Friday, June, 26, 2009 Croteam Answers Questions On Serious Sam HD and Serious Sam 3 - Louva-Deus - 5:23 PM - Comments - Link to this Item After the announcement of Serious Sam HD and the fan frenzy that followed, Alen Ladavac, Croteam's CTO, posted on Seriously!'s forums and answered many questions asked by fans regarding Serious Sam HD and Serious Sam 3. Here are some of the highlights: Q: Will we see the return of many of the features from Serious Sam 1 that were absent in Serious Sam 2 like Mental mode, custom gravity and saturation/colour bias sliders? A: Mostly yes, plus, SSHD holds some more improvements that are in line with where SSFE was, and SS3 adds some more specific stuff to gameplay and options. But custom gravities, unfortunately, not yet. Q: Will there be an achievements/unlock/rewards system for superior gaming skills? A: Yes, there already is in SSHD. Q: Will the sound engine have more extensive support for integrated sound cards and soundchips? Will the engine include support for OpenAL implementation as an alternative to Creative EAX? A: SE3 supports DirectSound W&W/O EAX, OpenAL, and XAudio2. But XAudio2 rocks so much, you won't want to use anything else. That will be the default, and there probably won't be a menu option to use the other two at all (only through the console). XAudio2 works perfectly, no matter which chip you have. We were never able to get this much reliablity in reproducing the same sound effects with other APIs before, ever since our old software mixer (which has not been used for quite some time). Effectively, XAudio2 _is_ a software mixer, and that is why it works so well. Check out the discussion thread on our forums to see the rest. The answer to the question of whether SS3 will be more like the original or like SS2 awaits you!