was stunned.

Natural language? He didn't know how to use "natural language" to describe those complex technical details.

"I want him to walk like a real person!" he tried inputting.

In the preview window, the character began to walk, but the gait was stiff, and the movements were like a marionette.

The entire team encountered similar bottlenecks.

Lu Zhao wanted to design a dynamic weather system for his shanhai mirror. Rain hitting different surfaces—such as stone, leaves, or metal armor—should have different physical feedback; the splashes created and the paths of the flowing water should all be different.

It was impossible to precisely describe these complex fluid dynamics and optical reflection formulas using language.

He input: "I need a realistic rain effect."

The AI gave him a rainy scene, but the rain looked like a layer of transparent texture, completely lifeless.

The development efficiency of the entire team did not increase; it actually decreased.

Everyone was stuck in a dead end of thinking.

Some developers hired at high salaries even began to discuss privately, suspecting that this "Luoshu" was just a flashy gimmick, something Chen Xu used to fool laypeople.

"What AI programming? I think it's just an advanced game scene editor."

"If I had known, I would have stayed at NetEase to keep making reskinned mobile games; at least the pay was good and the work was easy."

Feelings of doubt and complaint quietly spread throughout the team.

Late at night, Lu Zhao was the only one left in the development department office.

He could not believe that Chen Xu, who had brought out a miracle like the "tianshu evolver" at the press conference, would use a scam to toy with them, the developers.

The problem must lie with him.

He lit a cigarette, stared at the screen, and replayed the video of Ling's demonstration from that day over and over again.

He analyzed every instruction Ling gave, frame by frame.

"Create a planet with a diameter of one hundred kilometers..."

"Add a tidal system conforming to fluid dynamics to this planet..."

He suddenly noticed a detail he had overlooked.

All of Ling's instructions were not technical. She didn't mention underlying algorithms, didn't mention underlying rendering pipelines; everything she used was descriptive, imaginative language.

Lu Zhao felt as if he had grasped something.

He stubbed out his cigarette and, in the "Luoshu" input box, deleted all the descriptions of physical parameters and technical indicators he had written before.

He closed his eyes and conceived a picture in his mind.

Then, he entered a new paragraph.

A passage that didn't look like program instructions, but more like a prose poem.

"Imagine a river rippled by mountain winds, the murky water churning with silt, lapping against moss-covered reefs on the shore. Dark clouds obscure the sun, and the sky is dim. A bolt of lightning tears across the horizon, briefly illuminating the water's surface. A giant python with pitch-black scales slowly pokes its head out from the riverbed, its cold snake eyes reflecting the fleeting flash of lightning in the sky."

He pressed the execute key.

The next second.

On the 4K screen in front of him, a river appeared.

It was a river that seemed to have been lifted straight from the real world, full of vitality, flowing endlessly.

The river water was murky, and one could see the silt churning underwater.

On the reefs by the shore, the texture of the moss was clearly visible.

The sky was thick with dark clouds, so oppressive it made one breathless.

A bolt of lightning struck without warning.

Under the illumination of the lightning, a huge black snake head slowly rose from the water.

In those snake eyes, one could even see the reflection of the passing lightning.

Lu Zhao was stunned.

Looking at the scene on the screen, which rivaled top-tier movie special effects, he felt as if he had opened the door to a new world.

He finally understood.

"Luoshu" wanted not programmers, but dreamers. Not cold code, but descriptions filled with emotion.

You give it a line of code, and it returns a bug.

You give it a poem, and it returns a world.

Lu Zhao stood up abruptly from his chair, rushed out of the office, and called to wake up all the colleagues who had already returned to their dorms to rest.

"Get up! Everyone get up! I know how to use it!"

The entire team was roused from their beds by Lu Zhao at two in the morning.

When they saw the lifelike giant python on Lu Zhao's computer, everyone was asking how he had done it.

Lu Zhao gave them a demonstration, and the gloom that had been weighing on their hearts was completely blown away.

A kind of ecstasy called "creation" surged into everyone's hearts.

Calculating by this, their daily workload exceeded the sum of their past three months of work.

Everyone felt that they were no longer game developers.

They were gods.