[quote=“Chizzles”]TA, my point is that now the Xbox version of Shenmue II has been done, it would be easy to recycle code from it and save time, even more so to a simple syste like Wii. As Abadd pointed out, not all code, but deffinatly some code.
Shenmue II on Xbox did look mildly enhanced, such as imporoved lighting and high res textures.
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Sorry mate , I just don’t agree. Look at other X-Box 360 games like HALO III, PGR III. I doubt they used any part of the old X-Box code at all from PG or HALO II , they would all be need to be built from the ground up , to make use of the memory and shaders of the next gen , otherwise people would laugh
Look at somthing like COD IV , The COD have all been made in C+(or what ever it is) yet takes IW 2 years at least to make each game , and in most cases a brand new engine re-write and thats a simple basic FPS at the end of the day .
Why did it take Rockstar 4 years , 100 million big ones to make GTA IV, when the game world is much the same as the previous games and the previous games all run in C thanks to also being onthe PC
And Shenmue II onthe X-Box hardlly looked any better , people were expecting leaps to what SEGA GT, HOTD , JSRF offferd onthe X-Box compared to the DC versions , more so given this was AM#2 the best programming Team SEGA Japan as to offer.
Shenmue III only Exists on paper imo , I bet next to part of the game is running on any system . The whole game would need to be remodelled as would the characters . It took AM#2 some 6 months to Port Lindberg code to the PS3 and X-Box . It would take a massive team some 2 years plus, and millions to make a new Shenmue
Can’t give you exact numbers, but let’s just say that it wasn’t insignificant. I believe SOA has internal translators, but often uses outsourcing as well, due to the sheer volume of some titles.
You think one coder should be enough? And this is based on…? So, how many lines of dialog do you think one coder should be able to implement in a single day? How many lines of dialog are there in the game? How much does a single coder cost per month? Oh, and I didn’t even get into various details like artists to redo in-game signs and menus (because menus often use art rather than text), etc.
And never said that it would be an exorbitant amount of money. It just adds up. And yes, development should always take that stuff into account. And yes, code should be as bug free as possible up front. But while we’re talking about fantasties, I would also like a really nice red sportscar and maybe even a pony.
In all seriousness, everyone shoots for being bug free. NOBODY is, though. That’s just a fact. Problems always come up. And when you have people (in this case, the artists and coders) working in a language they aren’t fluent in, they will often make mistakes and will not be able to recognize problems in the localized text, which is why you need extensive QA. And let’s not forget the fact that each region has different 1st party requirements for approvals (the rules are often the same, but what each region’s 1st parties are willing to let slide will differ greatly).
Who knows?
And yet the first game was only rated in the 70s. Remember, the internet represents only a minority (but a very vocal one at that).
That’s not an accurate comparison. I don’t believe Sega has ever said they wouldn’t make a Shenmue because they couldn’t afford it (hell, I don’t think Sega ever said they wouldn’t make a Shenmue period, though I could be wrong). You would need to change that statement to, “Spiderman 3 lost us a ton of money, so instead of Spiderman 4, we’re going to make Iron Man.”
And yes, it was a poorly managed development process from what all the signs indicate. You are right in that it shouldn’t have cost that much money and to be honest, nobody but Sega really knows how much money was spent and why it was spent. That being said, regardless of the fact that a ridiculous amount of money was spent building the game, a large sum of money was also spent selling the game. And despite that, despite all the hype that the game received, it still underperformed (based on a business’ expectations of return on investment).
Let’s put it this way - if you were a game creator and you were given a large budget to make a game, would you a) make your own game that is your own vision and is something you’ve been thinking about for years? Or would you b) work on someone else’s game that has a lot of baggage and wasn’t terribly successful?
And before you go on about whether or not something is a success, a game company is a business. While money is not the be all end all of game development, you still need to make sound decisions. So, let’s take a really basic look at this from the business side, since we took a basic look from the creator’s side. Just because Shenmue sold a certain number of units doesn’t mean it’s a success. Think of it this way. If you had a million dollars and you put it into a regular savings account for a year earning 2% interest, you’d still make $20,000. That’s a lot of money! But hardly worth the year’s investment it took to get it. You could take the same money and invest it in a CD account (5%) and get $50,000 in the same time frame. Suddenly, the $20,000 doesn’t look so great, does it?
So, in the end, you end up with the creative side of the decision and the business side. The difficulty of entertainment business is the need to merge the two. On one hand, you have a creatively successful game that was financially not so successful. But you also have creators that want their own shot at making something better, with the chance of having better financial success.
And would you deny a creator the chance to make something new? Isn’t that how we got Shenmue to begin with?
Before I address Chizzles - Geoffrey, I don’t think Shenmue 1 sold 1 million stateside, so I doubt the sequel would have =\ Especially since the hardware was in severe decline.
[quote=“Chizzles”]
In the same way that Shenmue II for XBOX was modified to take advantage of high res textures, the same can be done again.[/quote]
Not really. During the early days of the Xbox, people were still using fairly old school texturing techniques and not to mention the fact that advanced lighting solutions were a pipe dream for the most part.
Entire new engines had to be written to take advantage of things like normal mapping and specular lighting… something that can’t be simply by hardware. Aside from the obvious resolution differences, the biggest change from last gen to this gen is the lighting. The Shenmue engine only used baked-in lighting from what I remember. I don’t believe any of it was dynamic.
You bring up another good issue. You would also have to rewrite the engine to be able to multithread. But these “basic elements” that you speak about aren’t all that different from taking any other old engine. There’s nothing special about the Shenmue engine at this point. If you could get that sort of performance from a 7 year old engine, Epic and id would have no reason to constantly be updating their Unreal and Quake engines…
