The Serious Engine and Serious Sam series

Hamel · Post by **Hamel** » 2003-10-21 03:51am

Why did only one developer license the Serious Engine? So much could have been done with it!

I heard the game sold well, but you wouldn't think so judging from the horribly low number of servers. Anyway, the games kick ass. They don't have Karma physics, but weird stuff can happen, such as being able to walk on cylinders, cubes and such with proper perspective changes. SS:SE is the only game to date that gave me motion sickness.

Another ++ for Croteam: many times, they use higher res textures than you see in most other games. Quake3's textures were splotchy and undetailed. Even UT2k3 has some low res textures all over the place.

Screenie depicting Croteam's respect for textures

Nice use of Terragen, environment mapping everywhere

Both of these shots were taken at 1600x1200 FSAAx4 and sampled down.

I'd like to just use [img] tags, but the pics are 800x600 and I don't want to piss anyone off. Mozilla browsers might read the file as text, so you can paste the location into IE or download/rename to see them.

Shinova · Post by **Shinova** » 2003-10-21 03:54am

Are those shots from Serious Sam?

Hamel · Post by **Hamel** » 2003-10-21 03:56am

Darth-Garfield · Post by **Darth-Garfield** » 2003-10-21 07:14am

I loved playing serious sam on small lanparties with some friends.

Few things can compare with a few hundred monsters coming at you and your friends in an open field. That was one of the nicest things of Serious Sam imho, the huge number of monsters they could show on your screen without the game getting horribly slow.

I would have loved to see more games take advantage of this.

Hamel · Post by **Hamel** » 2003-10-22 06:03pm

This is OLD news (sometimes i'm just out of the loop), but Croteam has spoken about Serious Engine 2.

Most of our fans already know or read that, but for those less familiar, we are in development of Serious Sam 2 for PC and Xbox for quite some time now. To be precise, as soon as we finished Serious Sam for the Xbox, we started the design for the sequel. Serious Sam 2 development is planned to be finalized in second quarter of 2004, so you can expect the release also in that period. We are currently on schedule, so I don't expect any delays.

Along with that, we decided to develop new engine technology called Serious Engine 2. The decision not to update old Serious Engine was already made before we finished Xbox version. We realized the difficulties of updating the technology which is now almost 6 years old and keeping it up-to-date with latest techology. So, we decided to start from beginning, but also to use good parts of old engine as a basis for creating new one.

This proved to be a good decision, as now we already have new Serious Tools in workable condition, along with Advanced Physics, Entity Compiler, etc. For example, Level Designers are now able to create much more complex level arhitecture, at least hundred times more polygons than in old engine, while still having an excellent framerate on mid-range configurations. All this will be spiced up with usage of advanced vertex and pixel shaders, dynamic shadows and lots of other state-of-the-art features. Also, Entity Compiler means more control over enemy AI, weapons, etc. and also it's going to be of great help to MOD community, as you won't need to have Visual C++ any more to create code for your MOD. These are just a few of many great things we already have in Serious Engine 2.

Along with the game and engine, we are also planning to release a technology demo/benchmark in the near future, showing what Serious Engine 2 is capable of. We hope that you'll be _amazed_ with what we are doing.

I won't go into more details at this stage, as we plan to have updates regularly, where you'll find out what's going on in more details.