Interview With Dean Sekulic We recently had the opportunity to ask Dean Sekulic a few questions about Serious Sam and the Serious Engine. Dean is one of the programmers and level designers over at Croteam. Thanks to both Dean and Roman Ribaric for this interview. 1. Thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions. Let's begin with a little background. Could you tell our readers about your position at Croteam, what you are responsible for and about some of your previous work? Well, I'm Croteam member right from the start, way back in 1993. My 'main title' is programmer, and with Alen and Davor, I worked on SeriousEngine design. Besides general work on engine, I did most of the graphic code, and tight-spot optimizations (sound mixer, shadowmaps...), since I know assembler, which come very handy when you ran out of C/C++ optimization options. :) I'm also part-time level designer. And a bit of 2D designer. And hardware guy, too. That's it. I think. :) 2. How well do you think the Serious engine will do against both the Team Fortress 2 and Duke Nukem Forever engines, which will be released some time in the future? Do you think the Serious engine has a niche of its own or do you see yourselves in direct competition with these other engines? Both. Since SE is a 3D game engine, competition with other engines is inevitable. However, SE has some features that other engines don't have and, looking from the point of engine-design, they cannot implement them (well, at least, not in near future:). Just to name a couple: rendering of massive open spaces at high speed, and lots of monsters on the screen at once, thanx to very fast LOD algo. Furthermore, SeriousTools are extremely user-friendly, which cuts development process in half comparing to other game dev tools. This is what makes SE different. And, not to mention that all important features, that other engines have, SE has too. :) 3. Do you think the Serious engine will be used for anything apart from FPS type games? Apart from FPS type games, what other games are the Croteam guys playing at the moment? SeriousEngine could be used for other types of games, too. In fact, at the moment, we're talking to some licencees that wants SE to be heart of action-adventure game. Game we're playing at the moment? Non-FPS? None! FPS? SeriousSam multiplayer! (For testing purposes, of course) :) Well, to be quite honest, we don't have much time to play, you know. I'd like some NFS5, but it's so far away from me ... 4. Are there any features that you wanted to implement into the Serious engine but found that you couldn't due to current hardware restrictions? You name it... :) Fast AGP (lets say, 32X:) - we want memory/AGP bandwith to keep up with speed of accelerators functions (T&L is a good example for that matter), so we can have both fully dynamic geometry and fast texture upload (that way we can create and change textures per frame basis) Nice and accurate real-time shadows - some hardware could manage that, but this feature is very limited for the time being. Not only in speed, but in quality also (shadow buffers, for example). And fully functional accumulation buffer, too. Yeah! 5. You have managed to turn the development of your engine and game from a hobby into a commercial venture. Do you have any advice for other groups of developers wanting to do the same? Well, assembling a good team is no problem. I mean, everyone in team has to like what he/she do, and has to be good at. This is the default. But, that's sufficient only for starting the game dev, and not as nearly sufficient for finishing it. Persistence - that's most important! Lots of 'teams' stop working after the 1st phase, when game development turn into 'manual' labor. Working thru 2nd phase, when hype is over, is the most difficult part. Like Mr. Abrash says: after you finish first 90% of a project, you'll have to do other 90%. :) And that's true, belive me. It's not like gaming development is just plain fun and great hype, but if you like it, nothing can stop you from finishing. 6. I have read in previous interviews that you are planning to release your Serious Editor and Serious Modeler with the game. Are you also planning to release the source in an SDK to allow fans to create their own mods? If so, could you tell us a bit about the source and the SDK you plan to release? Yes, of course. There is no point in making a mod if it is only for new textures and worlds. People have to be able to change behavior of the AI and add their own features to some extent. The SDK will contain includes and libraries for creating your own entity classes, and original sources of the Serious Sam entities, so you can make modifications. It will come with the Ecc (Entity Class Compiler) that translates the class sources from their .es format creating C++ files that are in turn compiled with VisualC++. The .es is much like extended C++, it supports most things that C++ does, and most of the code you write in fact is pure C++ code that links directly to the engine. Just that it is extended to support state-stack machine paradigm that is neccessary for easy solving of game-specific tasks. 7. I personally have no doubt that we will see a large amount of mods appear after the release of the game. Are you expecting the success of the game and engine to be influenced by the mods that may be created? How much support do you plan to give the mod authors, mappers and modelers? The fact is that Croteam is a little team with a big engine. This means that we cannot build a game that'll use all of engine's features in all their glory. Therefore we consider mod community as a great assistance. We already seen some things that were created by our beta testers and, to be quite honest, these are impressive. So, from the one side you have us, that'll provide mod community with excellent tools, and on the other hand, there is a mod community that will provide gamers with excellent stuff. So, who wouldn't support that? :) 8. The Multiplayer Test shouldn't be very far off now. When can we expect to see it released? Has the team had much time to relax and maybe go out for a few beers? Relax time? Beers? Are you kidding me? 9-10 hrs a day, 6-7 days a week. That's relax! :) We're on the working spree here, you know. It's not like we publish one demo-test and want to go to Hawaii or something. Anyway, you can expect multiplayer test sometime at the end of November. And the reason why it is 'so late' is beacuse we want to put new AI in, too. You see, our primary goal is to make big coop game experience, and for that matter, you definately need better enemies than before. Also, modem-code took us two weeks longer than planed, must admit. :( 9. Could you tell us a bit about the type of new monsters, weapons and multiplayer scenarios we expect to see in the final game? Are there any that are new monsters funnier than the Headless Bombers? Sorry, don't want to spoil the surprise. :( All I can say for now is that Tome, our simple-monster-putter, is giving us hard time with play-testing. I mean, come on, 30 Kleer skeletons on screen at once? 150 in one wave? I unloaded whole rounds of rockets, granades and minigun, and they're still coming. Tome says that I should save some ammo for later. Later? :) And yes, there'll be lots of new enemies, so if you think Headless Bombers are funny, you haven't seen nothing yet. 10. What are the plans for Croteam once Serious Sam has been released? Do you plan to develop other games for the engine or concentrate mainly on the development of the engine itself? For the time being we're planing one engine update (SE 1.2 or 1.5, don't know), and then we're onto completely new engine from scratch. With this engine update SeriousSam mission packs and addons will be build, and probably Seriou Sam 2. But, this plans aren't rock-solid, because we'll have to see what 1st quarter of 2001 brings. Then we'll have to make some more decisions and see what'll happen. I think one thing is for sure - Croteam will develop both games and engines from now on.