Get Serious

All the little things...

Graphics. Serious Sam has always been about awesome, mind- blowing graphics. Croteam, not satisfied with just plastering the most succulent, high-resolution textures and largest view ranges gamers have ever seen into Serious Sam 2, went one step further and crammed support for advanced shaders effects, per-pixel lighting, normal mapping/parallax mapping and oodles of reflections into it as well.

‘On top of [this], there’s a very powerful terrain shader which can blend up to eight textures in one pass. That can be very handy, especially when it comes to texturing vast environments,’ explains Ladavac.

What more could you want from a nextgeneration engine? ‘We also chose to go with complete support for true HDR rendering.

Of course, a nifty bloom post-processing effect on top of that makes everything look really shiny and life-like.’

Scaling and compatibility have also made their way into the tasty package that is SS2. ‘It even supports pixel shader model 1.x (which makes the game playable on older hardware), but at the same time the engine fully utilises all the bells and whistles of new technologies like, for example, NVIDIA’s SLI.’ Ladavac also points out that SS2 will be available on Xbox as well as PC, so making the engine scalable was always an important factor.

‘Serious Engine was well known for its scalability since the beginning and that has been taken to the next step with Serious Engine 2. The engine and editor aren’t OS specific, so it can run on Windows or Linux platforms or any platform we want.’

The icing on the cake? ‘The engine also supports multi-threading, open rendering architecture and in-house modular physics – which is enough to have it running on next-generation consoles in no time.’ Nice.

Oh, and it supports OpenGL and DirectX, so it’s up to the user which API poison they prefer. Ladavac says that DirectX will be enabled by default – even though OpenGL will perform better on certain hardware – for the sake of compatibility.

Smart physics

You may have noticed that Croteam has developed its own physics module for Serious Engine 2 rather than using a third-party solution like Havok. Croteam had some tall demands for the physics engine, and nothing but a custom job was going to satisfy the needs of Serious Sam 2.

‘With a game [as] fast and arcade-ish [as] Serious Sam 2, we needed a lot of things to blow up and destroy. Serious Physics is optimised and powerful enough to handle with ease large amounts of props being affected by the laws of nature,’ explains Ladavac. Thanks to the work of Croteam, Serious Sam 2 enjoys very playable frame-rates under heavy physics duress.

So, if not Havok, why not something more advanced like Novodex? And if this were to become an option, would there be support for physics cards when they come out? According to Ladavac, the immaturity of hardware physics and the lack of actual product availability made Novodex unattractive – at least for now.

‘It certainly is a useful piece of hardware and it can give a nice boost to a physics-heavy game. The major problem with the currently available hardware is that there is no open API, and the only interface to the currently available hardware is proprietary and enforces a specific proprietary software solution to be used in the absence of hardware acceleration,’ explains Ladavac.

‘This does not open enough possibilities for quick expansion of the market. But the end results remain to be seen. This way or another, Serious Engine 2 supports modular parts, so we will probably be supporting a hardware-accelerated physics module [in the future].’

All the work put into the visuals would amount to nothing without an intelligent AI running things. Croteam has gone to tremendous effort to tweak and improve the AI fundamentals, making enemies more devious than before. Navigation is improved over Serious Sam and character interaction is more complex.

‘For instance, some NPCs will help the player by fighting the enemies together with him, some of them will run away when the enemies attack, while some will help in different ways like bringing items and showing ways [to go] to the player.’

Ladavac explains that additional work has also been done to incorporate all the nice aforementioned extras included in Serious Engine 2.

‘Besides usual bad guys, the game now includes NPCs and wildlife creatures. Add the vehicles and turrets to the mix, and allow combining different creatures where one can ride on another, it gives a whole new set of possibilities to play with,’ he says.

End of the world
 
According to Ladavac, like Serious Engine, Serious Engine 2 will be licensed out. The technology is too spectacular to stay contained within the walls of Croteam.

‘Serious Engine 2 was designed from the start to be open, modular and flexible, so it can be used not only for FPS games, but for other genres as well. We expect to see it used for a wide variety of target projects.’

The ease in which new content can be added, played with and fine-tuned, without the need for a programmer, makes it great for prototyping Ladavac explains. ‘[It] ... allows developers to concentrate on the actual content, not on the technology behind it.’

That’s what games should be about – content, not technology. Croteam is building the tools to allow developers to do just that. And it will be in their (and our) hands sooner than you think.

‘It’s ... pretty exciting to see us coming close to the gold [finishing] date after years of development,’ says an enthused Ladavac. ‘The game should be completed in a couple of months.’

That’s seriously sweet.