[Farid]

http://archive.gamespy.com/gdc2004/serioussam2pc/

Although the Game Developers Conference has always been a show first and foremost about game development and technology, there are always a few new games being shown around the show floor. One nice surprise at this year's GDC was a sneak peek at Croteam's Serious Sam 2, on display in the form of a brief non-interactive demo running at both ATI's and Microsoft's DirectX booths. For some insight as to what we were actually seeing, we caught up with Croteam lead designer Davor Hunski and lead programmer Alen Ladavac.

The demo itself was barely two minutes long, featuring lots of the spacious outdoor levels similar to those found in the first two Serious Sam games (the First Encounter and the Second Encounter), albeit with lots more detail. The demo (which was being rendered in real-time, and was not a movie) -- started off with Sam sitting on a bright, shiny, three-wheeled chopper, and then driving off out into the level. According to the Croteam guys, vehicles will play a part in Serious Sam 2, and will be used in some interesting ways -- in some points, Sam may need to outrun enemies to get to a vehicle first, as enemies will be able to use vehicles as well.

Another scene showed a motley cast of characters running through the level as a squad. Keeping in line with previous Serious Sam games, all the characters were bright and colorful -- in particular two oversized behemoths built and outfitted like NFL football players. At first, we thought this might be a display of co-op in action, but as it turned out, these were actually bad guys chasing Sam through the level. If you can imagine such a thing, imagine the Blue Meanies (from Yellow Submarine) brought to life in a rainbow of flavors -- and with heavy artillery -- and you start to get the idea.

As the camera panned around the chase, a lot of effects we've come to associate with the series - big, open spaces and bright sunny skies - were all in effect. As is the norm for many graphical tech demos these days, the Serious Sam 2 demo also contained demonstrations of the game's physics, starting with the now-standard human-pachinko-machine: a series of bodies dropped off the side of a cliff, bouncing around wooden planks protruding out the side. There was also a scene in which a dozen or so metal barrels were set up and knocked over with another barrel, sending the collection falling down a hill in every direction.

The end of the demo was a showcase for one of the oversized football player enemies close up, zooming in and rotating around the character to get a good look at the character's amazingly textured surfaces. From the shiny exterior armor to the small bumps on the football being held in its hand, everything was textured to a remarkably effective degree.

Beyond the short demo, Hunski and Ladavac weren't able to reveal much about Serious Sam 2. The team is still hoping for a 2004 release, although that date isn't set in stone and could still slip into next year. The basic formula clearly hasn't changed, with lots of huge, bright, colorful levels, minimal story, and tons of enemies to shoot. And to our delight, cooperative play will return, as it was one of the most popular features of the exisiting Serious Sam games.

Croteam has grown much since the release of their first games -- there were about 10 people on the original Serious Sam team, but they've now grown to over 20 people. As a team based in Croatia -- far from the center of the game development world -- the original Serious Sam demo was instrumental in building up a buzz around the game, and a demo for Serious Sam 2 will almost certainly be released before the game. When that might be is still a mystery, however - we'll keep tabs on Serious Sam 2 as the game continues development.

The 10 best pics available :? http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=55027












The polycount seems (even on those blurry pics) high , and the engine feature all the "next-gen must have"

A few more informations for those who never heard of this engine:

http://croteam.com/

The firsts Serious Sam (both fisrt and second encounter) were quite impressive on the technical side (lots of effects, spacious levels, bug free, etc...), i hope this new version will be as much impressive as the first one in his time.

[Wunderchu]

cool
thanx for the heads up

[Waltar]

Serious sam is one of the only games I know of that literally had zero bugs. Thats how a dev team should do it, godammit. This looks absolutely gorgeous. The foilage looks jawdropping, modeling looks quite nice..I'm guessing maybe 50k polys for everything? Maybe some multipassing..

I'm more interested in the render then the game, though.

[Fodder]

2 minutes of shaky-cam. They say they'll have a high-res high-quality capture soon.

[Dave Baumann]

both ATI's and Microsoft's DirectX booths

Implication being that they've dropped OpenGL as the primary development platform in favour of DirectX?

[Evildeus]

Really? the vidéo looks good to me.

[g__day]

Hot damn but I loved Serious Sam's first two titles - these games seriously rocked!

[Farid]

Originally Posted by DaveBaumann

Implication being that they've dropped OpenGL as the primary development platform in favour of DirectX?

It look like that's the croteam follow the DX train...

Sad that one of the best OpenGL Dev team goes DirectX (even if it's only for the publicity).The Xbox version of the game must be one of the primary reason of this.

On a side note i'm quite sure that there will be an Opengl Version.

[Guden Oden]

Who CARES what api it'll use as long as the game looks awesome, runs fast and plays well?

If anything I'd be glad to see everyone drop OGL so we could be rid of the extension hell that's currently plaguing that development environment. The standard just isn't moving forwards, no matter what else you may want to say about MS, but at least they've embraced some new features these past few years...

[london-boy]

I'm sorry, but isn't SS2 already out? *Me confused*... *ducks*

[Tim Murray]

Serious Sam: Second Edition != Serious Sam 2.

[Bjorn]

Originally Posted by Guden Oden

Who CARES what api it'll use as long as the game looks awesome, runs fast and plays well?

If anything I'd be glad to see everyone drop OGL so we could be rid of the extension hell that's currently plaguing that development environment. The standard just isn't moving forwards, no matter what else you may want to say about MS, but at least they've embraced some new features these past few years...

Isn't Open GL 2.0 pretty much the same as DX9 SM 3.0 ?

[Tim Murray]

uh, is OGL2.0 even defined yet?

[Fodder]

Originally Posted by The Baron

Serious Sam: Second Edition != Serious Sam 2.

SS: The Second Encounter. Between SS: The First Encounter (SS1) and SS: The Next Encounter (GC/PS2).

It was sort of a standalone expansion pack, like Doom 2.

[london-boy]

Originally Posted by Guden Oden

but at least they've embraced some new features these past few years...

"Some"??? Jeez that's the understatement of the year. I'm sorry but i remember the old days, with DX<6, and i have to admit, DX is one of the very few things MS is getting right. *ducks*

[Zeross]

Originally Posted by Guden Oden

Who CARES what api it'll use as long as the game looks awesome, runs fast and plays well?

Here you got a point

If anything I'd be glad to see everyone drop OGL so we could be rid of the extension hell that's currently plaguing that development environment. The standard just isn't moving forwards, no matter what else you may want to say about MS, but at least they've embraced some new features these past few years...

This is just plain wrong : new features are continuously added to OpenGL : VBO, ARB_VP and ARB_FP, GLSLANG and next PBO or Superbuffers. And the extension hell is a big exageration, moreover it's for the most part Microsoft's fault. The extension mechanism IS a good thing, it lets you try hardware functionnality right out of the box without waiting for the API writer to come with something to cover this. That's the way it should be used but thanks to MS and the part of the GL driver that comes with Windows we have to use extensions for anything that needs more than GL1.1 core. But I wouldn't call it "hell" it's juste a little painful but you've got some extensions loading library which hide alll the mess for you.

[Joe DeFuria]

Originally Posted by Zeross

And the extension hell is a big exageration, moreover it's for the most part Microsoft's fault.

Now, that's a new one. I heard MS is als responsible for male pattern baldness...

The extension mechanism IS a good thing, it lets you try hardware functionnality right out of the box without waiting for the API writer to come with something to cover this.

Yes, great for devs to try new stuff out...but entirely debatable as a consumer benefit.

[VVukicevic]

Originally Posted by Guden Oden

If anything I'd be glad to see everyone drop OGL so we could be rid of the extension hell that's currently plaguing that development environment. The standard just isn't moving forwards, no matter what else you may want to say about MS, but at least they've embraced some new features these past few years...

OpenGL 2.0 = OpenGL 1.5 + GLslang, essentially. That "extension hell" in many ways pushes the industry forward, by giving the hardware makers a way to expose new toys to developers very quickly, so they can assess whether it's a useful path to persue or not. It does get messy, but the mess comes in from incompatible extensions for the same purpose coming from different camps -- i.e. NV_vertex_array_range and ATI_vertex_array_object. However, both were valid approaches, and they influenced the official ARB extension.

In any case, just because they added support for DX doesn't mean that they had to drop OpenGL, though it would be nice if they had remained OpenGL-only. It just doesn't make sense to do so, though, when porting/developing for the xbox is in many ways a low hanging fruit in the console space.

[Zeross]

Originally Posted by Joe DeFuria

Now, that's a new one. I heard MS is als responsible for male pattern baldness...

Really ?

Don't get me wrong, I'm the first to defend MS when it's attacked without a good reason. For example I think the whole Media Player thing in Europe is really stupid. But this is not the topic, back on OpenGL under Windows the part that is really frustrating is having to load extensions that are part of OpenGL core since 1.2 like Multitexturing, 3D textures etc... MS promised some years ago to update Windows GL driver but we're still stuck to GL1.1 level. This part of the driver is tied with the Windows OS so MS is the only one that can update it.

Yes, great for devs to try new stuff out...but entirely debatable as a consumer benefit.

Right but sometimes it can be useful for example if your applications use fp textures. Under DirectX NV3x cards don't support fp textures because of restrictions on their implementation. Under OpenGL all you have to do is to use the right extension. Ok it's more work because you have to do onemore code path but at least your application can be used on any hardware.

[Joe DeFuria]

Originally Posted by Zeross

Really ?

That's what I've been telling my wife, anyway.

I'm the first to defend MS when it's attacked without a good reason. For example I think the whole Media Player thing in Europe is really stupid.

More like greedy...HEY...MS has all this money...let's just steal some. It's a farce.

But this is not the topic, back on OpenGL under Windows the part that is really frustrating is having to load extensions that are part of OpenGL core since 1.2 like Multitexturing, 3D textures etc... MS promised some years ago to update Windows GL driver but we're still stuck to GL1.1 level. This part of the driver is tied with the Windows OS so MS is the only one that can update it.

I do find this curious...but I think we're talking about two different things. Does MS driver structure prevent promoting vendor specific extensions to ARB extensions?

[Arun]

Originally Posted by DaveBaumann

Implication being that they've dropped OpenGL as the primary development platform in favour of DirectX?

I can confirm that.
They most definitively are NOT giving up on OpenGL though. It's just because of the XBox, the slow rate at which OpenGL is evolving, ... they just decided to focus on DX this time around. An OpenGL version of the engine most definitively IS to be released simultaneously.

Uttar

[Colourless]

His problem is having to call wglGetProcAddress() to get function pointers to the Multitexture, and other GL1.2 additions.

[oddfellow]

Can't wait for this one. The pics were enough to make me drool even though they were low quality. I loved both the first games immensely.

I hope they get a few licences out of this engine, going by their previous work I'd say they deserve to make a few extra bucks out of their tech, which is top notch.
Incidentally, does anyone know if their previous serious engine's were licenced to anyone? Will Rock looked pretty similar, but I'm not sure if the serious engine was used

[Tahir2]

This game looks great, like a cartoon. I loved the original games and it's refreshing to see people talk beyond HL2 and Doom 3 once in a while

As for the effects, Croteam are known for pushing a lot of polygons in bright open spaces with a lot of detail and fluidly on even modest hardware. I cannot wait to try this out on my new NVxx or Rxxx.

[EasyRaider]

Originally Posted by Joe DeFuria

I do find this curious...but I think we're talking about two different things. Does MS driver structure prevent promoting vendor specific extensions to ARB extensions?

There are vendor specific extensions, ARB extensions and then there is core OpenGL. Vendor specific extensions can be promoted to ARB, but ARB extensions cannot be promoted to core GL under Windows. I (and probably many others) suspect MS is holding OpenGL back at 1.1 to promote DirectX.

Anyway, that's how I have understood it. I could be wrong.