Shenmue Heads (18 HI-RES screeshots)

Segata Sanshiro · Post by **Segata Sanshiro** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 11:07 am

For long time i have been wandering why most of the Dreamcast screenies on the web are of such poor quality (especially the ones found in IGN and GameSpot), so after the RE:V and Ikaruga, here are the Shenmue Heads (i made a total of 100 pics, but i dont have traffic for all of them).
Taken directly from the game (Shenmue passport)

Hope you like them

continues in next post....

Segata Sanshiro · Post by **Segata Sanshiro** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 11:07 am

Moving the light around (with the thumbstick)

Same thing, moving the light

Segata Sanshiro · Post by **Segata Sanshiro** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 11:08 am

Lyris · Post by **Lyris** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 11:18 am

Nice pics, but they're plagued with ridiculous edge enhancement.

Segata Sanshiro · Post by **Segata Sanshiro** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 11:50 am

Lyris wrote:Nice pics, but they're plagued with ridiculous edge enhancement.

Thanx man, but what is ridiculous here is your claim

There always has to be sceptics.

The only enhancement is one hit of sharpen in Photoshop after i set the size to 800X600, that's ALL!

Cid Highwind · Post by **Cid Highwind** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 12:01 pm

Nice shots, how did you make them? I've only seen such clear shots by the use of Chankast, which isn't even free of bugs.

When I took a look at the passport disc suddenly the Half Life 2 models don't seem that impressive anymore if you keep in mind that these Shenmue models are from 1998/1999. When I first saw them I was stunned by the fact you could even see contact lenses on Xiuying's eyes.

Darksaviour69 · Post by **Darksaviour69** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 12:44 pm

they are very impressive, but its not really in-game graphics (i.e. when your playing the main game). but still very nice

Segata Sanshiro · Post by **Segata Sanshiro** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 12:58 pm

Yeah, but they're still realtime polygons, textures and lighting rendered by the dreamcast!

Darksaviour69 · Post by **Darksaviour69** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 1:35 pm

Segata Sanshiro wrote:Yeah, but they're still realtime polygons, textures and lighting rendered by the dreamcast!

oh yeah, i should have made that clear in my post

Cid Highwind · Post by **Cid Highwind** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 1:47 pm

I look at them as some sort of technical demos, and they're highly impressive, just like anything else abou the game.

GyroVorbis · Post by **GyroVorbis** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 5:48 pm

I'd bet money that a few of those are bumpmapped, no joke. That would be the first time I've ever seen bumpmapping on teh 'Cast... especially Chai, he must be bumpmapped.

mink03 · Post by **mink03** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 10:04 pm

this makes me want to pop is my passport disk and play with all this neat stuff

Segata Sanshiro · Post by **Segata Sanshiro** » Sat Apr 22, 2006 12:39 am

GyroVorbis wrote:I'd bet money that a few of those are bumpmapped, no joke. That would be the first time I've ever seen bumpmapping on teh 'Cast... especially Chai, he must be bumpmapped.

I dont know, while i was doing them i had the same impression for a while, but i think its more like that the very detailed texture+the hi-poly count is what gives the effect

Cid Highwind · Post by **Cid Highwind** » Sat Apr 22, 2006 11:57 am

GyroVorbis wrote:I'd bet money that a few of those are bumpmapped, no joke. That would be the first time I've ever seen bumpmapping on teh 'Cast... especially Chai, he must be bumpmapped.

Soul Calibur has got some bumpmapping in it as well, as does Shenmue 2 ingame. Just take a good look at the apartments of the old lady you have to protect from the land sharks, was she called guixiang or something?

Segata Sanshiro · Post by **Segata Sanshiro** » Sat Apr 22, 2006 2:01 pm

Man, i wont say that I'm 100% positive, but as my job is graphic designer in game development (among other boring things) i dare to say that what you see in soul Calibur, shenmue, etc is great texture quality, no bump mapping!!!
Right now I'm playing Skies of Arcadia for the millionth time and near the end of the game there are some truly amazing textures that made me stop and spend long time just studying the walls to learn how its done (examples: mount Kazai temple, Galsian's ship and much more), but its my belief that its all done with great texturing.

I'm not saying that the DC is not capable of doing bump-mapping, i just think it wasn't that modern at the time...

I'll hit you with something more amazing and less believable:

- In Skies of Arcadia, when the party goes to the Great Silver Shrine and they're told the story about the rains of destruction, they're in a weird trance (reminded me of 2001 space Odyssey) and i noticed that the characters had BLOOM!!! The new pixel shader effect overused in every modern game (prince of Persia, Burnout Revenge, etc)

- In the Fight with Galsian he throws a magic called "TERMINAL" and in the animation can be clearly appreciated that he has HDR, also a "new" DX9 pixel shader effect.

So there is no doubt that the developer can achieve amazing effects either by hardware or emulating/faking them... and that the DC is an amazing machine!!!

mink03 · Post by **mink03** » Sat Apr 22, 2006 6:12 pm

these pics made me come across this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPyRG-Fd ... ch=shenmue

then that made me come across this again
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE2smkBf ... saturn[url]

gotta love it[/url]

mankrip · Post by **mankrip** » Sat Apr 22, 2006 6:20 pm

I'd like to see some of those pics without the resizing and the sharpening.

Cid Highwind · Post by **Cid Highwind** » Sat Apr 22, 2006 6:47 pm

Segata Sanshiro wrote:Man, i wont say that I'm 100% positive, but as my job is graphic designer in game development (among other boring things) i dare to say that what you see in soul Calibur, shenmue, etc is great texture quality, no bump mapping!!!
Right now I'm playing Skies of Arcadia for the millionth time and near the end of the game there are some truly amazing textures that made me stop and spend long time just studying the walls to learn how its done (examples: mount Kazai temple, Galsian's ship and much more), but its my belief that its all done with great texturing.

I'm not saying that the DC is not capable of doing bump-mapping, i just think it wasn't that modern at the time...

I'll hit you with something more amazing and less believable:

- In Skies of Arcadia, when the party goes to the Great Silver Shrine and they're told the story about the rains of destruction, they're in a weird trance (reminded me of 2001 space Odyssey) and i noticed that the characters had BLOOM!!! The new pixel shader effect overused in every modern game (prince of Persia, Burnout Revenge, etc)

- In the Fight with Galsian he throws a magic called "TERMINAL" and in the animation can be clearly appreciated that he has HDR, also a "new" DX9 pixel shader effect.

So there is no doubt that the developer can achieve amazing effects either by hardware or emulating/faking them... and that the DC is an amazing machine!!!

Well I ain't no guru about stuff like that either, but I do know that some textures in Soul Calibur look absolutely fabulous, the ones in Money Pit for example, they create such enormous feeling of depth yet they are all flat.

SoA has got some really good textures as well, that pyramid comes to mind, it's simply stunning. It's been a long time ago since I last played that game, also I didn't have all the time to enjoy the graphics that much because I played it with my GF back then so I couldn't just stop at every single moment to take a close look at the textures. This game did surprise me with its graphics, I could walk around on Pirate Isle for hours, the view from that high part is just stunning, it almost gave me a funny feeling in my stomach because of the sense of height. I'd love to give it another try to check all the scenes you mentioned for effects I could not place before. But first there's Evil Twin to play, another pretty game.

GyroVorbis · Post by **GyroVorbis** » Sat Apr 22, 2006 7:40 pm

Yeah, I agree that it very well could be great textures. They sure new how to use texture compression and their 8meg VRAM for some amazing stuff.

DC can hardware bumpmap (I've personally done it thanks to Quarn), but I think it was technology that was just too new at the time for developers to take advantage of.

Segata Sanshiro · Post by **Segata Sanshiro** » Sun Apr 23, 2006 2:06 am

Fragger wrote:I'd like to see some of those pics without the resizing and the sharpening.

He he, my point in doing these shots was not to show and analyse the pixel display quality of the VGA output, but to show how beautiful are the Shenmue designs, models, textures, lighting and the unexplored POWER that still lies in the good old Dreamcast. Although i sharpened them, the textures, lights and model geometry is the original and its stunningly beautiful even by todays standards!
My other idea by showing them in such clarity is to make people want to dust off their shenmues, play again this masterpiece and enjoy first hand its quality... i guess i'm a little obsessed with the DC

Cid Highwind wrote:because I played it with my GF back then so I couldn't just stop at every single moment to take a close look

I guess i'm lucky that SOA is my wife's favourite game (we have, by here request: Skies of Arcadia (us), Eternal Arcadia limited box edition (jap) for the DC, SOA Legends (us) for GameCube and Eternal Arcadia legends (jap) for GC)... a couple of times i even woke up for work only to find here still playing from the night before

But now that we have a son we dont have that much time to play anymore, i guess he is the one that will carry on the gaming addiction.