Get Serious

Logan Booker throws some questions at a headless, screaming Alen Ladavac, Technical Director at Croteam, about the glorious Serious Sam 2.

Serious Sam was destined to be a different sort of game the minute it set a cardboard foot on the retail shelf. Released on a (probably) gorgeous day in 2001, SS broke free of the corridor-ridden, claustrophobic, brown-grey environments of its brethren and provided us lucky folk with an array of luscious, vibrant areas, complete with rich colours, large seemingly endless maps and a theme unlike anything else. Littered with Egyptian Gods, decapitated screaming opponents, skeletal animals and enormous end bosses, Serious Sam bellowed originality wherever you looked, if eyes could hear the bellow of originality.

Serious Sam was such a success it spawned an expansion in 2002 called The First Encounter, and now developer Croteam is working hard on Serious Sam 2. Not only does it look a million times more brilliant than Serious Sam, it radiates the same aura of difference as its predecessor.

Power to the papyrus
 
According to technical director Alen Ladavac, Serious Sam 2, both technically and story-wise, will continue on from the previous game. Sam, having defeated innumerable opponents in the pyramids of Egypt, medieval towns and other distant locals, is off to visit the most distant of them all – a planet called Sirius. As you can guess, it’s a distinctly off-world venture, which culminates in a battle with the great evil itself, named ‘Mental’.

‘[The] story will be backed up with over 90 cut-sequences through 42 levels. Sam will travel on 7 different planets/environments, kill over 40 [types of] baddies, drive vehicles like flying saucers, jet bikes, animals and chat with natives on planets,’ explains Ladavac. All this will be accompanied by a co-operative mode, which Ladavac describes as an ‘integral part’ of the Serious Sam games. It’s even seen a number of upgrades, and along with Internet and LAN support for PCs, SS2 will allow console owners to multi-play using System Link or Xbox Live!

Serious engineering
 
Serious Sam was a fantastic game, but at its core rested something just as great and potent. That something was the Serious Engine. Most of Croteam’s efforts in the past few years has gone into making Serious Engine 2 a rendering powerhouse. If you can do it in shader pipeline then you’ll no doubt find it in this engine.

‘Serious Engine 2 has been written from the scratch to meet demands of modern technology and for designers to explore all possibilities while creating SS2,’ says Ladavac. ‘The new engine allows easy adding of all features that anyone will ever need and more.’

This claim includes the engine’s ability to have pretty much anything within the game, such as turrets, vehicles, NPCs and advanced AI to control it all.

‘Support for them had to be added into the engine and this is where SE2 shines,’ declares Ladavac. ‘Every little detail about ... any enemy character, like its health, speed, attack or sound is available to artists and designers to change, create or modify. This allows even [more] complex behaviours to be controlled at the moment of [creation].’

‘Also, designers now have Serious Macro at their disposal, a powerful scripting language for controlling almost every aspect of gameplay and behaviour.’

Like the engine, all the tools designed for creating this content have been made from scratch. Ladavac explains that this was needed so the team could manipulate the game’s complex geometry, which far exceeds that of the first Serious Sam.

‘Also, Serious Physics [the in-house physics engine] has been created for object manipulation inside the game [and provides] ragdolls for characters, vehicles and turrets.’ In fact, Croteam says that Serious Sam 2 is ‘100 times more complex’ than Serious Sam.

This statement, as marketeer-like as it sounds, is true. ‘Seriously, we are now using much higher model detail for levels geometry. On SS: The First Encounter, houses were boxes with painted windows, doors and similar. Now, we can put as much as needed details to make [the] game world look realistic and living.’

‘With new shaders and rendering effects, we can simulate realistic skin on enemies or reflective metallic surface of vehicles. Lights and post-processing effects, like bloom, haze and HDR [High Dynamic Range] rendering add a much more complex feel and look to the game,’ says Ladavac.

And it doesn’t stop there. Serious Engine 2 promises to be a designer’s dream. Ladavac claims that SE2 is superior to most other engines on the market, when you take into account the flexible, powerful toolset as well as its features. In fact, Croteam is so proud of its toolset it’s declared it the ‘mother of all editors’.
‘Designers and artists can get familiar with it very fast and start producing game content in a matter of days. For example, a user can create the model of an enemy with its skeletal structure inside any 3D application and export it into Serious Editor 2. From there he/she can adjust geometry, shaders or even animations and export that back to 3D application,’ says Ladavac.

The ease at which all this power can be used is amazing. ‘To create complex shaders on characters, the user doesn’t have to write any text files, learn complex mathematical formulas, or a programming language – everything is available at the click of mouse.’