The state of YsNET?

Covid 19 hit China a month after S3's Western release and after that, everyone in China just kind of forgot about S3.
 
hyo_razuki said:
Covid 19 hit China a month after S3's Western release and after that, everyone in China just kind of forgot about S3.
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I think there’s a bit more to it than that. I recall reading that the game was heavily pirated and sold by third parties for a fraction of its retail price immediately after its western release. I suspect that YsNet and Tencent decided it wasn’t worth forcing the issue after that. The lukewarm response from critics in the West probably didn’t help either.
 
tomboz said:
I think there’s a bit more to it than that. I recall reading that the game was heavily pirated and sold by third parties for a fraction of its retail price immediately after its western release. I suspect that YsNet and Tencent decided it wasn’t worth forcing the issue after that. The lukewarm response from critics in the West probably didn’t help either.
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I'd be surprised if piracy was a major factor as it affects most game releases. Publishers accept that X% of copies will be pirated -- I can't imagine why Shenmue would be pirated more than any other game.

I think it's more likely your second point, that they just didn't think it'd be popular with Chinese gamers based on its mixed reception (and maybe the type of game it is).

...or maybe they had issues with the content, which is still a Japanese interpretation of China. They can be picky about these things :censored:
 
orient said:
I'd be surprised if piracy was a major factor as it affects most game releases. Publishers accept that X% of copies will be pirated -- I can't imagine why Shenmue would be pirated more than any other game.
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I think the game being unavailable through official means and there being no official release date will have made a huge difference. For anybody desperate to play the game in China, piracy was pretty much their only option. Maybe some people waited patiently, but surely there comes a point where you just have to say ‘sod it’. AFAIK, the Chinese release still hasn’t been officially cancelled anyway.
 
So a lot of the heavy work to make the game was done by contractors:
NPC characters
Voice Acting
SFX/Music
Possibly even large amount of textures etc.

There will more than likely be a core team that worked on the game design, code base, level design etc. They are more than likely working on pre-production bits for S4. So like experiments in the engine to add features and building the frame work for new areas etc. (This assumes that they are working towards S4).

Its likely this team will present a blue print for the game with some demos to publishers etc. to get green lit to make a full game.
 
This may have been covered as it's from Jan 2020, but I just saw this video shared with only a few hundred views and no english translation. It's an interview with Yu Suzuki / YSNet and appears to be with a Japanese tech / engineering company. Has it been translated at all?

 
samweavr said:
This may have been covered as it's from Jan 2020, but I just saw this video shared with only a few hundred views and no english translation. It's an interview with Yu Suzuki / YSNet and appears to be with a Japanese tech / engineering company. Has it been translated at all?

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@Switch Is this something you remember?
 
samweavr said:
This may have been covered as it's from Jan 2020, but I just saw this video shared with only a few hundred views and no english translation. It's an interview with Yu Suzuki / YSNet and appears to be with a Japanese tech / engineering company. Has it been translated at all?

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I watched these back when they were released. There were a number of nice details about Suzuki's early work, the progression in engineering the machines for all of the experience titles, and what led up to the R360. As an engineer, it was pretty fascinating for me.

I think he talked here, as well, about what led him to Sega, and his college days.

I think this was also where he mentioned some things like the camera in Shenmue III being the style of camera he had originally envisioned for the first two games, but it just not being possible for them on the Dreamcast. It's a really cool interview, and of course, it's Matsukaze giving the interview, so there's some discussion of his voice work as Ryo, too.

As far as nuggets on the state of YS Net, I'm sure there weren't any. Nothing that would be relevant now, at least.
 
Rydeen said:
I watched these back when they were released. There were a number of nice details about Suzuki's early work, the progression in engineering the machines for all of the experience titles, and what led up to the R360. As an engineer, it was pretty fascinating for me.

I think he talked here, as well, about what led him to Sega, and his college days.

I think this was also where he mentioned some things like the camera in Shenmue III being the style of camera he had originally envisioned for the first two games, but it just not being possible for them on the Dreamcast. It's a really cool interview, and of course, it's Matsukaze giving the interview, so there's some discussion of his voice work as Ryo, too.

As far as nuggets on the state of YS Net, I'm sure there weren't any. Nothing that would be relevant now, at least.
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Ah thank you! I always wondered where that fact about the camera originated.
 
Oh! I just remembered, on the Matsukaze aspect, they also talked at length about how they directed him to play Ryo as kind of a lifeless monotone being driven by trying to reduce the overall density of Ryo's unique lines. Having him repeat the same, or similar phrases for (almost) every interaction would have been a nightmare, data wise. By having Ryo be more dry and monotone, they were able to record a line once or twice, maybe, and reuse it in a hundred different conversations, for instance, and it would still fit with the more unique bits of his conversation.

Just given the nature of the radio show, they covered a lot of technical aspects of making all these games in Suzuki's portfolio. For people who like that, these were gold. They're also quite dense (and almost two hours, total), so actually translating all of it would be a real task.


EDIT: I found some basic summaries/thoughts I had written up back in January of last year.

The interesting things about this interview are that it's from a radio show called "A-LABO INDEX," where Matsukaze Masaya (yes, that Matsukaze Masaya; the Japanese voice of Ryo) interviews a bunch of industry leading Japanese engineers. I've only listened to the first half so far. It seems like it was conducted just before the release of Shenmue III, and broadcasted at the end of October. (Blog posts here, and here) The first half is really all about his pre-Shenmue legacy, which is both extensive, and impressive.

There were some wild stories I'd never heard before, like how Bill Gates wanted to have an audience with Yu because he was interested in finding out how Virtua Fighter was able to run its graphical processing calculations so quickly. Also Steven Spielberg wanted to get Yu's autograph for his son, because he was a fan of Virtua Fighter, and liked games more than movies. Of course, Virtua Figher is also the only video game on permanent display in the Smithsonian as an exhibit on technology innovations. They talked about that a bit. Also, the dude went and actually flew fighter jets with part of his team, in Florida, in mock dog-fights! One of the things that just bled through the entire interview was the astounding level of R&D environment SEGA was. Prototypes for Hang-On initially attempted to simulate actual motorcycle physics, where accelerating would move the bike more upright, and they had a blower that would simulate variations in wind speed, as well. It was really interesting, from an engineering perspective, listening to them talk about the Power Drift arcade cabinet, and all of the possible mechanical failures that could occur from use. Apparently, on the hardware side of development, that group was hoping to get to full freedom of motion in the cabinet; Outrun swung out to the left and right, while After Burner had two axes of rotation in the left-right, and up-down tilt, but had limited range. Eventually they succeeded with the R-360 cabinet, for G-Loc, etc--which isn't Gimbal locked, so they would have had to program it with quaternions.

Something I didn't realize, but because Yu worked on research in 3D modeling when he was studying at Okayama University of Science, all of the under-the-hood calculations for his arcade games from the 80s were done in 3D, and mapped to a 2D space for the graphical display. It's just amazing stepping through his career in this interview. They also talk about the secret military technology requisitioned for the texture mapping in Virtua Fighter 2 (a 200 million yen chip). I remember reading about this not too long ago, but it's still pretty crazy. SEGA was really on the bleeding edge of technology in those days, and a lot of it was spearheaded by Yu.

The second half of the interview seems like it should be all about Shenmue. At the end of the first half they talked a bit about what led to the shift from arcade games, to a console epic, but that's a lot of stuff I've heard him talk about elsewhere. For instance, putting all of the know-how from over a decade of arcade games experience into a console game, and that sort of naturally led to a variety of gameplays that looked something like FREE (open world-ish) gameplay. I'll probably listen to the rest sometime later tonight, and possibly report back if I find anything wildly interesting.
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Well, the second half didn't offer a lot of info on Shenmue III, but it was still incredibly interesting to listen to. I was looking at Yu's major again, because it's sort of a curious name, but it's more like Electronics Science. In those days you had people like Bill Joy working in Electrical Engineering departments, when they would likely be considered Computer Scientists these days. There was a much less rigid dichotomy, but I guess Yu, as a kid, was interested in taking things apart--he turned a classical guitar into an electric guitar for his band in high school--but was kind of infatuated by the title of "programmer." He talked about, as a high school student, realizing that he wanted work with as much free time as possible, in order to pursue more of his hobbies. So he considered being a teacher, and also a dentist (because dentists' patients don't typically die from dentistry), but eventually went to school for programming, and cut his teeth on Fortran (unsurprisingly).

A good 40% of the second half of the interview was taking about his early life. They also touched on some of the technical demands of rendering frames of a video game, versus frames for movie, and sort of the more limited advancements in computers over the coming years, due to physical limitations (in the absence of some more revolutionary technology, or scientific advancement). Yu expressed his consternation with working with a bunch of black-box libraries in UE4, versus a custom engine, and not being able to tweak or calibrate as much (I can totally relate with this--libraries are handy, but I'd usually rather know exactly what my code is doing, and be able to optimize as much as possible, if needed). He actually talked a little bit about ray-tracing, too. I have a feeling that Shenmue IV could have ray-tracing going on. He was basically saying that it was like a far off dream for him back in the earlier part of his career. It was kind of funny, also, because Matsukaze Masaya brought up the fan on the Hang-On prototypes again, and Yu mentioned that he'd like to have smells as part of his games.
:lol:
Yu was saying if, like, Febreze technology improved to the point where it could create and eliminate targeted smells on command, then it would be the kind of thing he'd like to add to games.

On the Shenmue III front, he mainly talked about the features implemented based on feedback from the first two games (a more simple combat system, with level and difficulty mode scaling, time-skip feature, and more easily recognizable sign posting, so that the average person doesn't get stuck). Also, he mentioned that the camera angle for S3 is more like where he always wanted it positioned, to begin with, but in the first two games that sort of camera angle caused too much slowdown. I just thought that was interesting because so many people seem to hate that the camera angle changed from where it was in the first two games.
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orient said:
It wouldn't surprise me if they'd worked on several pitches/prototypes as from a business perspective that'd be the safest thing to do.
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It would be nice to let the community participate, I mean there are probably a lot of testers here, that they do not have to pay for testing...

hyo_razuki said:
I think it's a real shame the Chinese release of S3 got canceled.
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The CCP probably doesn't like that theres no propaganda in it (except for capsule toys), so they forbid to release it in China.
 
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