The History of Technology - Serious Engine

GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT TECHNOLOGY

 

On March 20, 2001, a game called Serious Sam was born - it was a classic shooter in the best traditions of Doom and Duke Nukem, where instead of shooting from behind cover, the hero rushes through the levels, stuffing enemies with lead and dodging their attacks. The game was a breath of fresh air for the players of that time, where at that time Half Life from Valve ruled everything. The shooter was very dynamic, funny and beautiful. Sem showed "Halva" who is in charge here, and they began to call him Duke's son. In a nutshell - the game turned out to be very successful. The game was developed by a small, previously unknown to anyone, Croatian company Croteam.

 

CROTEAM

Croteam was founded by four enthusiasts in 1992 in Croatia. They were engaged in the development of sports simulators and action games. In 1994, their first game, Football Glory, was released for Amiga computers. The game was appreciated and Croteam earned its place in the computer games market. 

On May 29, 2000, a test version of Serious Sam Test 1 was released, but it was not a demo, not an alpha, or even a beta version - it was a technological test for compatibility with other computers. After the release of the test version, the interest in the development of the Croats increased many times, since before that no game had provided such performance and graphics.

 

The engine produced the most beautiful picture in huge open spaces with high-quality textures and models.

 

On December 15, 2000, Public Test 2 was released, including multiplayer, which delighted fans of Doom and Duke Nukem. 

 

On March 20, 2001, the full version of the game is released under the title Serious Sam: The First Encounter. The gameplay of the series can be seen as a slight throwback to early first-person shooters. While other companies worked on realism and the process of identifying the player and the protagonist, Serious Sam offered a traditional, Quake-like gameplay. However, modern technology has taken the classic game formula to the next level. 

 

ENGINE FEATURES

 

Serious Engine is written in C++ while Quake (Sam's main competitor) was written in C, this fact alone gave the engine an advantage in terms of ease of coding for it. The engine had a lot of features, some of which could not be found in other games of the time. The Serious Engine handled complex architecture very quickly, allowing developers to easily showcase large buildings or objects with lots of detail, open and closed spaces, and high-poly models in the game. Everyone was amazed at how quickly the game handles huge levels without losing performance.

The engine had static and dynamic shadows, reading them on the fly, which made it possible to make levels with unprecedented speed and ease. The engine could work both with dynamic shadows that change and are reflected in real time, and with pre-calculated shadows. 

 

 

The engine also supported reflective surfaces, volumetric fog, portal technology (the ability to create portals at levels that can display some point of the location created by the developers, and also be used to move the player), overlaying up to three textures on one polygon, detailed texturing (with With the help of detailed textures, you can make it so that when a player comes close to an object, a texture with details is smoothly superimposed on its normal texture - in our understanding, this is tessellation), playing mp3 files, skeletal and morphing (smooth transformation of one object into another) animation, particles and procedural textures, Sky Box textures.

 

One of the most interesting features was multi-directional gravity with six-sided free physics, which made it possible to change the direction of gravity in certain areas of the level.

 

LEVEL EDITORS

 

To work with the engine, three editor programs are used:

Serious Editor - designed for editing and creating locations in real time, the editor interface is similar to UnrealEd. You can try the created map directly in the program window. The editor supports editing in four modes - Entities, Polygons, Sectors and Vertex. Each of the modes corresponds to the color of the indicator, which is located at the bottom of the screen. The view area can be divided into one, two or four windows, in which the level can be shown from several angles: top, bottom, left, right, front, back, and perspective.

The editor used the famous sector system to divide the space, which has proven itself in the idSoftware and Epic engines, but in the "Serious Engine" there was a special approach to the formation of the level in the mind of a new project. The engine generated an endless world, which the designer filled with architecture. This avoided level leaks that plagued designers working with the Quake engine.

The main difference was that he worked at lightning speed and calculated shadows on the fly as the designer moved the light source around the location - so when a new architectural element was added, a shadow immediately appeared on it. Also, the uniqueness of the editor was that it was possible to immediately test the game in the window without compiling. Everything was considered very quickly and the editor immediately gave out a picture that would be in the game. The engine is also convenient because add-ons can be written for it in the form of *.dll dynamically loaded libraries, which are simply copied to the game folder and make changes to the game, allowing you to use these resources in editors without changing the game sources. From this we can conclude that the "Serious Engine" had a modularity. 

Serious Modeler - used to create, edit and save models in the game's native *.mdl format. Supports importing objects from 3ds Max and other 3D graphics programs.

Serious SKA Studio - allows you to import models with skeletal animation from LightWave or 3ds Max and save them in *.SKA format. 

 

MULTIPLAYER

 

 

The engine also supported multiplayer up to sixteen players, but this limitation could be easily removed by changing just a couple of lines in the server script, and then the number of players was limited only by the server's capacity and the speed of the Internet connection.

 

COMPATIBILITY

 

The engine is cross-platform. Serious Engine has been ported to xBox, Playstation 2 and Game Cube. Thanks to this, the engine sold and licensed very well. Serious Engine uses DirectX 8 version as graphics API. In general, Serious Engine gave us such games as: Carnivores: Cityscape (2002), Deer Hunter 2003 (2002), Bird Hunter 2003 (2003), Alpha Black Zero: Intrepid Protocol (2004), Nitro Family (2004) , Serious Sam: Next Encounter (2004).

 

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS FOR SERIOUS ENGINE

 

Croteam realizing that they have created a masterpiece series, they begin to develop a new engine. They did not want to rewrite the engine completely, but eventually came to the decision to write the engine from scratch. Perhaps this was a huge mistake and in the end the engine was not as successful commercially as its predecessor. Serious Engine 2 also failed to compete with engines of its generation such as Source, idTech 4 and Unreal Engine 2.5. Many of the technologies implemented in the engine were either outdated or already used in more advanced engines.

ENGINE FEATURES

Serious Engine 2 featured HDR, a technology that, by 2005, was implemented and used in all engines. Also, support for DirectX 9 was implemented, which used shaders of the second generation 2.0.

Other features of the graphics engine include the implementation of sun glare, as well as MIP-texturing - this effect is used for better rendering of the level, so one high-resolution texture is taken and after that reduced copies are created down to the pixel - all this is created in order to to avoid blurry textures at high screen resolution, and if the texture resolution is too high, to eliminate the appearance of extra pixels and the loss of fine details. It turns out that it is better to have several textures of different detail and apply the one that is most suitable in this situation to the object.

 

 

The engine has the technology of light refraction in water space, however, all refractions are static and are not calculated in real time.

The changes also affected the artificial intelligence system. The sound engine uses several systems and audio file formats. A constant feature since the first version of the engine was amazing optimization. Due to this, a fairly large number of objects could appear on the player's screen.

The engine, as mentioned above, failed commercially and was not licensed by any of the development companies. Croteam didn't release more games on it either. The only game developed on the Serious Engine 2 is Serious Sam 2, which was rather coolly received by gamers. 

 

LEVEL EDITOR

Serious Sam 2 comes with a new game editor, Serious Editor 2.0, which uses built-in features to manipulate all game resources in one program. The program has a built-in GUI driver, editors for polygons, animations, collisions, destruction, destructibility of objects, the world, models, scripts, particle systems, as well as a resource editor (allows you to change the appearance of the menu and other elements).

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS FOR SERIOUS ENGINE 2

SERIOUS ENGINE 3

The first mention of Serious Engine 3 slipped in 2007. The Croatian video game publication has published the first screenshots of the upcoming game from Croteam, a military FPS shooter that was supposed to be published by Gamecock Media Group. The release of the game was scheduled for 2009, but the current status of the shooter is unknown. Probably the game was frozen or cancelled. The report also mentioned the computer game Serious Sam III, which was then in the early stages of development. 

 

As a result, HD remakes of Serious Sam: First Encounter and Serious Sam: Second Encounter were released on the new engine.

 

ENGINE FEATURES

 

The engine was written in DirectX 9.0c and, unlike its predecessors, supported the seventh generation of the xBox 360 and Playstation 3 consoles.

The PC version of the engine is designed to support multithreading and multitasking. Especially for the PC version of Croteam, the physical model has been completely "shoveled" to increase performance and increase the realism of the behavior of physical objects.

Graphic effects have been improved many times, and in particular the light and everything connected with it. Lighting technology has been rewritten for greater realism. The game received advanced HDR capabilities and, at the same time, advanced shadow technology.

Croteam in this version of the engine abandoned the Macro scripting language and began to use Lua. Lua is more flexible and easier to learn or use.

The particle system has been tweaked to provide the most realistic weather conditions in the game.

The main innovation of Serious Engine 3 was dynamically changing water physics, screwed in for the most part to implement the interaction of objects with the surface of the water.

 

Another technological feature is the new network code, which uses the capabilities of the modern Internet, and in the meantime, broadband transmissions.

 

 

In December 2010, thanks to an interview given by Croteam co-founder Alain Ladavac to Big Download, it was revealed that Serious Engine 3 would support DirectX 11. Serious Sam 3: BFE would be the first game to feature this feature. Later it became known that the Serious Engine 3 used in Serious Sam 3: BFE was updated to version 3.5.

 

 

LEVEL EDITOR

 

At the end of October 2010, the Serious Editor 3 level editor was released in the Steam digital distribution system, available for free download to all users and allowing you to create new locations for already released games on the Serious Engine 3 engine (Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter and Serious Sam HD : The Second Encounter).

Simultaneously with the release of Serious Editor 3,  the developers at Croteam issued the following statement: “Recently, players and forum trolls have been saying that they can make maps for the multiplayer campaign better than us. Prove it ladies." It was also reported that the developers will keep track of the best cards and reward their creators with gifts. 

 

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS FOR SERIOUS ENGINE 3