Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

(Shenmue I & II Re-Release Discussion)

Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby darkfalz » Tue Jul 10, 2018 12:29 pm

Jibby wrote: You can throw as many nonsense technological sounding things about SH-4 processors and audio codecs as you like but that doesn't make your baseless accusations any more solid.


I actually ripped DC games back in the day, wrote dozens of tools for manipulating the audio/video formats and cracked some protections. So I'm not trying to "sound like" I know anything.

And for the record I hope you are right, it's a rock solid real port and there is very little emulation involved (except of the music playback, which I hope is emulated and not pre-rendered and streamed) but several things they have already mentioned make me suspicious. Like saying that the game renders at 1080p rather than just saying it can render at whatever resolution you wish.

Most game companies can't even get modern console ports right, internal resolution locks and other stupid BS. It's a lot to hope this nearly 20 year old game will get the treatment we all want.
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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby mjq jazz bar » Tue Jul 10, 2018 12:59 pm

darkfalz wrote: I'm not being negative. I'm just giving reasons we won't be seeing 1/10th of the improvements possible in a real port (all confirmed).

I'm happy to have a fast loading, language swappable relatively glitch-free emulated port.

I don't think you're being negative at all. At the end of the day, we don't even know if these ports are going to be high quality ports. It's anyone's guess. I've gone all in and reserved my copy and am hoping for the best. I just wish we could've upgraded the audio, cuz by far that's the most off putting and dated part of the game.
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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby darkfalz » Tue Jul 10, 2018 1:38 pm

If there was no intermediate format which was already indexed the same as the final product there is no possibility of improving the audio quality (which I think was 11khz, ok for a lot of voices but worse for high pitched ones). Even if the higher quality raw recordings still existed (they probably do somewhere in Sega's vault) no way is anyone going to go back and crop/re-export thousands and thousands of lines of dialogue. You could theoretically write a waveform matching algorithm to automate this though but I doubt that's the kind of effort they are going to go to.

They could also add some kind of up-sampling filter but there's really no way to re-generate resolution that is not there (although it would probably improve aliasing assuming the final mixed output is 48khz).
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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby mjq jazz bar » Tue Jul 10, 2018 1:43 pm

A lot of that went over my head, but I'll take that as pretty good proof it wasn't just a simple task like many believed.
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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby Henry Spencer » Tue Jul 10, 2018 2:10 pm

mjq jazz bar wrote: A lot of that went over my head, but I'll take that as pretty good proof it wasn't just a simple task like many believed.


In layman's terms, he's basically explaining that SEGA may or may not have the high definition audio (for the voices and music, sound effects etc) in their vault/storage somewhere, but would be a massive undertaking going through all of that and added it all back into the game. It will be budgetary and time reasons and it being such a mammoth task to complete and that they could write in a kind of program which would decompress the audio, but again would incredibly tricky to pull off considering the age of the audio files and how long it would take to go over each, one by one. And even if they were to upsample the audio to improve the "sound", all of the audio files, it would be a pointless task when the output would be for naught since the improvement would be so minimal, that only experts would hear the difference (and that upsampling wouldn't even necessarily improve the audio anyway, since the audio is so old and that was the best offered at the time).

I understand them not doing much with the audio to be honest, but man Shenmue cutscenes in 4:3 is a disappointment.
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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby Jibby » Tue Jul 10, 2018 2:34 pm

darkfalz wrote:relatively glitch-free emulated port.

I'm going to ask you to stop calling it an emulated port. Misinformation about these re-releases is the last thing we need right now.

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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby FlagshipFighter » Wed Jul 11, 2018 12:45 pm

Adam produced a new video; expands on aspect ratio and technical talk with Shengoro86:
phpBB [video]

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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby GYO6161 » Wed Jul 11, 2018 2:32 pm

Good video. I'm surprised about no 4K even on PC it seems. Seems like resolution caps are rare on PC when it comes to SEGA ports but it is what it is i guess.
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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby RiGoRmOrTiS » Wed Jul 11, 2018 5:48 pm

I agree all the negativity is excessive and there was no way they were going to get it to run higher than 30fps due to the way its all coded ; not to mention its entirely reasonable the cut scenes remain 4:3 because on-screen objects etc don't behave correctly in many situations (freeze or disappear) when they exit the 4:3 "border" because they were not meant to be visible anymore; but this isn't the reason they give in this video. The reason they give is "creative choice".. this random assumption makes them sound like they are so desperate to dispel negativity they'll just make stuff up. If they could have maintained the aspect ratio without visual issues it sounds more reasonable to assume they would have.

But their reasoning on why it can't run at 4K is utter garbage...in fact they don't really address it. if they can get the game to render native at 1080p when it used to render much lower then there is no reason it shouldn't render at 1440p, 4k.... etc. These are all the same aspect ratio. There isn't really any good reason not to offer multiple resolution options for PC. All that said, this port is "good enough" and doesn't deserve hate. but lets not make stuff up...
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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby GYO6161 » Wed Jul 11, 2018 6:03 pm

I don't think the reasoning is garbage. Shenmue runs on a pretty custom proprietary engine and porting from Source Code and emulation are completely different beasts. Maybe they could only get it to 1080p and 4K is too big of a resolution for the engine to handle. I seem to recall Bayonetta on PC having issues on certain scenes when running on high resolutions so it could be something similar on that front.

Either way it is a miracle these games even run on modern hardware considering how different the architecture the Dreamcast is from modern systems. I'm more than happy with 1080p.

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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby RiGoRmOrTiS » Wed Jul 11, 2018 6:11 pm

GYO6161 wrote: I don't think the reasoning is garbage. Shenmue runs on a pretty custom proprietary engine and porting from Source Code and emulation are completely different beasts. Maybe they could only get it to 1080p and 4K is too big of a resolution for the engine to handle.


Emulators are bound to be much slower than if they've genuinely migrated the code over as they state they have and running Shenmue in 4k on emulators has very little additional overhead versus lower resolutions.

GYO6161 wrote:Either way it is a miracle these games even run on modern hardware considering how different the architecture the Dreamcast is from modern systems. I'm more than happy with 1080p.


agreed, but this video isn't going to help shut up all those naysayers because its got two pretty major fan-boyish justifications for what some negative nellies perceive as major issues.
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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby Centrale » Wed Jul 11, 2018 7:43 pm

RiGoRmOrTiS wrote: The reason they give is "creative choice".. this random assumption makes them sound like they are so desperate to dispel negativity they'll just make stuff up. If they could have maintained the aspect ratio without visual issues it sounds more reasonable to assume they would have.


It's really not a 'random' assumption if you're a film buff and familiar with how auteur directors (a classification I'd say applies to Yu Suzuki in the realm of games) care deeply about their cinematography. They hate it when studios mess with the framing of their shots.

RiGoRmOrTiS wrote: this video isn't going to help shut up all those naysayers


Nothing is going to shut them up. There's a negligible number of haters who will continue to try and rain on this parade no matter what. Meanwhile it's still going strong on the best sellers lists...

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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby Telekill » Thu Jul 12, 2018 12:45 am

Ok... I agree with Adam in his new video that the guys that took the time to go back into the source code to get us the game on modern systems and in full 1080p deserve massive credit. It sounds like a very frustrating undertaking and I would shake the hand of every single one of the coders that did that. As I can't do that, the least I can do is buy the game right?

As for all the negativity surrounding the Shenmue HD Collection, I don't understand why people would show any kind of negativity towards this that were real fans. Is it a remake like Resident Evil 2... no. Is it 4K and/or 60fps like many modern releases... no. It doesn't matter. We are getting both games in an HD collection on modern systems. That in and of itself is enough to be excited over.

I think some may be forgetting that Shenmue fans right now are in the midst of an incredibly rare moment. The experience that we all love was cut short due to various reasons. 17 years after the last game released we are getting a full source code remaster of one of our favorite games/stories. Not only that but we are expecting it to finally continue with the third game releasing next year. Remember people... 4 years ago, the series was essentially dead. There was no reason to ever believe that we would get a remaster collection let alone a continuation to the story. We are getting both and from the success we're seeing, we could very well see Shenmue continue to completion. I don't believe I've ever seen or heard of another fanbase getting this kind of reboot to a favorite series.

Don't let the negative people online get you down. As a Shenmue fan... it's time to celebrate :!:

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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby darkfalz » Fri Jul 13, 2018 3:45 am

GYO6161 wrote: Good video. I'm surprised about no 4K even on PC it seems. Seems like resolution caps are rare on PC when it comes to SEGA ports but it is what it is i guess.


The 4K explanation was cringe-worthy. Getting the game to run at 4K (at least on PC) would have been easy since they've already coded it to run at 1080p. The problem is it would require significant extra GPU for very little visual gain since we're taking about 2000 era textures and models. It may well have just led to parody screenshots saying "4K!" and then a photo of some shoulder joint poly and texture looking horrible.

The 3D engine part of the game is relatively easy to scale to any resolution since by its nature it is not fixed. The 2D part ie. HUD, splash-screens etc. are another story. If the coders are porting to multiple platforms which might have different resolutions, the will include rudimentary code which calculates these coordinates based on the output resolution. If they are going with a fixed resolution, the might just hard code it to fixed coordinates. They also need to obviously scale the HUD bigger for higher resolutions, so it's a bit of extra work which is why it wasn't always done when all game consoles ran at 640x480.

Emulators interpret these 2D writes and do all the re-positioning and scaling as part of the HLE process.

So yeah. No reason for SEGA to hard code for 1080p rather than 480p, it's just that a) 4K is basically pointless with such an old game (diminishing returns) b) HUD was likely drawn naively at 1080p and they didn't want to scale it. The explanation given in the video that it would have been hard to do it in a source code port rather than emulation is completely backwards - and the stuff about the code being written in Excel... seriously dude. Maybe the part of the scripting of events for the interpreter, but this is not code.
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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby RiGoRmOrTiS » Fri Jul 13, 2018 5:22 am

Resolution options are not pointless. PC users should always have an option to run games at the native resolution of whatever panel they are running.

The GPU requirements on a game like shenmue to run in different resolutions is minimal. There are no screen space effects, shaders, per pixel lighting etc... Just basic geometry and flat textures. It doesn't make sense, only reason I can think of is they couldn't be bothered to scale the new UI which boggles the mind after they put so much effort into migrating the code in the first place which was the hard part.

That said, it's hardly the end of the world.
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