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| Serious Sam The First Encounter Game |
Serious
Sam is
a first-person shooter video game, released in two episodes and the first in the Serious
Sam series, developed by Croteam. Originally released for Microsoft Windows only, Serious
Sam's rising
popularity resulted in the porting of the episodes to the Xbox, Game Cube, PlayStation 2, Game Boy Advance and Palm OS, as well as in the remaking of both episodes for Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 in
high-definition.
The series follows the adventures of protagonist Sam
"Serious" Stone and his fight against the forces of the notorious extrat errestrialoverlord
Mental who seeks to destroy humanity.
Gameplay
Enemies spawn frequently and attack in large waves from
across the game map, and the player is intended to dodge their projectiles and
charges by jumping and strafing rather than by taking cover. Health and armor
are non-regenerative on most difficulty levels, and instead are replenished
with the health and armor packs which are littered throughout the game.
Available health is represented by a percentage number on the screen. The
combat is high-paced and frenetic: The levels typically consist of a series of
elaborate arenas, in which the player will defeat a set number of re-spawning
enemies before proceeding to the next. Enemies range from soldiers with rocket
launchers to gigantic charging robots to shrieking suicide bombers without
heads and holding bombs. The environments include ancient Egyptian pyramids, tropical rainforests, and medieval
castles. Serious Sam features cooperative gameplay through a split-screen mode and via
the internet.
Development
Croteam created their own engine for use in both The
First Encounter and The
Second Encounter. Named the "Serious Engine", it is designed
to cope with extremely large view distances and massive numbers of models by
implementing level of detail rendering.
Most contemporary FPS engines were developed for a limited draw distance and
only a few animating models (i.e. enemies) on screen at a time. The Serious
Engine is very efficient, capable of maintaining dozens of moving enemies
(often stampedes) and enormous enemies, even on a modest system challenging the
well known id Tech, Unreal Engine or Source engines. The "Serious
Engine" can render through both Direct3D or Open GLand, while it does not support pixel or vertex shaders,
it is optimised for Direct3D 7's
hardware transformation, clipping and lighting. The "Serious Engine"
is available for licensing from Croteam.
A more powerful iteration of the
"Serious Engine" was developed for use in Serious
Sam 2 and is known as
"Serious Engine 2". It supports many features of modern GPUs such as
pixel and vertex shaders, HDR, bloom and parallax mapping.
Serious Engine 3 was used in Serious
Sam HD: The First Encounter and Serious
Sam HD: The Second Encounter. It includes detailed shading, and enemies
are completely remodeled to look more realistic. This engine is also being
developed to harness the full capacity of HDR and High Definition mapping. An
updated version, Serious Engine 3.5, is used in Serious Sam 3: BFE.
The latest version is the Serious Engine 4, which Croteam used in
their most recent game, The Talos Principle.
In March 2016, Croteam released Serious Engine v1.10 as free and open source software on GitHub under the GNU General Public License v2
