Random Shenmue HD Thoughts

(Shenmue I & II Re-Release Discussion)

Re: Random Shenmue HD Thoughts

Postby Jibby » Mon Jul 02, 2018 6:43 pm

Something interesting that Spaghetti picked up on is the background in this new screenshot of Shenmue HD:
Image

It looks higher quality than usual. I went to check it against Mr357's Shenmue Movie remaster (which was recorded and uploaded in native 1080p) and sure enough, the texture is higher quality:
Image

Have a zoom in on the images and see for yourself. Even H.264 + YouTube compression wouldn't blur the background that much.
Looks like we may be seeing some improved textures after all!

Jibby has received 5 thanks from: Kiske, Let's Get Sweaty, Niowiad, ShenGCH, SledgeNE
User avatar
Jibby
I see.
Alpha Trading Boss
 
Joined: February 2014
Location: Scotland
Favorite title: Shenmue II

Re: Random Shenmue HD Thoughts

Postby GYO6161 » Mon Jul 02, 2018 7:20 pm

Woah. Now im curious if these are brand new made textures or if they managed to find the original hires assets. Yu Suzuki mentioned once the assets were originally made in higher fidelity then downconverted.
User avatar
GYO6161
Man Mo Acolyte
Man Mo Acolyte
 
Joined: September 2015
Favorite title: Shenmue IIx
Currently playing: God of War

Re: Random Shenmue HD Thoughts

Postby Centrale » Mon Jul 02, 2018 7:34 pm

Looks like Tom's skin and hair textures are higher resolution, too. The clown on the sign is different as well.

Centrale has received a thanks from: SledgeNE
User avatar
Centrale
Man Mo Acolyte
Man Mo Acolyte
 
Joined: June 2015
Favorite title: Shenmue

Re: Random Shenmue HD Thoughts

Postby xatruio » Mon Jul 02, 2018 11:22 pm

...Also seems to be bloomed. I'd prefer both or neither have bloom effect and hopefully toned down during daytime.
User avatar
xatruio
"After Burner...Great!"
"After Burner...Great!"
 
Joined: June 2003
Location: Chicago
Favorite title: Shenmue II
Currently playing: Shenmue II

Re: Random Shenmue HD Thoughts

Postby ShenGCH » Tue Jul 03, 2018 3:58 am

Image

The recolouring and repositioning of the clown's hair, along with the addition of a little tuft on top of its head, is a nod to Krusty the Clown from The Simpsons :)

ShenGCH has received 3 thanks from: GYO6161, Jibby, Spaghetti
User avatar
ShenGCH
"After Burner...Great!"
"After Burner...Great!"
 
Joined: January 2006
Location: United Kingdom
Favorite title: Shenmue

Re: Random Shenmue HD Thoughts

Postby GYO6161 » Tue Jul 03, 2018 4:05 am

ShenGCH wrote: Image

The recolouring and repositioning of the clown's hair, along with the addition of a little tuft on top of its head, is a nod to Krusty the Clown from The Simpsons :)

Can't believe i didn't picked up on this as a semi big Simpsons fan.
Mind blown!

GYO6161 has received a thanks from: Spaghetti
User avatar
GYO6161
Man Mo Acolyte
Man Mo Acolyte
 
Joined: September 2015
Favorite title: Shenmue IIx
Currently playing: God of War

Re: Random Shenmue HD Thoughts

Postby Niowiad » Tue Jul 03, 2018 5:29 am

Not that I care about the clown but I don't know why they even bothered to change it :lol:
User avatar
Niowiad
Master of the Three Blades
Master of the Three Blades
 
Joined: May 2017
Favorite title: Shenmue II

Re: Random Shenmue HD Thoughts

Postby Wolfgame » Tue Jul 03, 2018 7:19 am

Rushed out to the MS store to pre-download Shenmue HD this morning. The file size was really low so I imagine the actual game isn't up in full yet to pre-download. My system only dled around 400mb.
User avatar
Wolfgame
Master of the Three Blades
Master of the Three Blades
 
Joined: May 2005

Re: Random Shenmue HD Thoughts

Postby Hazuki00 » Wed Jul 04, 2018 5:01 pm

It's a bit frustrating and disgusting reading in several forums people talking shit about these remasters without having the slightest idea about this issue. Besides, Denuvo seems to be harming the decision of buying the game among people. It's a never ending fight!

It appears many trolls try to spread wrong information about the remasters also.

I hope the rest of the people will give it a try not paying attention to this trolls. The saga needs to sell very well.
User avatar
Hazuki00
Man Mo Acolyte
Man Mo Acolyte
 
Joined: July 2016
Location: Spain
Favorite title: Shenmue II
Currently playing: Waiting for Shenmue 3

Re: Random Shenmue HD Thoughts

Postby Sappharad » Wed Jul 04, 2018 7:38 pm

I meant to share this back in April after the announcement, but I kept forgetting about it:
http://www.sappharad.com/junk/shenmue12_logo.svg
Vector version of the Shenmue I & II logo so you can scale it up to any resolution that you want.

The English part of the logo should be a perfect match, but the Japanese text up top had to be slightly awkward due to shading and the best I could do was an auto-trace with multiple layers. I needed a high-resolution version of it for the remixed trailer I started building, since there were no good copies already I went and made one. Obviously nothing ever happened with that trailer, because nobody responded to the post on it so I dropped that project at least for now. I guess the good thing that came out of this is that I didn't accidentally build a 60fps trailer for a 30fps game.
Sappharad
Man Mo Acolyte
Man Mo Acolyte
 
Joined: October 2015
Favorite title: Shenmue II

Re: Random Shenmue HD Thoughts

Postby PILMAN » Wed Jul 04, 2018 7:57 pm

Hazuki00 wrote: It's a bit frustrating and disgusting reading in several forums people talking shit about these remasters without having the slightest idea about this issue. Besides, Denuvo seems to be harming the decision of buying the game among people. It's a never ending fight!

It appears many trolls try to spread wrong information about the remasters also.

I hope the rest of the people will give it a try not paying attention to this trolls. The saga needs to sell very well.


It could be, but there seem to be some serious concerns about Denuvo with other games as well. I knew about DRM issues with the Assassins creed games but started to read more into Denuvo and apparently some of the other SEGA games such as Sonic were reported as having some issues. I don't know or cannot say how much of this is factual. I think some of the arguments may actually be legitimate but I don't think calling for boycotts of the game are justified. What I do think would be rational is feedback to SEGA if you disagree with the DRM used especially if it's something specific to always-online.

I preordered the game and one of the major reasons why I wanted a version for PC was because of the aging Dreamcast system and the GDROMS are not going to last forever. The alternative of course was DEMUL and ROMS which of course fall into a gray area in terms of legality at least for the ROM portion. Having a PC version in digital format that could be backed up or retained and played on future systems was the ideal version I was looking for. In regards to "always-online" I know there are always those who say "well most of these systems just require you to authenticate every 2 weeks".

There are actually some legitimate concerns regarding this, for example, an unpractical but possible situation would be something like Kevin Mitnick who had his online access revoked as part of his parole, he was allowed to use a computer or system but not internet access, his wife actually had to process the online portion for him to read the news/etc.

There are other factors, military, legacy systems that are isolated from online activity for security reasons, etc. etc. It also impacts the modding community.

This isn't about trying to hurt Shenmues legacy or speaking ill of Sega, they are very valid concerns that I do believe should be brought up in a way that is constructive and feedback oriented.

Mods can help to prolong the life and modernize the game and in many cases improve upon it, example would be the Mafia series. Some of the retexture mods are absolutely gorgeous and preserved a game made in 2002.

I would love for nothing more than the Shenmue series to do well, we've all been waiting a long time, and even if the game were simply a port to the PC or a 16:9 version, I'd be completely satisfied, however, I think equally we should question some of the decisions being made and have a voice in this as well especially as consumers.
User avatar
PILMAN
Man Mo Acolyte
Man Mo Acolyte
 
Joined: January 2004
Location: Somewhere In The Deep South
Favorite title: Shenmue II

Re: Random Shenmue HD Thoughts

Postby asdfguy » Wed Jul 04, 2018 8:13 pm

Jibby wrote: Something interesting that Spaghetti picked up on is the background in this new screenshot of Shenmue HD:
Image

It looks higher quality than usual. I went to check it against Mr357's Shenmue Movie remaster (which was recorded and uploaded in native 1080p) and sure enough, the texture is higher quality:
Image

Have a zoom in on the images and see for yourself. Even H.264 + YouTube compression wouldn't blur the background that much.
Looks like we may be seeing some improved textures after all!


You're right, they did use a better texture. It makes me wonder why they didn't use a high-quality texture for Roy's jacket?
User avatar
asdfguy
Asia Travel Representative
Asia Travel Representative
 
Joined: March 2015

Re: Random Shenmue HD Thoughts

Postby GYO6161 » Wed Jul 04, 2018 10:36 pm

Bloom can be turned off confirmed by Sega Europe
https://twitter.com/SEGA_Europe/status/ ... 1229370368

GYO6161 has received 3 thanks from: Centrale, Niowiad, punkmanced
User avatar
GYO6161
Man Mo Acolyte
Man Mo Acolyte
 
Joined: September 2015
Favorite title: Shenmue IIx
Currently playing: God of War

Re: Random Shenmue HD Thoughts

Postby staplepuffs27 » Thu Jul 05, 2018 12:06 am

GYO6161 wrote: Bloom can be turned off confirmed by Sega Europe
https://twitter.com/SEGA_Europe/status/ ... 1229370368
Good news. I think I’ll keep it, personally! At least for my first play through. I don’t know why anyone would want cropped, zoomed in cutscenes; that sounds terrible lol.
User avatar
staplepuffs27
Funny Bear Burger Clerk
Funny Bear Burger Clerk
 
Joined: June 2015
Location: Oregon
Steam: staplepuffs27
Favorite title: Shenmue
Currently playing: Sonic CD

Re: Random Shenmue HD Thoughts

Postby Sappharad » Thu Jul 05, 2018 12:20 am

PILMAN wrote:I preordered the game and one of the major reasons why I wanted a version for PC was because of the aging Dreamcast system and the GDROMS are not going to last forever. The alternative of course was DEMUL and ROMS which of course fall into a gray area in terms of legality at least for the ROM portion.

If you have a working Dreamcast, consider looking into one of the optical drive replacements available. It's an alternative that uses the original hardware but you don't need to worry about moving parts wearing out. I bought a GDEmu board for mine several years ago and dumped every single disc I own so I have digital copies that will never degrade. Games load from flash storage and load times are amazing, much faster than from disc media. Installation is pretty easy, you unscrew and pull out the original drive and the devices slide right into the drive connector on the mainboard. In addition to GDEmu there's a USB based one that may be easier to obtain but GDEmu seems to be the more favorable option as it has 100% compatibility with all retail games. There are also 2 different vendors that make HDMI adapters for Dreamcast. There's a cheap one that Adam reviewed recently, the results are somewhat blurry but better than old composite cables, and there's the Akura HDMI box which is kind of expensive but the quality matches what you'd get from a VGA box.

There's never been a better time to upgrade your Dreamcast for the modern era.
asdfguy wrote:You're right, they did use a better texture. It makes me wonder why they didn't use a high-quality texture for Roy's jacket?

Who's Roy?

The texture thing has a fairly simple explanation. The original textures were compressed in PowerVR format for the Dreamcast's graphics hardware. They can't be used as-is because the texture format is hardware specific, and none of Sega's previous Dreamcast ported titles (ex. Sonic Adventure, Phantasy Star Online, Jet Set Radio) used the original files either. In some cases like Sonic Adventure they took the original format (PVR) and made up their own GVR format for the Gamecube and later ports.

They basically had two options:
1. Unpack the already compressed textures and repack them in formats applicable to the platforms they're porting to now
or
2. If they have them, which apparently they do, take the uncompressed source textures that they compressed for PowerVR and package those up for other platforms instead.

Although the PVR texture compression format has been documented since DC homebrew started way back in 2000, they would actually have to write new code to be able to use those files as-is. Option 2 was probably the easiest option. This explains why we're getting better textures, but the same audio. The CRI middleware used for voice playback is not hardware specific and is available for other platforms already. For the music, AM2's DTPK music synthesis player had to be ported from AICA ARM to x86 for the Xbox port of Shenmue 2. (Shenmue 1 also used the same format, but I haven't checked to see if it's the same version. That driver was used by multiple AM2 games and some of the DSF ripping tools are aware of it.) Here's the interesting part though: The XBOX had 64-channel audio mixing in hardware just like the Dreamcast did. Essentially it gives them the ability to use separate channels for different instruments and not have to mix everything together manually in software which can be expensive. Modern gaming hardware isn't really optimized for synthesized music anymore though. If you look at the PS4 tech specs on Wikipedia, the only thing they list for audio processing is a variant of AMD TrueAudio, which is primarily for doing DSP effects and surround sound.

This gave me another interesting thought. Were they actually able to port the AM2 music driver to modern hardware? I don't know enough about the capabilities of modern console audio hardware to speculate on that. Back in 2012 I played with DSF support in one of the open source audio players on iOS to try and come up with speed increases so devices in the iPhone 4 era could play back DSF's at full speed which is when I learned just how heavy on CPU the mixing and DSP effects were. Disabling channels and mixing at lower quality had significant impacts on performance, enough to go from stuttering to full speed. (Modern phones now can handle the same AICA emulation code as PC full speed.) Unless they have a direct route to take on music with modern hardware I honestly can't see them implementing their own replacements. IF they can't do it in hardware anymore, the easiest route for them would be to just replace all of the music tracks with streamed (recorded) versions. Based on the other choices they've made, I could see this happening and it would go part of the way to explain the 30GB space requirement that Sega lists on the Steam page. Especially since the XBOX port retained separate folders for each disc with a bunch of duplicate files and it's easier for them to retain that structure than re-working things into shared locations. But it would also make some people wonder why they didn't do the same thing they did with the textures and just use the high quality versions like Shenmue Online had. I guess the only counter-argument I can come up with that those tracks weren't always identical to the 1&2 game versions, they could have been the "demo" tracks that were presented to Suzuki-san before being converted down to AM2's sound format and it wouldn't be good to change them.

I'll be interested in seeing whether there's any correlation between this proposal and how they actually handled the music. If it ends up being all streamed, then we've already got a good explanation as to why.

Sappharad has received a thanks from: xatruio
Sappharad
Man Mo Acolyte
Man Mo Acolyte
 
Joined: October 2015
Favorite title: Shenmue II

PreviousNext

Return to Shenmue I & II Re-Release

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest

Powered by phpBB © 2000-
ShenmueDojo.net