To elaborate more on the sophistication of the Shenmue engine, you have to consider what it's presenting and how that differs from other games. Think of it in a "Making of Shenmue" kind of way.
AM2 wanted to make a highly immersive world that suspended realization of common videogame trappings. Instead of an action or adventure game where believability goes only as far as the stage for that particular scene has been set, Shenmue allows the seamless transitioning of an always running, dynamic system.
Think back to MGS2 or a Final Fantasy game. Imagine your adventure has you cross paths with a character such as a guard. What would happen if you decided to just watch that guard? Would you see him get tired from his shift eventually and leave his post? Would he go home, via a fully working transportation system to his fully modeled house/apartment? Would he ever stop to eat? Does he have a name and a backstory? Do any of these factors even matter?
Of course not, because the believability of your situation is scripted for that one scene. It's like dressing a stage for a single act at a time in a play, and that's quite acceptable for most story-based adventure games.
Shenmue presents a simulation of a real world for Ryo's exploration and adventure, though. You could follow that shopkeeper you happened upon as they dusted their antiques and sat behind the counter writing on forms, to when they closed up shop for lunch and headed down the street to the burger shop, to when they sat down on the bench and ate that burger, to when they got up again and headed back to their shop to re-open it, and to when they finally closed for the day and started walking out to their apartment at a nearby complex (or perhaps to the bus station down the street to go to their home in another part of town.) The engine transitions between all these actions as you watch it, without pausing to reset the stage or skip over the continuity parts where doors have to be opened, bodies re-oriented from moving to standing to bending and sitting into chairs. And this is happening for hundreds of characters all the time, as morning turns to night, and as clear weather turns rainy and back again.
The time of day (and date) is dynamic and the weather unscripted, and the characters life routines are influenced by this. For example, at a certain point in the storyline progression, the flower shop girl Nozomi will head off to Sakuragoaka Park where she'll get harassed by some thugs. But, she'll go to this park
only on a day it isn't raining (makes sense), so this event won't take place until this progression has been reached and it also so happens that the weather is fair. If you're trying to meet up with certain characters to question them, you need to know where they are and at what time they'll be there, taking into account conditions. Some people stay nearer to their houses during inclement weather.
The whole map is laid out to be more than just scenery. People have family, acquaintences, jobs, and homes. The convenience store is clerked in shifts by different characters for different days. And although that kind of stuff is just content, it's compelling nonetheless within the framework of what the engine is presenting. The Mishima family, consisting of the mother Fusayo, the eldest daughter Mayumi, and the youngest daughter Megumi, all share a facial resemblence like families do; they live in a house you can visit in the neighborhood down the hill from yours, Sakuragaoka. The mother has a complex life history I won't waste time going into here (you could read it on the Shenmue Passport disc, get clues in-game, or read the strategy guide), but her daily routine starts her at home at 8:00AM, shopping to Yaokatsu Produce, to Komine Bakery, to Tamura Quality Meats, to Mary's Patches and Embroidery Shop, to Uokichi Seafood, and then back to her porch by 1:45PM. She goes into her house at 3:00PM, returning outside to gossip with some other ladies from the neighborhood thirty minutes later by the telephone booth. She leaves them back for home at 7:00PM, and then returns outside to sweep her porch from 7:50PM to 8:30PM. And Mrs. Mishima is just some random character you'd never even have to meet if you didn't want to during your progression through the story.
The engine isn't just throwing out a bunch of texture mapped polys. It's allowing all these things and all this movement to take place around you. If you stayed within one part of the map, you could see random characters wandering in during the day and behaving differently with individual daily routines, without the game ever stopping for a loading screen. So, it's seamless in that way as opposed to Jak and Daxter's seamless terrain loading engine.
Ryo throws off multiple shadows that deform correctly even over complex terrain when near multiple light sources. When walking and stopping on a sloped surface, he rebalances his weight more on one leg realistically. Same with stairs. The game knows how many times you've looked at different stuff and how many times you bumped into things (all in the Shenmue Passport stats). It probably has the most spoken dialogue of any game ever, allowing almost any character to tell you the directions from where they presently are to almost any location you happen to be asking about. To accomodate so much speech, Shenmue employs real-time lip synching. When you see Ryo's hand reach out for something, you can see the intricate lines and the veins beneath his skin flex. Even the animals - the dogs, birds, and cats - have life routines. The development of one particular kitten is tied into the diet of food and attention you give her. When it's raining, you can stand under the awning of a building and watch the rain drip off infront of you and splash on the ground.
The indoor locations are lit very convincingly for mood. Outside, the time of day and position of the sun are reflected in lighting, coloring, direction and length of shadows, and lens flare.
The game dynamically mixes background music, ambient sounds, conversation speech, and localized sound effects by distance from source.
The pathfinding AI for the characters will have them back off, readjust and wait, or line up single-file at congested doorways and destinations. Body parts bend, twist, and flex at joints with real-time interpolation between animations. Instead of having to return to a very limited set of keypoint animations to execute a new behavior, a character can turn their neck, body and eyes to face you for conversation even if they're kneeling or working on something else.
The game creates its conversations from dialogue sets in real-time to avoid repetition. So for instance, if you happen to ask the same question to the same person more than once, they'll usually have multiple ways of delivering the same piece of information. Ryo will have multiple ways of responding, sometimes questioning more specifically, sometimes responding with the curt "I see", or sometimes thanking the person for the help. The generated responses depend upon the mood and tone of the conversation, and Ryo's face animates dynamically to match the emotion of the speech with eyes that squint and blink, a mouth that can frown or smile, and his brow that can furrow. There are more subtle touches to the facial animation then that, and all of the other 1000+ characters match their face to the tone of the conversation to some extent too - beat the Lucky Hit stand owners several times in a row, and they'll acquire a sadder expression when they say something like, "Here. Take your money!"
The game doesn't even fully express the flexibility of the engine and tools, though. During development, AM2 showed numerous tech demonstrations regarding the games' Magic Time and Magic Weather systems. There are videos of the camera pulled way above the neighborhood of Sakuragoaka where you watch the sky and trees change with the passing of the day and seasons. Leaves fell from the trees, snow built up on the ground and melted, and the trees eventually became full of foliage again. Since your story progresses from day to day, you can't time lapse things to see it all. But, if you play long enough in the story, you will see holiday decorations put up around Dobuita for Christmas, a man dress in a Santa suit to advertise the shops, and certain characters wearing traditional Japanese Komonos for the New Year's holiday.
You better believe that one of the largest and most technically proficient development teams ever, with a budget high in the tens of millions, and a development duration of several years would be able to put together some sophisticated toolsets, development processes, and an engine for this project. They created techniques for facial modeling and animation that allowed them to make a cast of hundreds of unique looking characters which could all react and animate their expressions in real-time. The characters are individually clothed and skinned and they react to their daily duties and the environment with seamless animation transitions. Sure, MGS2 has some sweet looking animation - the developers were able to have motion-capture actors play out the pre-scripted cut-scenes, and they could interpolate with some IK during the in-game stuff to give everything amazing smoothness. But for Shenmue, not every scenario is a pre-dressed set on the game's stage... instead, everything has to look natural as your character moves among a dynamic world where progression isn't so linear, and where there's a certain level of freedom and randomness to what you'll encounter and the behavior you'll see. Making all that animate like a real-life town, of which you are free to move about, was quite the challenge.
In summary, the game had to push enough geometry to convey realistically-styled locales with dozens of individually modeled characters at once. It had to be able to load them dynamically while you played for new people and new behavior mixing. It had to push enough texture information to allow booths and stands and different storefronts all over the place within cities and nature environments. All of that had to be highly interactive enough at times to allow you to knock those booths over and break them apart. The items on top had to react properly to physics and fall over appropriately. The engine had to allow changing time and weather and seasons, and it had to track how all that influenced character behavior. It had to allow lots of sound mixing. It had to allow large panaromic shots as well as micro-scale detailing. It had to allow for expressive human and animal faces to deliver the emotion of the scenes in the story. AM2 had to make quite the impressive engine to cover such daunting requirements, and the result is the Shenmue engine.
Remember, this game was made and shipped into the hands of hundreds of thousands of gamers in Japan back in 1999 before the PS2 was even out yet, let alone before games like MGS2 or Jak and Daxter would ever see completion (and games like Silent Hill 3 aren't even out yet.) This was done on 1998 Dreamcast hardware, not on fifteen month newer and 50% more expensive PS2 hardware. Don't be too surprised to see some of the more impressive engines of the future come out of SEGA and AM2.
Phil:
Why are we suddenly comparing it with Sonic Adventures 2? To my knowledge, we were comparing it to Shenmue, because you wanted 'us' to present a game that looks significantly better than Shenmue.
I used Sonic Adventure 2 DC as an example only to point out that Jak and Daxter's cartoony theme and 60 fps refresh was not fully responsible for its minimally textured look. Sonic is cartoony as well (though, not trying to achieve the exact same look, of course), but it's concentration of texturing is strikingly higher than J&D. However, you can just as easily substitute Shenmue back as the example, for it's just as concetrated with texturing variety on virtually every new surface as Sonic Adventure 2 DC is (the textures certainly aren't as pretty though, since there so much more stuff to do.)
I agree with Marconelly with Jak & Daxter, as the fact that the game runs at a smooth 60 fps with awesome lightning, as good texturing and a seamless world that's being streamed without visible loading, validates to it being graphically better in probably every single aspect.
Come on now... Shenmue just throws around so much more texture variety that it really isn't a comparison in that one regard. Whether or not its cartoony, Jak and Daxter's surfaces just look much more pastel and smooth than the busy surface patterns in Shenmue. Looking out across distant views shows that farther geometry may not even be using texture maps at all after a certain visibility distance.
It's evident enough though to have it running beside me and considering the insane amount of geometry the engine is pushing, I personally think Naughty Dog did a wonderful job.
I definitely agree here.
You can read up on various reviews (IGN comes to mind, GameSpot's review is locked to members only unfortunately) of the game that will show that many people at the time were impressed by the texturing and all the other aspects and put it over many PS2 games graphically at the time.
There's nothing technically wrong with the textures that are there. I'm just saying they are very sparsely distributed by comparison.
