Serious Sam 2 tools interview

[Xtasy0]

Seriously! - How has the ability to have fully dynamic lighting affected game design? Is the lighting system still the same, with a light entity, or has it changed? How does shadow baking work?

Davor Hunski - The question is, what do you mean by "fully dynamic lighting", because you can't imagine how many meanings that has. Often people not involved in cutting edge technology programming don't have a good knowledge (because these things are hard to understand) about dynamic lighting (do you mean lighting or dynamic shadows?). About lighting, we use spherical harmonics, brilliant technique that will display multiple colored lights onto object that passes near by. I can't see any better solution for dynamic lighting. Dynamic shadows is completely another area of problems. There are few solutions in existence today, of which neither one is good enough to be used as general shadow rendering solution in an general purpose real-time game (in my opinion, at least). Some of them are too CPU intensive, some of them are too memory driven, some look chunky. We have some kind of dynamic shadows (and we will probably have all of the most important algorithms in the engine some day) but Serious Engine 2 is not built upon the idea of having truly dynamic shadows on everything. We still prefer (as a general useful case, and the case used in our games) shadow maps as a starting point for building game visuals.

Seriously! - With the added dynamics that advanced physics bring to the game, how has level design been affected? Will mappers be able to specify the mass of each object and create destructible architecture? How will water work, and can we have strong wind or shockwave effects?

Davor Hunski - "Realistic" physics is awesome ground for some superb game design. Of course, it has some limits you must keep in mind, but brings a LOT! I hope that we will be able to use the new physics in some good stuff for the upcoming game. Regarding the second part of your question, yes, you can alter mass, and yes, you can create destructible architecture (you actually have a complete editor just for that, but be careful with what you mean by destructible architecture! You can simulate it, but I think that you will like never see real-world-like architecture destruction with all of its consequences in computer games), water will look very real, objects will sink/raise extremely realistically, though don't expect water to behave realistically when spilled. Again, you can add wind that will "drag" dynamic objects in some direction, but is that all you thought of? Because for now, wind won't bend trees and houses...Shockwave effect, again, what exactly do you mean by that? You can make player feel like it is there is shockwave going on, you can also support it with some new fancy gfx features, but don't expect tremors that will "actually" physically shake ground by moving it around and then expect buildings to collapse due to the shaking effect.

http://www.seriouszone.com/cms/articles/11_1.php

heh, two quotes that sound like questions people ask about source all the time, thinking it's real life simulator...heh...

 

[The Dark Elf]

I've seen spherical harmonics in action (cheers qckbeam again for that) and it looks great. Didn't know SS2 was using it. Should look rather groovy as some people would say.

 

[Xtasy0]

I've seen spherical harmonics in action (cheers qckbeam again for that) and it looks great. Didn't know SS2 was using it. Should look rather groovy as some people would say.

linkage?....

 

[Gorgon]

The game looks so nice.

did they talk about the requirments spexs to run the game ?

 

[BabyHeadCrab]

linkage?....

I think he dc'd it to him... oh and it could be a leak or something frowned apon like that

 

[torso boy]

go to http://www.croteam.com and read all the monthly reports...the engine seems to be shaping up amazingly. they are making their own physics engine too and they say it runs alot faster than others with the amount of characters they have on screen. The editor scares me though...you can go as far as running network simulations from the editor, and you can start a game to test your level, then go back into the editor and change things...while the game is still running in real time!