Care to provide the Action Replay / Codebreaker version of this, so it can be used by people with original discs?

If not I can go ahead and convert later, just want to give you the opportunity to post it if you were planning on it.

The best we could hope for now, is if Yu decides to ever do an in-depth dissection of alpha builds of Shenmue, or if the Saturn Shenmue code is rediscovered.
Wait.. when was the Saturn Shenmue code initially discovered????????????
I believe Spaghetti is referring to the fact that Ryan Payton was looking into it last year and that no one has / remembers much about it.

It has not been rediscovered. The "initial discovery" in this case would still be the video that you unlock after beating Shenmue 2.

Just to provide you some advice in case you want to try again or 'fix' the majority of concerns that people have...

The reason so many people are skeptical of what you're doing is because many of us could have done the same thing. I could go out to vgmusic.com and download some Shenmue MIDI's, use GarageBand to make them into piano music, and then post a video of it just like you did. If you had previously worked on Piano albums before and referenced that work, people would know you could actually do what you want to do and not have reason to be skeptical.

Without that, you might actually have to do more to earn people's trust. For example, plan out what you want to include in your album, create a "sample" video of someone practicing playing one of those songs (since it would be a video it wouldn't be the quality you want for the actual album, but then you'd see someone is capable of performing the work and the funding is just to pay for professional quality) and then maybe it would seem easier to trust you. I hope this helps.

Check out this video I just made in 15 minutes. It is not affiliated with this project:
https://youtu.be/BTue5kaOYpU

With the Wayback info from Kiske, that's kind of the nail in the coffin for me. I'm not particularly worried, though. SEGA's stated intent is to do a remaster right , and I think they'll follow through on that no matter who gets it. For Blitworks it's certainly a passion project and we can expect them to treat the game right.
I wouldn't want Blitworks to do the ports, at least they wouldn't be my first choice and I'm surprised by the enthusiasm over them. I've complained about Blitworks in the past, and I'll restate some of those reasons again. If Blitworks does it, you're not getting the quality you deserve. You'll get an emulated game with the same limitations as the original and some new menus randomly injected into the game that don't match the original. Both of the ports they did for Sega were mediocre bare minimum jobs.

Let's start with their first port, Sonic CD. Originally, Sega commissioned them for an XBOX 360 and PS4 port of Sonic CD. They emulated the Sega CD and emulated it poorly. It ran at 30fps even though the original game was 60. This build was posted onto Xbox 360 PartnerNet back in December of 2010 and you can find details (and I think there was even a video of it at one point) elsewhere. That version was rejected by SEGA and instead they had Blitworks scrap it and port Christian Whitehead's mobile remake instead. His engine is extremely easy to port, essentially they barely had to do any work other than hooking it up to the console API's.

Their second SEGA "port" was not a port either. Jet Set Radio is a hybrid emulator where they just emulate the original game and inject changes into the emulation where they were needed. They've got their own widescreen hack in there, which is slightly more advanced than the community built hacks for the Dreamcast version and they inject new menus into the emulated game to handle native stuff. Their menu system is rather primitive compared to the 'native' ones in the game, just featuring basic 2D artwork for navigation purposes. Their port also suffered from the exact same framerate issues that the Dreamcast original had, in the initial releases Bantham street had several areas where you'd see slowdown just like in the original game. These issues were eventually corrected in a later patch, and they delayed the Vita version because of performance problems and by the time the game launched on Vita it ran better than the original unpatched PS3 release.

Blit might be capable of doing a better job than they did with their previous games, but their current work is not a good indication that they would be great for "ports" of Shenmue. I think whoever ends up doing the ports needs to take the approach that was taken with Shenmue 2x, and by that I mean an actual port instead of emulation. There are a bunch of nice little improvements that they can easily make (use the original high quality voices, high quality music, full quality models) if they're doing an actual port which would not be easy to do if they're emulating the originals.

However, I don't think Sega gave them access to source code for either game. They clearly have capable people working for them, (they wrote Unsharper after all) but to think they'd be a good fit solely from their previous ports does not inspire confidence in my opinion. I think they'd probably do fine if they had access to the original code, assets, and Sega gave them the right requirements when it comes to improvements they could make that wouldn't damage the original experience.

Did they say see you next month in the last update? I feel like they normally say that. They've got to have an update after E3 anyways, after Shenmue 1 and 2 HD and 3 trailer is shown off obviously right \:D/ ?

Right :mrgreen:
...There must be an update after the reveal trailer and Shenmue HD announcement! [-o<

PS. Yes, they said "See you next month!" in the update #65.
Since the videos were filmed on Saturday April 15th, I feel like they probably had intended to post it last week but didn't get around to it until this morning.

Also, the fact that they're working on Saturdays tells me that they're still trying really hard to make December.

I'll see about setting up a Gofundme tonight. Last night I was busy.
I would suggest refraining from collecting any money until you've completely established what it will be used for and how the gift is getting there.

I would love to contribute, but not while there's still risk of it being a black hole into someone else's wallet.

I don't have problems with 30 fps cap on old ports since that's how the games were designed to run.

Yeah, Shenmue was also designed for 640 x 480 resolution 4:3 aspect ratio, but it would be nice to have widescreen, better resolution and some updated textures.
Widescreen, better textures, better models are things the community has already done. Those are pretty easy to do.

60fps is less likely though, for the same reason as ports of other games from that era such as Final Fantasy X. If the motion capture data for the cutscenes only exists at 30fps, that presents a problem because they won't have the "positions" for movement of characters on those extra frames. There are ways you can try to deal with it, such as taking the average between the next and previous frame to account for the one in between, but that won't be correct if something is accelerating for example. Looking at additional frames could be used to try and pick up those trends, but that isn't always going to work either since movement isn't always supposed to be fluid. We don't know what they have, but 30fps motion capture was common back then, so if they want 60fps there's a lot of work to do there. Square Enix recently did that for their Kingdom Hearts PS4 remasters, and the Digital Foundry video on those talked about it a bit. Apparently some of the cutscenes in the Japanese version had movement issues as a result of them doing interpolation, which had to be manually cleaned up before the US release.

I'm saying they can do it, but it's more difficult than other things they could do. I'm okay with 30fps, since they're probably targeting 30 for Shenmue 3 and it'll be consistent.

I can tweet to him, but are you thinking of getting him to take the gift over?

Nope. It'd be nice if Cedric could be there for the gift. If he can't that's fine. We can send one to the Shibuya Productions at a later date.
I still like my previous suggestion of asking Ryan Payton. He's not directly involved with the project but visits them quarterly based on that interview from last year where he talked about it. He just seems like the best person to ask. What are your thoughts on that?

Random factoid for the day:

By this date in the E3 & Shenmue 3 2016 thread, we had 8 pages worth of comments.

This year - 32.

The attention is real.
This may have been pointed out before, but the Shenmue III forum has more posts than the first two games combined. Although wasn't this originally used during the Shenmue Online & Shenmue Town eras as well, and just renamed?

Random note: Has anyone pointed out yet that April has now passed, thus confirming that the online shop taking pre-orders for the Shenmue I & II HD due for April release earlier this year was full of shit and just making stuff up for traffic? I mean, most of us already thought it was unlikely, but I just remembered it now.

You forgot to give credit where it's due.
https://twitter.com/Shenmue_Dojo/status/868251930228928512

*Slight correction: S4pph4rad from assembler games originally found the 16:9 exploit. Esppiral developed it further for both Shenmue games providing us instructions how to patch it in this topic.
They're different methods of doing the same thing, Esppiral's work isn't really based on mine.

My initial approach for Widescreen hacks was to crush the horizontal camera field of view without changing vertical so that you see more on each side of the screen. This caused minor pop-in on the sides in Shenmue 1 & 2 because the game knows when an object would normally not be visible anymore and doesn't draw it.

Esppiral's first approach was to zoom the in-game camera further out then stretch the vertical field of view so the top & bottom of the screen still end up in the same place they were originally. The game engine knows about the zooming, his approach eliminated pop-in. Since the zoom is a game engine feature though, it didn't affect cutscenes and since the vertical stretching was still there the black bars had to be disabled so you could see the same amount of detail as before.

I'm not sure what approach he took for the Hex patch, I never got around to figuring out why the codebreaker wasn't able to perform the same patch in memory yet. I suspect it's permanently modifying the game logic that calculates the camera parameters. The patches are in the executable range and I've done other codes that patch the executable like the one to let you start a new Shenmue 2 EU game from a US Shenmue 1 save file, so it's still a mystery why his latest patch isn't working. I'm getting closer to finishing up on other projects that I promised to do, so hopefully I can go back to figuring out how to get these working with an unmodified copy of the game.


Random note: the 4's are A's, the previous Assemblergames forum software was disallowing my username when I signed up even though it wasn't taken. I tried to get the owner to change it when I made a rather reasonable donation over a year ago, but he ignored my request.

So, random NPC that you interact with or do we think this character is someone that has relevance to the plot? It's weird to see it rendered without in game lighting and textures, almost looks like a cartoon. That makes it hard for me to see him as something other than someone you move crates with or a street fight.

I'm glad they finally showed character model work, even if it wasn't one we wanted to see. :-)
It's something I was hoping they would have as a filler update for a long time now.

Welp. No E3, unless they're fucking with us.
I don't think they are. If Sega chooses to announce ports of 1 & 2 at E3, they might announce that 3 is being delayed, but at least this pretty much confirms that we are not getting a trailer in June.

YSnet aren't going to say where the money is from, so this is cyclical and pointless if you're not satisfied by valid suggestions made by other posters.
I'm also surprised that nobody has mentioned the recent job listing updates in this thread.

For those who either don't recall or haven't seen it in another thread, (I don't remember which thread at this point) they removed 'urgent' from multiple job listings at some point within the last 2 weeks. Those listings are still up, but no longer urgent. It's likely that they weren't even spending money as a fast as they wanted to because they couldn't hire as many people as they wanted to. The delay gives their existing team more time to finish, and the money they would have spent on additional staff is just shifted towards paying the existing staff for longer.

As others have said, they wouldn't have delayed for that long if they didn't have the budget for it. Although they might be hoping for some additional slacker-backer funds after the first two are re-released.

Since I haven't gotten around to saying this yet...

I'm really looking forward to the next update. The fact that they promised more details about the revised schedule is something I've been hoping they would do since late last year. At the end of last year I was hoping they'd provide a more detailed schedule regarding when they would be doing things (when do they start motion capture? recording the voiceovers? etc.) and it sounds like we could potentially get that information now. The wait will be much more exciting when we have a better idea of what happens when, and they can do this without spoiling any details about the game itself.

We have only a little over 2 weeks left to wait for a potentially great update.

If they announce the demo for September, which of the 3 villages would you like it to be? Baisha, Choubo or Bailu Village. It's a hard pick for me because I don't want to be spoiled too much. Choubo for me then
Based on their level of effort to avoid spoilers by basically not showing video of anything besides Bailu so far, I'm guessing the backer trial is just going to be the beginning of the game. (Bailu)

Because the trial is only going to those who paid $100 or more, it's likely that most of us who paid that much are already familiar with the series and don't need a demo to introduce it. If they were looking to introduce Shenmue to people who weren't familiar with the series Choubu would be be a better choice. Actually, they must account for the fact that people are going to share gameplay of the trial, so maybe Choubu would be in their best interest but if they're thinking primarily of core fans then I think the beginning makes the most sense so they don't need to create content specifically for the trial. Throwing you directly into the middle of the game would require them to actually develop content specifically for that trial to know what's going on, and I don't think they're going to waste funds and time doing that.

I'd be interested in looking into it too. Does anyone know of a good free SH4 disassembler? The Demul one is too painful...
dcdis v0.4a by Lars Olsson

It's a free command line disassembler that dumps the entire 1ST_READ.BIN into a text file. I used it to come up with the hack to import US save files into Shenmue 2 EU. I also used the source code to write the SH-4 plug-in for Hopper Disassembler. (But that's not free)

Edit: It seems to be hard to find 0.4, lots of sites have 0.3.3a. Here is a direct link to 0.4 on his website:
https://www.ludd.ltu.se/~jlo/dc/

Although I prefer the original like most of you and voted for that, I would be okay with them keeping the handwritten one if they cleaned it up a bit. I understand the concern that some people can't read cursive and they want it to appeal to a broader audience, and the handwritten one does kind of look like Japanese characters which is probably the feeling he was going for. It does look bad with the gold effect applied, but maybe if the letters were evened out and looked more balanced like the Japanese logo, or some strokes smoothed, it might look better.


From a fan perspective I prefer the old logo, but ultimately it doesn't matter that much and I'd rather see them take whatever option will portray the series best to those who aren't already interested.

Same shit, different month:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=50539&p=1146391&hilit=Shenmue+pack#wrap

It's the same retailer that has had it posted since January, back then with an April release date. Not real.

One thing to note is that the save needs to me modified as the Beta handles them as Japanese.
Sorry I missed this post. Modding the save is probably not necessary if you import into the EU version using the code I posted 2 years ago to disable the region check. (Or apply the hex changes documented in that thread to patch the game itself)

Just wanted to point this out again since people are still suggesting converting save files:
http://www.shenmuedojo.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=49245&p=1121507

Unfortunately it's off-screen, so it's hard to tell if the colors are accurate or not.
You have the Windows start bar at the bottom as a reference point for pure black and white. That doesn't help with color accuracy, but it does help with brightness. If you crop out everything else in the photo except the monitor then do black level correction against the bottom, the blue gets slightly darker. Not sure if that helps or not, as the colors are still crushed a bit.
They are not listed because they are probably distributed by Koch Media / Deep Silver.

https://www.parisgamesweek.com/en/article/koch-media
Deep Silver isn't going to announce a game on Sega's behalf either. It just doesn't make sense, they've never done it before either. And Sony is more likely to focus on games developed by their studios and partners in Europe during Paris games week, such as Quantic Dream or Media Molecule. I'm not expecting much news regarding Japanese developed titles until PSX. (And we already know not to expect Shenmue 3, given the information from Gamescom)

For what it's worth, I will be at PSX again this year but not with false hopes of Shenmue 3 news like last year. I had vacation days to use up, and last year was somewhat fun.

Because they do it by hand, it's not automated.

This is wishful thinking, folks. I do believe Shenmue III will be at PSX, probably HD as well, but to expect gameplay is a bit far fetched. I base my prediction on Yu's statement of ramping up promotion near the year's end and PSX is the only stage capable of doing so, or maybe The Game Awards, but the former has the best shot.

People think Sony fired their heaviest guns at Paris, but I disagree. They still haven't shown Shenmue III, Resident Evil 2 REmake, FFVII, Dreams, Days Gone or other hits they have lined up.

At best we will get a nicely done cinematic trailer, but gameplay still has to be too early to show in my book.
I disagree with some of your PSX predictions. I went there last year hoping for it and was disappointed on that front, and based on my conversation with Gio back then I no longer expect them to do promotion at a trade show unless it's announced ahead of time. To my point, they did tell us about Gamecom in advance. There will be no Shenmue 3 at PSX unless they announce in advance that it or Yu Suzuki will be there. The interviews at Gamescom specifically told us they don't plan to show anything new until the end of the year at the earliest. (Not exact wording because this is from memory) Since 1 & 2 are in Sega's hands, those are still fair game for a surprise announcement, but at the moment it actually seems unlikely to me because the only re-releases of old games they've been doing recently are mobile. I don't think Sega Heritage Collection actually worked out for them, because they seemed to abandon the series after SA2 / NiGHTS / Jet Set Radio several years back.

I do agree that they likely have a good number of titles left to announce/promote at PSX though. Probably Death Stranding unless that's at the Game Awards first, but not FF7 specifically because SquareEnix said it's still a couple years off due to development being shifted in-house. They'll probably show Kingdom Hearts 3 instead, since that's due next year. As far as surprises go, I know Tetsuya Mizaguchi has been working on an unannounced VR game in the year+ since Rez Infinite came out, and I'm hoping they reveal that soon since Rez Infinite was first shown at PSX 2015.

They haven't even announced any developers or guests that will be at PSX yet, other than the return of the collectible cards. The cards are actually a hint at 3 games that will be playable though, since you got them last year for playing the respective games. (Meaning Destiny 2, Moss, and Shadow of the Colossus will be playable) I suspect they'll start announcing booths & guests next week once Paris Games week is out of the way.

For those who don't pay attention to Sony news, there is no Saturday morning keynote for PSX this year. They're having a small event the Friday before it starts and only the first few thousand people who bought tickets will be allowed to attend. They wanted to try and kill the massive line Saturday morning that had people lining up 10 hours early by having a smaller event Friday night with a known attendee count. They also aren't promising any big announcements either, they wanted the convention to focus more on the games playable at the show and showing more about games that were already announced. This is why they had a press conference at PGW last week. I think this news doesn't rule anything out specifically, but we already knew not to expect anything related to Shenmue 3 anyway unless it was announced in advance.

The news kind of annoyed me because the way they initially described Friday it sounded like sort of a meet-and-greet with developers, as opposed to a replacement for the Saturday morning keynote which most people assumed was happening. I missed the cut-off for early-bird tickets by a few weeks because I had some things to work out before I eventually decided to go again. Being in the audience for the crowd reaction to announcements was one of the best parts of going last year, and now I'll have to watch it from a hotel walking distance away from the actual event. Oh well.

I don't have any reason to expect that we'll hear about any HD remasters this year either. There haven't been any hints dropped by Sega's media team to get excited over.

Yes.

How could it NOT end on a cliffhanger? The story isn't going to be finished with 3, so no matter what they do there's going to be a cliffhanger. Even if Shenmue 2 had ended after disc 3, that's still a cliffhanger because you're waiting to go to Guilin.

I think this news doesn't rule anything out specifically, but we already knew not to expect anything related to Shenmue 3 anyway unless it was announced in advance.
My statement above still stands, but...the exhibitor list for PSX 2017 was announced today and Deep Silver has a booth this year. They were not present at all last year, and I can't find any details of them being present at any major US game conventions in the past year. They were not at PAX East, they were not at E3, and they were not at PAX West.
https://blog.us.playstation.com/2017/11/16/playstation-experience-2017-more-than-80-exhibitors-confirmed/

Now, keep in mind that Deep Silver is a publisher and has other games coming out next year besides Shenmue 3, however I still found their presence to be notable. Cross-referencing the list of confirmed games for the show, the only Deep Silver title that I saw was Kingdom Come: Deliverance. While very it's possible that their booth is just to promote that one game since it's due out in February, it's kind of interesting that they'll be at the show. It might be a good opportunity to strike up a conversation with any of their PR people who might be present.

It's Bailu Village. Those pics surfaced around 15 years ago IIRC. The basic consensus is that Shenmue II on Dreamcast was originally developed to include it, but was probably cut to give Shenmue II a clearer ending.
No it isn't. It's Miao Village, which we also have loading screens for. The pics came from Shenmue.com in one of the "blog" posts there, and they were of the area cut out between Languishan and meeting Shenhua. It's the explanation as for why the scenery suddenly changes between two areas when you're on the path at the beginning of Disc 4.

Someone mentioned recently, in the last month I think, that this was even talked about in one of the video interviews posted during the Shenmue 3 kickstarter. That video explicitly confirmed that the screenshots were from the cut area.

He starts talking about it at 2 minutes 15 seconds into this video:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ysnet/shenmue-3/posts/1278225

Too many people elsewhere are complaining because they think the team is behind schedule.

These people are quick to forget the days when we didn't even have a Shenmue 3 to look forward to.
Who wants a rushed Shenmue 3 anyway? I certainly don't.
I don't think they're behind schedule to achieve 2018, and they're definitely not rushing. They didn't even start to look at character models seriously until the 2nd half of this year. They're scaling their resources appropriately based on where they are in development.

I have rough estimates for things I would expect to see by certain times (some of which are opinions that I've posted in other threads) and so far that seems to have been reasonable. I was expecting the character stuff that we started seeing in August by last December and once that passed it seemed very possible a delay would happen. The extended trailer showed privately to press in August apparently already showed some form of in-game play. I'm expecting that we will see actual gameplay footage either before or perhaps they'll save it for MAGIC. If we haven't heard any news about motion capture or VO sessions by the end of April, it's going to be very unlikely that they'll make 2018. That's just my personal benchmark for them though based on my estimates of how long things take to do.

What criteria are others holding them to that makes you think they're behind again? We know back in August from interviews that the environments were about 70% done. That's necessary for all of the stuff they'll be filling them up with for the remainder of development, (including the characters) so at this point they're going to be building the part that they can actually show things from, not just random environments.

To be honest, I think they shouldn't have shown anything to anyone until E3 2018. That way, it'd build a lot of hype and anticipation for it. Then when they finally reveal an official full trailer of Shenmue III that blows everyone away and is basically a mic drop moment for them, it would have a HUGE impact on everyone. But still, it's nice that we'll get to see more Shenmue III soon!
Too many people elsewhere are complaining because they think the team is behind schedule. Waiting over 6 months is not going to help with that.

By next June (E3) they will have less than 3 months to finish the game if they want to meet manufacturing deadlines for a physical release by the end of 2018. If they finish in September they won't be able to release until the end of November or early December. The people at MAGIC should be seeing actual gameplay if the project is on schedule for 2018. (At least, that's what I would expect.)

I pointed this out once during a previous discussion in 2016 and I don't remember how many examples I provided, but games are typically finished around 2 months before release. For example, the final build of Uncharted 4 that went to manufacturing was finished March 18th 2016 and the game was released on May 10th of that year.

It looks great, although I may be the only one that sees this image and sees photohop all over it.
I've been meaning to comment on this, but I keep forgetting.

They've photoshopped several character images in the past, with the most obvious one being the one with Ryo's DC face photoshopped into one of the photos from December 2016. Even the image with the shrine maiden was photoshopped. But in all of those instances, it was pretty easy to prove it was edited - they always had shadows on the characters that didn't match the direction of the shadows in the environment they were in.

In this most recent showing, there is no evidence that I can see of the characters or parts of them being inserted into another image. The shadows on the characters seem to line up just fine with the environment around them. To me this looks more like a "photo mode", similar to racing games or Mario Odyssey where additional effects are enabled that probably won't be used in-game.

Either way we'll see it in motion in about a month so, I don't have any concerns right now.

That's the best I could find.
That was the version posted by Shenmue Forever on Twitter right after it was shown, which was split into two parts and both tweets were deleted. Only the last 10 seconds or so are missing. Those last 10 seconds have not been lost though, I have my own copies that I saved and stitched together on the correct frame once I realized those tweets were deleted. I'm not going to share that just yet, because I'm hoping that one of the people who originally recorded it will release their video in full quality. And I also want to see how the whole thing goes regarding whether they get taken down or left alone. In absolutely worst case scenario, it can resurface once we have proper new footage, at a time where the outdated footage wouldn't be a problem to share anymore.

I posted my thoughts elsewhere, but simple summary:
1. Liked the new QTE stuff that we saw, QTE Title Arcade game, and more people in Choubu.
2. Disliked the fact that they showed a video that we know is 6 months old at this point.

In a few days, preferably after we get a kickstarter update about this (and depending on it's content) I will probably quote my old post about why I thought they were still on schedule because they potentially failed my criteria for showing they could meet a 2018 release. It's hard to tell because they're really not giving us any information about what they hope to have accomplished by what times, so I have to base it on what I think their schedule needs to be and in order to evaluate that they need to tell us how various things are going. I now have a new estimate for where I think they are, but I'm going to hold on to my thoughts for a little longer because we haven't heard much from those who attended the event who can provide more information.

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Did you do something special to get 3D visuals to work? I downloaded the latest nightly build yesterday and I can see the logos from startup, but the title screen and afterwards is all black. The intro has sound and the AM2 / XBOX logos in the corner but it's basically the upper left corner of your video only. The compatibility list says it only works in Wireframe right now. Input does work though, I can press start on the title screen. Based on the change log they fixed it a few days ago.

Useful tip for anyone who hasn't used CXBX before: The emulator doesn't accept disk images. You need to extract the game data to a folder (unless something can mount them?) and run default.xbe from the root.

Wow, this is pretty amazing. I can't believe it is full speed and sound is working!
CXBX doesn't have to emulate most of the hardware, so good performance on a weak PC is not too surprising. The games were all built around Microsoft technologies, (DirectX, etc.) and the XBOX ran on x86 hardware, so CXBX just adapts the games to use Windows equivalents of the same libraries. I think they're starting to emulate stuff now, but their original approach will work well for many cases.

I've always wanted an HD version of the "Shenmue II Special Trailer" that Sega released at some point in the middle of 2001. I remember back then IGN usually had 640x480 versions of most of the trailers, but those have been lost to time. The only remaining copy that I can find is the low res-version on Disc 4 when you place it in a PC. This project was to remaster the trailer in HD.

Version 1 completed trailer:
https://youtu.be/oRhlxgtr1ps

My primary video source has been Mr357's Shenmue 2 movie, but there are several clips that are either from the wrong time of day, different in the final game (the lighthouse scene in Beverly Hills Wharf for example), or just aren't part of the 9 hours that Mr357 recorded. (7pm night transitions, Fengmei scene in the diner, etc.) Also, the font used in the trailer doesn't appear to be publicly available. A font search engine found me one that's close, but as you can see some letters are slightly different.

There are also some interesting differences to be noted in the scenes that do match. For example, the scene with Yuan and Duck Race Man in the basement of the warehouse, one of the random henchmen is different in the trailer. In some cases characters blink at different times.

This project has given me new appreciation for the time and effort required to produce a trailer, and it make sense now how time consuming it would've been for YSnet to produce a Shenmue 3 trailer for MAGIC this year. Putting together what you've seen so far took over 8 hours, and it's less than 2 minutes long. There are several scenes where things are chopped together not only in small bits, but out of order that they appear in the game. I wouldn't be surprised if the original version of this trailer took someone a few weeks to make.

I'm hoping to have a finished "draft" of the base trailer using the clips I have already have finished in a few weeks, then I can go back and replace some of the stuff that's inaccurate. I might also consider using something like SVP to interpolate the source footage to 60fps, but my current video editor actually only does 30. (There's a newer version that does 60, I just haven't had a reason to buy it yet.) I wanted to post the WIP here in case anyone's interested in helping to improve the accuracy at all. I can replace the font for example, if someone either finds the original or wants to recreate the existing text as vectors. Or if someone is interested in recording more 1080p source footage, it would save me time. Either way, I plan to finish this since it's over half way done.

What do you think?

My money is that it will be ICO
I'd agree if not for the comment that Bluepoint gave about this remake being bigger than SOTC. Ico is neither bigger in scope or popularity than the latter game IMO. My money actually would go for a remake of MGS1,
given it'll be the game's 20th anniversary later this year and Bluepoint having worked on the remaster of all the subsequent games of the series. Or the rumored remake of Demon's Souls, simply because of the strong signs pointing to it like ESRB rating the game again, Atlus shutting down the servers of the PS3 game and the recent announcement of DS remastered.
I would consider Ico to be bigger than SOTC. Maybe not in surface area, but it's a longer game with greater scope and given it began on the PS1 and had some dated elements, would be a bigger endeavor to remaster. I'm vastly in the minority here, but out of the 3 games in the trilogy I actually enjoyed SOTC the least. It was just "run to the next boss and fight it" with the only puzzles being how to beat the bosses. Ico involved actual mandatory exploration and puzzle solving, which is why I enjoyed it more. The Last Guardian had its issues from a control standpoint, but it brought back the same kind of exploration and puzzle solving that Ico had, which is why I really liked it.

I don't think it's Shenmue either, but I also don't think it's MGS related. MGS was already remastered once, for the Gamecube. The Gamecube version was my introduction to the series and I've bought every game since. Konami's actions during the late development of MGS5, along with their statements that they didn't feel console gaming had a future, followed by the garbage that was MGSurvive, just tells me that I don't think they're willing to fund a third-party studio to remaster one of their games.

The Demon's Souls suggestion has the most logical arguments to back it up, IMO.

60fps might be pie in the sky if the engine won't allow for it.
I agree.

While it's pretty easy for them to unlock the framerate, I'm pretty sure all of Shenmue's animation was done as fixed frames. Thus for example when you ran down the crowded street in front of Tomato mart the game would actually slow down instead of skipping frames. They CAN pull off 60fps if they update all of their animations to account for it (SquareEnix did it for the Kingdom Hearts HD collection) but that requires someone to review everything by hand. Interpolation will only get them some of the way there.

But if they did do it the result is very nice, as seen in the trailer I posted a few weeks back.

D3T is listed as the developer on Steam... as they don't appear to have any other credits, are they some sort of subsidiary of Sega that was formed for this project? Or does anyone know something beyond what's listed on Steam?
http://d3tltd.com/gameography/

First of all, I'm glad they announced this.

On to the feedback:
1. Why are all of the Shenmue 1 screenshots in 4x3? We've already managed to patch the Dreamcast version to run in 16x9, so why can't they?
2. The voice clip in the trailer is from the Dreamcast original and not the original higher quality recordings present in Sega All Stars racing. While this isn't a big deal, if they have the original 44100hz recordings they should be using them.
3. Not featured in the trailer or hinted at in any way, but I hope they offer the original renderings for the music as an option now that they have room for them. (See Shenmue Online, Shenmue 3 interviews)

The updated watch in the HUD seems to ditch the Timex style. I'm guessing this is intentional and the port will lose some branding.

My concern is that you see the intro to Shenmue 1 in 4:3... will the cutscenes not be in widescreen?
We see a Shenmue II cutscene in 16:9, and the trailer is split between 4:3 and 16:9 likely for the purposes of "old vs new" for the video.
Shenmue 2 cutscenes were always in 16x9. The fact that they go back to 4x3 at the end of the trailer doesn't make sense. "Sorry, we're going old again even though we're trying to show you the remastered game"

Since it was already mentioned - In Sonic Adventure 2's case, they had to keep some cutscenes in 4x3 because those scenes contained video overlays on top of the in-game rendering used for certain effects. The original videos were only 4x3 and it's likely that they didn't have the means or budget to try and re-create them. In Shenmue's case everything was in-engine so they should have the means to fix the cutscenes.

Esspiral is right though, there's no excuse for them not to fix it. We could do it for them if we ever figured out the cutscene format. I know it's just work in progress but we might as well notice these things now because if they make it all the way to release then they're not going to fix them. I want to see the game in the best condition they can put it in given the constraints. We know they're listening, so let's make sure when they do make changes they aren't sloppy.

Shenmue 2 cutscenes were always in 16x9.
Unless I'm seriously misremembering if the Xbox version had a widescreen option, Shenmue II's cutscenes were still 4:3, unless you're mistaking the letterboxing for 16:9.
I'm not mistaking letterboxing for 16x9. I know it was letterboxed, but it was still 16x9. They did the exact same thing that Esspiral's most recent hack does, which just gives you the exact same view you had before without borders on the top and bottom. The viewable area was always [roughly] 16x9 and my point was not to be excited over an aspect ratio that the cutscenes already were designed for.
It's unwise to start pointing fingers about no excuses not to fix X or Y, especially when the trailer is clearly marked WIP.
No it's not, unless you misinterpret the intentions. If the same thing were true after the game releases we'd just be making the same comments then. Might as well make them now so there's a chance they can see it's something they might want to consider in case they didn't plan on fixing it.

We're not crying "oh this is wrong the game is going to be bad because of these things", it's "here are some flaws we see with the work in progress that you've shown us, we hope you fix those before you're done".

So if I'm reading this correctly you believe they've removed the letterboxing and just "blew up" the image remaining to fill the screen for the 16:9 shot in the trailer. Am I understanding that right?
No? Your description of my statement makes it sound like you think that I think that there's additional information added to the scene. What I'm saying is that it's the original content, but formatted to fill a 16x9 because they don't need to letterbox anymore. If you compare it side-by-side, it's the same. They don't need to do anything to update Shenmue 2's cutscenes content for 16x9 because they were already 16x9.
Just look, I did the side-by-side for you:
http://www.sappharad.com/images/shenmue2_sidebyside.jpg
(time in both might be slightly different, I didn't go frame-by-frame to find exactly the same frame)

No it's not, unless you misinterpret the intentions. If the same thing were true after the game releases we'd just be making the same comments then. Might as well make them now so there's a chance they can see it's something they might want to consider in case they didn't plan on fixing it.

We're not crying "oh this is wrong the game is going to be bad because of these things", it's "here are some flaws we see with the work in progress that you've shown us, we hope you fix those before you're done".
Frankly it's just the conceit of this thread, being that within 24 hours of getting something we've all campaigned for over years and years, we're already picking holes in it and finding negativity. Especially when "WIP" was clearly listed on the trailer, and as per Adam Koralik we only know "5%" of the full story of what's happening with this remaster. We couldn't even go a day without a thread like this popping up.

And I don't buy the constructive criticism angle when the OP post is already declaring this a poor job and somehow worse than emulation.
It's not worse than emulation, going back through the thread nobody even said that. I would not have wanted them to emulate this, they are doing the right thing by porting it. I can see looking at other threads today that you and several others are getting personally offended by pointing out their opinions on what was shown so far and nobody's even attacking you. I'm sorry that you're upset, but there's no harm in talking about this. You don't need to defend the team, everyone posting here can read, so they saw the disclaimer that you're keen to point out. You're exactly right, we don't know what Sega's plans are for this, which is why we are sharing our thoughts on what we've seen so far.

I guess I'm also coming at this from a different perspective than you. I didn't find the opening post to be negative, it doesn't imply to me that he thinks it's bad. I don't think it's bad either. There has been some negativity here this weekend, especially with Peter fighting with that Polish guy that he eventually banned, but I didn't notice anyone disparaging the work that has been done. We've been through a similar situation already over the past 7 months regarding Shenmue 3's character models. They look fine to me, but other people are not satisfied yet. I'm not going to argue with other people about what they think, that's their decision, but I'm willing to talk about it to find out why they feel that way.

My entire point can be summarized as this: I personally hope they put an effort into presenting the first game's cutscenes in 16x9. The video shows that might not have done that, or didn't do it yet. If they don't it's not a big deal, but it would be a shame given the circumstances. Please don't take it personally.

Considering that Shenmue 3 voice acting starts being recorded soon, I don't agree with any of the people saying mid to late 2019 on that. If they're doing VO, most of the scenes and dialogue are already locked down and we should expect the game less than a year after they start recording. So April 2019 would be the latest I could see them pushing Shenmue 3 out to. At the moment I'm feeling like December 2018 is the earliest Shenmue 3 could be out, with April 2019 being the latest.

That in mind, and I don't think they'll want to launch in the same month as Yakuza Kiwami 2, I'm guessing July. That gives them about 2 months to finish and release to manufacturing.

At least at first glance that looks fine to me. What exactly is wrong with it and what would you do different?
I agree, the new HUD elements look fine to me. The clock needs to be generic looking to ditch the Timex branding since they're not re-licensing that. Some of it was weird at first and almost too smooth, but that's just because we're used to seeing the original. I will say that Esppiral's comparison screenshots on the previous page do look better to me than the ones Sega released, however it's an unfair comparison to make at the moment. Smoothing and filtering options are used for his images, and on PC you'll be able to force that stuff anyway via graphics card options. It's still possible those options could be exposed in-game as well.

Monday's batch of screenshots basically indirectly confirmed that aspect ratio will be an option (as we've now seen Shenmue 2 cutscenes in true 16x9 and also in 4x3 but letterboxed to 16x9 like the original was) so that's not something I'm worried about anymore although there's still no evidence that we'll get actual 16x9 cutscenes in Shenmue 1. Aside from that I'm not concerned about any graphical problems being introduced to the first game, since they're basing it on the original code and the team working on it knows what they're doing. For Shenmue 1 it's going to be the definitive way to play almost certainly.

But I will say that I still agree with some concerns about the second game. It's very likely that the problems introduced in the Xbox port will not be fixed. Sega contracted them to port the games and dictates the requirements for the project. D3T is going to do exactly what Sega requests from them, and if correcting the mistakes introduced in that version is not something that was requested, it will not happen. The people responsible for these decisions are not going to have the same knowledge of the game differences that the fans do. It's likely that they're not even aware of the differences and will just be doing comparisons against the Xbox version. Unless reverting the geometry changes is a planned change then it won't be happening. I'm buying it either way, but I'm disappointed that they're basing the area geometry on the Xbox port. (And before anyone goes all "but these are WIP" on me for this paragraph, re-read it again or just ignore this part completely. We don't know what their plans are, but they chose to cherry pick images with Xbox geometry intact and I personally believe they won't fix it. My opinion about that will be the same at release if it remains as-is, and I'll be very happy if I'm wrong or someone makes them aware of the situation and they decide oh we should change this. I'm still satisfied with the fact that this is happening at all)

First, I'll increase Ryo's health bar by increasing the contrast and making the "yellow status" more vibrant.
You're forgetting how that works. It pulses in and out, they just took the screenshot at a low point. If it works the same way as it does in the original there's nothing wrong with that image.

What I don't understand is, how come, if the cutscenes are really going to be in the original 4:3 ratio that this screen capture from a Shenmue 2 cutscene in the announcement trailer is in 16:9 ratio?
The little box in the lower right of the first page of the article has a list of changes. The 2nd bullet point says:

●操作可能なシーンでは、画面比率が16：9に変更
（イベントシーンなどは4：3)

Which, you can copy/paste into Google translate yourself and it confirms what the german article claims. I think the article is accurate. I'm going to re-post this screenshot again:
http://www.sappharad.com/images/shenmue2_sidebyside.jpg
The Shenmue 2 cutscenes were already widescreen, just letterboxed. After we got the letterboxed Yuan shot, my opinion on this is that it's probably going to be selectable, but we're going to be stuck with 4x3 in Shenmue 1 because they don't want to manually fix every cutscene with problems outside of the safety area.

For what it's worth, I'm glad someone from d3t has reached out to the community. But I hope he doesn't get in trouble for it, since that kind of thing is borderline risky from an NDA standpoint.

When Christian Whitehead and co were working on Sonic Mania, Christian would occasionally confirm minor non-gameplay details like he mentioned the CRT filters before they were officially shown. But with Mania Plus the whole team has been completely silent, probably because Stealth from Headcannon confirmed on Steam that Denuvo DRM wasn't something they wanted in the PC version of the game and Sega of Europe added it themselves. (The post was later deleted)

I hope some of the fan feedback ends up getting considered at some level though. It seems like the two most common pieces of feedback are the same ones I'd like to see resolved too. Reverting the geometry / transparency cuts that had to be made for Xbox Shenmue 2 and offering the option to have cutscenes always 16x9 are my biggest hopes. Maybe the efforts they made to port Shenmue 1 would give them some tricks to handle 2's original assets better? And since editing cutscenes is probably too much work, maybe the few scenes that don't work expanded to 16x9 could have the camera zoomed so you lose some detail from the bottom but the sides would be fine then?

However, it's possible that they'll be able to resolve the issues with it and present the entire game in 16:9 by the time it goes gold. I'm not expecting it, though, and I don't care either way. I'm just happy to be able to play the games properly again.
There's no guarantee things will change since the published information from Famitsu says event scenes will be forced to 4x3 (with Shenmue 2 being the exception based on the trailer, since those were letterboxed originally), but if they did decide to change and didn't want to zoom the few scenes that need it, I'd be okay with just the few scenes that need it having bars on the side. Just so we at least get most in 16x9 as an option. Sonic Adventure 2's HD release a few years back did that for the same reason (some effects were done as 4x3 animated overlays so no 16x9 was possible) and I was fine with it too because I knew why they had to omit it for those scenes.

Not having any Shenmue 1 event scenes in 16x9 isn't a deal breaker, but I'd prefer to see it whenever possible.

I'm not sure if Sega would be willing to have to put up money for leaderboard servers and what not.
In the case of PS4 and Xbox Live, that's not a problem.

Leaderboards are hosted by Sony & Microsoft on their respective servers and are part of the console's integration with trophies/achievements. The native functionality is generic and provided at a console level, so it will continue to operate as long as PSN / XBL are supported on those platforms. I can't give you proof of this for Sony since their stuff is only available for developers, but here's Microsoft's leaderboard API for Xbox live.

The only stuff you'd have to worry about being shut down would be game specific content. In Shenmue passport's case, since none of it is realtime they could theoretically just build some web-based APIs and those would be cheap to maintain since they could be hosted by the same servers that host their other websites.

I don't think we'll get a direct port of Shenmue Passport though. It's just not something that games do nowadays. I would be surprised if some of the features did not return as extras, but I can't see them keeping it as-is for a direct port.

Erm no, it's nothing to do with what you or I or any normal consumer thinks. It's about retaining a certain level of professionalism with a major company and brand like Microsoft and Xbox that you should be working with. Not just that, in keeping with their standard content, but they should maintain a balanced view on the two consoles for their large audience. It's nothing to do with being "triggered" or "offended" (god I get bored of reading those accusations about everything in media). No one is either of those things. No one "raged for days". It's about professionalism. You might not get that, but you also, I'm going to guess, don't run a huge major media company.
Another thing to mention is that they absolutely don't want to piss off Microsoft. IGN relies on Microsoft for early access to games (and consoles) so they can review them, and game coverage is what makes their business money. Companies can and have withheld early access to games and press events in the past when they weren't thrilled with the agency doing the reporting.

These aren't direct game industry examples, because I can't think of any off the top of my head, but two similar situations in recent memory are:
1. Disney blacklisted the LA Times (newspaper) from press screenings of movies so that they couldn't review them before release, because they published an article about how Disney donated millions of dollars to officials running for election in Anaheim in exchange for tax breaks and the ability to get some building permits that the candidates opposing them were against. They were only re-instated after other reviewers threatened to not review Disney movies as a result.
2. Apple stopped inviting Gizmodo to press events announcing new devices after they published the images of the famous iPhone 4 leak back in 2013.

In short, they can't bite the hand that feeds them.