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Removals were likely due to hardware differences, adjustments however were probably in the pipeline during development, but time constraints meant the Dreamcast version had to cut corners.

Let's not forget there was about a year between each release, so the remaining members of the art team had to do summat!
 
Until someone can ask one of the folks in charge of handling the port, we can only speculate and keep speculating.

I myself came to the conclusion that the team handling the transfer to the Xbox got to work with outdated assets.
What makes this most apparent are some of the music tracks that sound different. It is striking how these are closer to the music demos produced before they got converted into sample based DC audio, hinting at files of an earlier point in production.

I also guess that some of the objects had to go or needed changes because of the stencil shadows that are not just cast by characters but pretty much the entire world's geometry. Looking through the changes, there are a bunch of examples where transparencies were removed. I guess there were some issues with shadows with those.
 
BlueMue said:
Looking through the changes, there are a bunch of examples where transparencies were removed. I guess there were some issues with shadows with those.
Click to expand...
The Dreamcast's PowerVR GPU is capable of order-independent transparency, allowing translucent surfaces to be blended correctly regardless of the order in which they were rendered (a feature missing from most other GPUs). This is an interesting article on this as it pertained to the Sonic Adventure ports, I assume something similar might have been an issue with the Xbox port of Shenmue II.
 
Not a tech guy so I cannot say if I am Right or wrong, but I think it could have something to do with the different Hardware.

Unlike today, where gaming consoles are just Office PCs in disguise consoles were custom made back then. Exklusive games were just made with the Hardware of the target platform in mind. If you port something to another machine you have too adjust the game to new Hardware which could lead to Problems and concessions.
 
BlueMue said:
Until someone can ask one of the folks in charge of handling the port, we can only speculate and keep speculating.

I myself came to the conclusion that the team handling the transfer to the Xbox got to work with outdated assets.
What makes this most apparent are some of the music tracks that sound different. It is striking how these are closer to the music demos produced before they got converted into sample based DC audio, hinting at files of an earlier point in production.

I also guess that some of the objects had to go or needed changes because of the stencil shadows that are not just cast by characters but pretty much the entire world's geometry. Looking through the changes, there are a bunch of examples where transparencies were removed. I guess there were some issues with shadows with those.
Click to expand...

This is my assumption--they probably had (slightly) older source code to work with for the port, so minor touch-ups that happened right before the Dreamcast version shipped weren't there.
 
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