Shenmue I Re-Release 16:9 Cutscenes Fix

[ner0]

I have tested the lasted version of patch. It seems running on my Simplified Chinese Win10, but Shenmue2.exe hasn't modified. It means after patching, cut-scenes still have four black borders and camera icon.

But how did it fail?
Did it recognize the version of the game?
Did it ask if you wanted to patch for fullscreen and camera icon? Or did it just stop at some point? I tried patching both games yesterday using simplified Chinese language and it worked fine. Make sure your exe is not already patched beforehand.

I recorded this demo that shows it working fine under the conditions which it previously did not:

 

[couyok]

But how did it fail?
Did it recognize the version of the game?
Did it ask if you wanted to patch for fullscreen and camera icon? Or did it just stop at some point? I tried patching both games yesterday using simplified Chinese language and it worked fine. Make sure your exe is not already patched beforehand.

I recorded this demo that shows it working fine under the conditions which it previously did not:

The CMD window worked same as English language, everthing ran well. But after patching the Original Shenmue2.exe had no change.
By the way, my Shenmue version is 1.01. Because 1.02 or higher version running very slow on my PC, like slide. So I have to keep it at 1.01. Maybe that is the reason.

 

[ner0]

The CMD window worked same as English language, everthing ran well. But after patching the Original Shenmue2.exe had no change.
By the way, my Shenmue version is 1.01. Because 1.02 or higher version running very slow on my PC, like slide. So I have to keep it at 1.01. Maybe that is the reason.

Because I cannot reproduce this issue, I'm afraid that I can't help.
I tried patching v1.01 under Chinese environment and it worked exactly like the video demo for v1.06 that I posted a few posts back. The only thing that didn't work, because I never bothered, was the camera icon removal - it only works for v1.04 and above.
The rest, removing black-bars, and adjusting subtitle positions, works fine here.

Can you post a video of your patching process?
If not, can you at least post a picture of the patch command line window after it completes?

 

[couyok]

Because I cannot reproduce this issue, I'm afraid that I can't help.
I tried patching v1.01 under Chinese environment and it worked exactly like the video demo for v1.06 that I posted a few posts back. The only thing that didn't work, because I never bothered, was the camera icon removal - it only works for v1.04 and above.
The rest, removing black-bars, and adjusting subtitle positions, works fine here.

Can you post a video of your patching process?
If not, can you at least post a picture of the patch command line window after it completes?

I tested two options about camera icon, got the same result.

 

[ner0]

Can you redownload please, I had just updated a few things in the script to v2.1.5, just say if it still behaves the same.
Also, after applying the update, the file "Shenmue2.exe" has the same date/time as the original? Or is it different and a backup has been created? If the file was modified, could you send it to me zipped?

What is your OS, Windows 8.1?

 

[couyok]

Can you redownload please, I had just updated a few things in the script to v2.1.5, just say if it still behaves the same.
Also, after applying the update, the file "Shenmue2.exe" has the same date/time as the original? Or is it different and a backup has been created? If the file was modified, could you send it to me zipped?

What is your OS, Windows 8.1?

EXE has been modified, date/time is new, backup has been created, but still has black board. My OS is Windows 10.
Please rename ‘Shenmue2.txt’ to 'Shenmue2.rar' to uncompress.

 

[ner0]

EXE has been modified, date/time is new, backup has been created, but still has black board. My OS is Windows 10.
Please rename ‘Shenmue2.txt’ to 'Shenmue2.rar' to uncompress.

Thanks. I can see the issue, but since I lack the ability to reproduce the issue myself there isn't anything that I can think of to solve this. I compared your file to the original and the patch was only successful in applying 1/8 of the possible changes to the exe. In the case of the executable you demonstrated, it only applied 1/3 of the patch for vertical subtitle alignment, which is applied when you want to make the game cut-scenes fullscreen.

I think you solved it by switching over the OS to English, and I'm sorry that I can help any further at the moment.
I may try to install a Chinese Windows 10 on a virtual machine from scratch just to try and figure this one out still.

 

[oregano9]

Thank you again, ner0.

 

[couyok]

Thanks. I can see the issue, but since I lack the ability to reproduce the issue myself there isn't anything that I can think of to solve this. I compared your file to the original and the patch was only successful in applying 1/8 of the possible changes to the exe. In the case of the executable you demonstrated, it only applied 1/3 of the patch for vertical subtitle alignment, which is applied when you want to make the game cut-scenes fullscreen.

I think you solved it by switching over the OS to English, and I'm sorry that I can help any further at the moment.
I may try to install a Chinese Windows 10 on a virtual machine from scratch just to try and figure this one out still.

Thank you very much! If you want any help about Chinese OS, please let me know. I sent you a private message, you got it?

 

[ner0]

Thank you very much! If you want any help about Chinese OS, please let me know. I sent you a private message, you got it?

Yeah, I got your message, and I think I replied.
Don't have either of those services. I'll try to manage with Google Translate.
Anyway, the system is up and running, I just have to test it and hope that I get the same issue so that I can begin looking into the root cause. If I need help, I'll be sure to let you know. Thanks.

UPDATE: I tested my Chinese OS environment and indeed the patch is not successful. I will investigate tomorrow.

 

[ner0]

After extensive testing I reached the conclusion that one of the tools packed with my patcher ('sed') is flawed, at least its Windows builds are. I tested multiple precompiled variants of the tool and they all had trouble handling operations under a Chinese Windows-environment, which also begs the question if it does not have issues under other OS languages.

I was faced with 2 options, writing my own binary patcher or finding a suitable replacement. Luckily I found another candidate: 'gsar' tool, which not only does the job very well under the environments where 'sed' failed, it is also very lightweight, fast, and needs minimal dependencies; the script itself is even bigger than the 'gsar' tool. Ironically this tool was ported to Windows back in 2008 yet it works perfectly today even under Windows 10 (x64). I had to rewrite most of the script to use the new tool, but it seems that it was worth it; the patcher has now dropped from 1MB to under 100KB since I discarded 'sed', 'grep', and all of their dependencies (DLLs). I cannot be sure that now everything is bug free, but I have done a fair amount of testing under Windows 10 (including native traditional Chinese build). If you find a bug, let me know.

Make sure to get the last version from the usual place: https://www.shenmuedojo.com/forum/index.php?posts/10013/

 

[Kodama]

Sorry I haven't read through the whole topic as it's 16 pages if this has already been mentioned lol. But with a widescreen fix comes issues such as characters not animating properly outside the normal field of view. Has anyone been able to go in and animate these characters correctly so that the widescreen looks good? If so, can we roll those mods into one fix or would it have to be two separate mods?

 

[ner0]

Sorry I haven't read through the whole topic as it's 16 pages if this has already been mentioned lol. But with a widescreen fix comes issues such as characters not animating properly outside the normal field of view. Has anyone been able to go in and animate these characters correctly so that the widescreen looks good? If so, can we roll those mods into one fix or would it have to be two separate mods?

I am no authorithy in the matter, but I'll assume the answer is no to all your questions.
There is a reason SEGA and D3T didn't do it themeselves, which I could only speculate about.
Modders are many times more restricted than SEGA and the companies holding the (pseudo)source-code, so my best guess is that those things will not be fixed in the near/medium-term, if ever.

 

[Kodama]

I am no authorithy in the matter, but I'll assume the answer is no to all your questions.
There is a reason SEGA and D3T didn't do it themeselves, which I could only speculate about.
Modders are many times more restricted than SEGA and the companies holding the (pseudo)source-code, so my best guess is that those things will not be fixed in the near/medium-term, if ever.

I'd only imagine it's possible since we've seen animation mods before, I recall a recent one where Chai was walking around peeing on telephone poles... but I don't know how that works with cutscenes...

 

[ner0]

I'd only imagine it's possible since we've seen animation mods before, I recall a recent one where Chai was walking around peeing on telephone poles... but I don't know how that works with cutscenes...

Oh, really?
Can you link that? I'd love to see it.
I've seen tons of modding, or rather animations, with third-party engines, but not with Shenmue's own.

 

[Kodama]

Oh, really?
Can you link that? I'd love to see it.
I've seen tons of modding, or rather animations, with third-party engines, but not with Shenmue's own.

I know nothing about how this stuff works, but it seems like he's taking a dog's animation and replacing the dog's model with Chai. I'd imagine if you can use animations in such a way, you'd be able to do things like loop characters to continue running past the field of view and stuff during cutscenes. But again, not gonna pretend I know how to do it, just seems very possible with a little elbow grease...

It also looks like there's so event triggering and stuff going on there, like Ryo reacting to these guys upon seeing them and them being scripted in. It looks like there's actually a ton we can do in engine, I'm just not sure how much you can do to the cutscenes. I know I've seen plenty of cutscenes with swapped dialogue and character models but not sure about changing/expeanding the animations themselves...

 

[ner0]

I know nothing about how this stuff works, but it seems like he's taking a dog's animation and replacing the dog's model with Chai. I'd imagine if you can use animations in such a way, you'd be able to do things like loop characters to continue running past the field of view and stuff during cutscenes. But again, not gonna pretend I know how to do it, just seems very possible with a little elbow grease...

Looks cool, but it seems that it's a model swap and not originally animated.
If that's the case, then my initial hunch is possibly correct.

 

[Kodama]

Looks cool, but it seems that it's a model swap and not originally animated.
If that's the case, then my initial hunch is possibly correct.

That's the thing though, they don't need to use custom animations, just keep using ones that already exist and add them in. For example the one where Goro's victim runs away and freezes off screen... can't we just loop the animation so he keeps running and moving in that direction? That's what I mean lol

 

[ner0]

That's the thing though, they don't need to use custom animations, just keep using ones that already exist and add them in. For example the one where Goro's victim runs away and freezes off screen... can't we just loop the animation so he keeps running and moving in that direction? That's what I mean lol

I get your point.

But my understanding is that model swap is as "easy" as replacing the model name indexed for a given animation or scene, the same would be true for almost any resource, speech included. I'm never seen anything that actually changes an animation or comes close to tweak an existing animation. And because of that, which I would imagine is very different and more complex than a model swap, I don't see it happening. I could be wrong, and there could already exist mods or at least PoC for that, but I've never seen them and the difference from that to model swap seems quite the stretch.

 

[couyok]

After extensive testing I reached the conclusion that one of the tools packed with my patcher ('sed') is flawed, at least its Windows builds are. I tested multiple precompiled variants of the tool and they all had trouble handling operations under a Chinese Windows-environment, which also begs the question if it does not have issues under other OS languages.

I was faced with 2 options, writing my own binary patcher or finding a suitable replacement. Luckily I found another candidate: 'gsar' tool, which not only does the job very well under the environments where 'sed' failed, it is also very lightweight, fast, and needs minimal dependencies; the script itself is even bigger than the 'gsar' tool. Ironically this tool was ported to Windows back in 2008 yet it works perfectly today even under Windows 10 (x64). I had to rewrite most of the script to use the new tool, but it seems that it was worth it; the patcher has now dropped from 1MB to under 100KB since I discarded 'sed', 'grep', and all of their dependencies (DLLs). I cannot be sure that now everything is bug free, but I have done a fair amount of testing under Windows 10 (including native traditional Chinese build). If you find a bug, let me know.

Make sure to get the last version from the usual place: https://www.shenmuedojo.com/forum/index.php?posts/10013/

I have tested the last version of patch, everything worked fine. Thanks again for all your great work!
But I don't think I got your reply, may I have your contact information?