I got a detailed response from Zach about the development problems that plagued Shenmue Online. (Hellraiser)
"hello
Originally it was a korean company that worked on the project. but disputes over profit eventually lead to a bad breakup. It was then sourced to Interserv Taiwan, which meant that the Shanghai facility would end up working on the bulk of the project. I was the only American working at Inteserv Shanghai at that time. I had the notion that Sega treated the Chinese outsource workers at cheap labor, and had no problem changing their designs and layouts for the game on the fly. Since labor cost was so cheap, Sega thought they could get away with it. Normally you would not be able to get away with such things if it was an American Video game company, because any major changes would set back the project months, if not years, and cost an additional 2-4 million dollars more. (ie. Starcraft Ghost).
I worked on the motion capture and character skinning (binding the 3d model to max character studio bones). The motion capture (fight scenes) was a bitch because the Taiwan quick check lady kept on denying and returning our edited motion capture saying that it was inaccurate. The only reference the animators were given were videos reference of the motion capture actors. None of the animators ever played Shenmue on the old dreamcast. actually none of the animators even liked fighting games. Nobody seemed to know what the taiwan Quick checker wanted, (MAJOR communication problem), and Interserv was too cheap to fly her over to Shanghai and have a meeting with us. One of the Art directors ended up helping us, and even the mo caps he personally passed ended up being rejected by Taiwan QC lady.
I also talked with many of the environmental modelers and they all said the project sucked ass. What's worse was a coworker worked on the mini games, and he had to work overtime, midnight to even 2 in the morning, for a month. He looked like a zombie every time I saw him. And at the end the mini games were changed so his work was all for nothing. He was not one to lose his anger easily, but that time he almost lost it.
Anyway, I left Interserv on good terms about a year ago. Last I heard from my coworkers is that Interserv is no longer working on Shenmue. Interserv had aobut over 200 employees when I left. There was also a huge talent drain at Interserv because the workers despised the new manager, who took all the powers away from the beloved art director, and so a majority of the artists decided to all leave at once. I don't know if Sega is going to finish Shenmue online. But if it still decides to go on, do realize it will at first only be for the Asian markets.
regards
Zach
ps. 3d Studio Max version 5.x was used because Shenmue online was using an outdated older game engine. and max 5 was most compatible. during year 2005-6 the latest max version was max 7 and max 8. to prove I worked on the project here is a link in winrar of 2 generic characters and their CS bip files. Anybody that knows 3d Max CS will know what to do with these.
www.yuandadaily.com/zach/shenmue.rar
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Zach posted at Sept 18th, 2007:
"I worked on the Shenmue online project in Shanghai at Interserv. The game had so many problems, from environment models, to 3d motion capture cleanup, to it’s mini-games. It was a real-time fighting game forced onto a online game, so you can imagine how fun it would be with lag. with the mocap it ended up with interserv using interns to help with the editing and skinning. There was just so many characters that needed skinning, and rigging, and then Sega decided to change the models, which resulted in all the characters needed to be re-skinned with max 5. hahah rofl.
Two words that described the failure of this game: ” POOR PREPRODUCTION”. You know, garbage in, garbage out, or like my art instructor said back in art college, ” if you don’t get the preproduction down right, you’re just polishing a turd.”"
Also,
http://www.metacritic.com/games/plat.../shenmueonline
this site has a release date of Jan 1, 2008 for Shenmue Online.... Oh boy..
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