Shenmue HD

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Originally Posted by QuickSciFi

No in-game option to switch it to Dreamcast style controls.

That does suck about Space Harrier. I love that game.

I will have to end up using the Cronusmax Plus. Probably after I finish Bioshock Infinite, which I'm playing right now. I figure I'll have to anyways like I did with the last Tomb Raiders, since Shadow of the Tomb Raider is also coming up and it will probably have the same issue with me. The last two were a treat, so looking forward to it.

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You can switch the controls to classic. So you can walk/run with the triggers. Only use 1 analog to look around. Some people still use both and than can throw you for a loop.

What are you all talking about. There are no analog controls in Shenmue II on Dreamcast. I just played through it last year. Analog stick is Ryo’s head.

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Originally Posted by DSwizzy145

What do you guys think of all these Youtubers shitting on Shenmue? Why talk about it now instead of years before? what made you guys hate it nowadays?

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Clicks/views.

And I get some people don't like it. Cool. But like you said, why now? Because of the release/hype of the HD ports which goes with my point above.

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Originally Posted by Mega Drive Bowlsey

Any fame hungry YouTuber who slags off Shenmue isn't worth any of my time as, to me, their opinion is worth less than shit. I've said it before and I'll say it again, if Nintendo had made Shenmue instead of Sega there would be mass public circle jerks over it to this very day.

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Funny i just had said exactly the same thing, thinking if Nintendo or Sony made Shenmue on their Nintendo 64/Nintendo Gamecube or PlayStation 2 people would defend the shit outta the game to no end making sure no Youtuber tarnishes it!

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Originally Posted by SegataS

You can switch the controls to classic. So you can walk/run with the triggers. Only use 1 analog to look around. Some people still use both and than can throw you for a loop.

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Must be a new update. Wasn't there when I played it. Will see again.

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Originally Posted by Blades

What are you all talking about. There are no analog controls in Shenmue II on Dreamcast. I just played through it last year. Analog stick is Ryo’s head.

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no it's not! you can go in the options and change it to analogue movement.

While browsing through the Google News feed on my phone I came across this interesting interview with the development team responsible for porting the games over to the PC,PS4 and Xbox One.

It goes in to some good detail on the challenges that the team faced when porting the games from the Dreamcast and OG Xbox over to modern systems. I thought it would be of interest to folks on here.

https://www.pcgamer.com/how-sega-bro...to-life-on-pc/


On the challenges of porting a Japanese developed game

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Originally Posted by PC Gamer Interview

Working on a Japanese-developed game must’ve been tricky too...

The original code was written by Japanese developers, so all the comments are in Japanese. We used Google Translate a lot to try and get a handle on what the code was doing, but it’s often not clear. Shenmue 1 had the additional problem for us that the game logic was written in a separate scripting language and ALL the function names and variables were in Japanese too!
Interestingly, we found that once the resolution was increased existing bugs became more apparent. There’s also the issue of widescreen, with the game being designed to run in a 4:3 ratio. This meant many of the cutscenes didn’t work correctly, so we had to add black bars at the sides.
The original games were technical marvels and they were highly tuned for the specific hardware platforms, which didn’t give us as much performance headroom as we were expecting, given their age.

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On the challenges of converting a game designed for Dreamcast over to modern systems

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Originally Posted by PC Gamer Interview

Were there any quirks of the Dreamcast hardware that made getting the first game working on PC especially difficult?

The Dreamcast hardware had some features which would prove difficult to emulate, particularly the audio and graphics systems.

The audio on the Dreamcast is mainly driven by a completely different chip to the main CPU. This chip is loaded with different programs defined by the original developer, specifying things such as loop points, reverb, volumes, envelopes, etc. We didn’t have the source data for this, which meant a lot of reverse engineering to get it sounding okay.

Regarding the graphics, the Dreamcast GPU had some powerful and unique features not found on modern cards. The two features which caused us the most headaches were the modifier volumes used for shadows and light volumes, and the ability to sort transparent geometry on a per pixel level. The lack of modifier volumes on our target platforms led us to use a hybrid stencil shadow approach similar to the Xbox version of Shenmue 2. This is different to the original and artefacts can occasionally be seen because of this.

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Originally Posted by stu

While browsing through the Google News feed on my phone I came across this interesting interview with the development team responsible for porting the games over to the PC,PS4 and Xbox One.

It goes in to some good detail on the challenges that the team faced when porting the games from the Dreamcast and OG Xbox over to modern systems. I thought it would be of interest to folks on here.

https://www.pcgamer.com/how-sega-bro...to-life-on-pc/


On the challenges of porting a Japanese developed game




On the challenges of converting a game designed for Dreamcast over to modern systems

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This was very informative. I gotta say that after playing the Bioshock trilogy on the PS4, I gave Shenmue another try with "classic" controls and it threw me off quite a bit. I guess it has been nearly a decade since last I played them, and part of the difficulty in getting it to appeal to current gen gamers might fall into that. I will try both games on the original US consoles again and get a true grasp of what is keeping me at bay. But I really love this series too much not to give it my best.

anyone got any technical issues they experienced?

for me, there was a buzzing noise when i started the game after the intro.

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Did you find anything interesting in the source code?

The moon in Shenmue 2 is not a texture. It’s an actual 3D object in the distance correctly lit by the sun direction. This produces accurate phases. We were surprised by this level of detail! The Lucky Hit games adjust the physical behaviour of the ball based on the weather and temperature, calculated by the time of day. For cutscenes, the game switches to high definition heads and hands, which allow for more expression. In Shenmue 1 the game logic is all written in a scripting language. For Shenmue 2 they got rid of it and wrote the logic in C code directly.

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The moon and Lucky Hit ones, WTF

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Originally Posted by fr0zenbuttox

anyone got any technical issues they experienced?

for me, there was a buzzing noise when i started the game after the intro.

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At the beginning of game one after browsing every drawer in Ryo's bedroom, I try to open the door and it goes back and stays in one of the cabinets while Ine San lectures him. Which is a long time.

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Originally Posted by Sik

The moon and Lucky Hit ones, WTF

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It's been a long ass time since I learned something new about these games. I spent so much time on Shenmue forums in the past I thought all there is to know I knew.

I am shocked that I see vet Shenmue players still dial the entire number in the game. You can skip the area code. It's 1987 when we didn't have to dial area codes for local calls.

I wish they would have used a Japanese dev to port it. Like M2. Which would you rather M2 work on? Shenmue or something far less special like Battle Garegga? I vote Shenmue. Oh well. At the very least. d3t (however you pronounce that) should have been given until the original November release date to fine tune it as much as they could. Pushing the release up made it far more buggy than it should have been.

I think they did a great job, considering they had to reverse engineer the Dreamcast's entire Yamaha audio subsystem.

...which makes me wonder why they didn't just record the audio straight off the Dreamcast...

are they still working on it though? I haven't seen a new patch in a while.

They are, there’s a patch in beta right now.

They should have released the game after patches were done. So stupid to release it before. God, modern videogaming is pathetic.

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Originally Posted by Joe Redifer

They should have released the game after patches were done. So stupid to release it before. God, modern videogaming is pathetic.

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I only hope it doesn't give a bad impression on potential shenmue fans. I bought this for my ex girlfriends birthday since she loves shenmue but I might as well let her play on the dreamcast again with better sound. still if they solve these problems I'm more than happy I just don't hope they have quit updating.

The game would be probably still buggy 10 years from now on if they kept working on it. Computers are a piece of shit to deal with (case in point: the other day there was an interview with M2 and they said that the only reason why they aren't making releases on PC is because Windows 10 keeps trashing performance despite having gotten their emulators to run fine on Windows 7).

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Originally Posted by Blades

I think they did a great job, considering they had to reverse engineer the Dreamcast's entire Yamaha audio subsystem.

...which makes me wonder why they didn't just record the audio straight off the Dreamcast...

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No need to record the audio when they can use the source files (and the codecs are well known by now), and the interface the game deals with is probably higher level than talking directly to the hardware, which should make it easier to make a compatible version. The problem would be more figuring out what the game actually wants from the interface.

Incidentally, wild shot here, but I'm guessing CRI provided the sound code? (hence why it wasn't available, Sega likely never had the source code in the first place)

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Originally Posted by Sik

The game would be probably still buggy 10 years from now on if they kept working on it. Computers are a piece of shit to deal with (case in point: the other day there was an interview with M2 and they said that the only reason why they aren't making releases on PC is because Windows 10 keeps trashing performance despite having gotten their emulators to run fine on Windows 7).

No need to record the audio when they can use the source files (and the codecs are well known by now), and the interface the game deals with is probably higher level than talking directly to the hardware, which should make it easier to make a compatible version. The problem would be more figuring out what the game actually wants from the interface.

Incidentally, wild shot here, but I'm guessing CRI provided the sound code? (hence why it wasn't available, Sega likely never had the source code in the first place)

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Shenmue generated music in real time from the Yamaha chip. They had to reverse engineer everything down to the reverb and kind of failed at it.