Serious Sam

Serious Sam is a video game series originally released for the PC market only, created and developed primarily by Croteam. Serious Sam's rising popularity resulted in the porting of the series to a number of different platforms, including the Xbox, GameCube, Palm OS, etc.

The series follows the adventures of protagonist Samuel "Serious" Stone and his fight against the forces of the notorious extraterrestrial overlord Mental who seeks to destroy humanity.

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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, unlike most FPS engines which are developed for a limited draw distance and only a few animating models (i.e. enemies) on screen at a time: it is very efficient, capable of maintaining dozens of moving enemies (often stampedes) even on a modest system. The "Serious Engine" can render through both Direct3D or OpenGL and, 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 II and is known as "Serious Engine II". 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 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.

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