ar warehouse-sized space
ied by people in leotards
ed with ping pong balls, you’ll
hief creative officer, Davor
ki, in a little office space,
ing sensors to his limbs.
e kit uses HTC Vive technology
e stations fixed to the upper
rs of the room monitor 17
rs which are attached to
nt parts of the body. I asked to
system myself and ended up
hree trackers per limb (upper
eg, lower arm/leg and hand/
ne on my head and one affixed
military belt from the Croatian
round my waist.
ere’s also a harness which puts
n each shoulder and one to
your chest but I left that one off
dn’t need that extra layer of
on. Even without the harness
cking took me by surprise with
uracy (although this was a
blessing given I couldn’t then
the setup for how wildly
rate my version of the Single
dance was).
nski also demonstrated other
nts of the system, for example,
ou could use the software to
one character’s movements,
witch to another character in
ene and record their
ments in order to interact with
ginal character. You could also
p a camera prop which was
with trackers and switch to that
ecording a third-person view
mera crew person.motion capture, though. Instead
Croteam is just using whatever works
best in a scenario. The Processed idle
animations worked well with the
technology, but the team got better
results for running by using hand-
animation techniques. I’m guessing
that’s at least partly due to the small
space that
Hunski is
working from. It’s
pretty hard to
record someone
running full tilt
across a room
that only has a
few square
meters of
floorspace, and each surface is
covered with sensitive hardware.
Despite seeing so much of what’s
going on under the hood of Serious
Sam 4 there’s plenty yet to be
revealed. The demo acts as a
statement of intent and reassures
players that the series staples are still
present and correct. I mean, mostly
you’ll want to know that enemies will
still run at you shouting,
“AAAAAAaaaaaAAAAAAAAAaaaaA!”
and that there will be plenty of
explosive weaponry to use against
them, right?
But the intriguing tease of that
Legion system and Ladavac’s remark
on the weapon front that “truly
deadly pieces are still under wraps”
underlines Croteam’s promise of
“signature Serious Sam gameplay on a
brutally bigger scale”.I GET SHOWN INTO A
ROOM BRIMMING
WITH ODD,
HOMEBREW TECHOne of the intentions with this
system is to be able to make the
workflow a bit easier to manage. So if
any changes are required, instead of
getting actors back into a third-party
motion capture studio to re-record
entire sections and having a back and
forth about what works and what
doesn’t, you’d be
able to just pop
into the other
room and record
a new section as
and when it was
needed.
Some of the
recordings made
using this system
have found their way into Serious
Sam 4 already. For example, the idle
state animations of the Processed
enemies are made using Croteam’s
own motion capture tech.
The team won’t be replacing all
character animation with its ownBELOW: Werebulls
never miss arm day,
leg day or neck day.BOTTOM: If only
there were more guns
to use...Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass
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