Biggest Mistake is that the spawner counts as a kill already. Increase kill counter when the enemy has actually spawned and not already before. Then you can only mess up the teleportations. But it would also "fix" it if you end a spawner too early which might not be wanted Or you could make the game engine more clever and calculate itself if the enemy can spawn or if its broken (no trigger etc). And if its broken refuse to load the spawner. Does this editor have no maperror check? Even doom editors have a tool to check the map for errors. Then the devs couldve seen the broken spawner themself
@@De-M-oN Responding to your points in reverse because that's the order my brain thought of things Even if the level editor had an error checking feature, there's some of these things that any amount of error checking won't catch without it being frustrating to use. For example the 27 hour spawn timer. Technically a legal spawner, just one that requires mild insanity to spawn in. The fish that delete themselves when they swim into the floor? Also might not get caught by error checking, unless the level editor would require you to play through the level to check for errors. There's also the spawners that are *technically* wired up correctly, like the 36 werebulls that don't spawn b/c the triggers don't spawn on other difficulties. Furthermore, regarding the fact that spawners themselves increment the kill count, the problem there would be that if they didn't, and it was just the enemies that spawned in that incremented it would make it kinda difficult to accurately tell how many enemies each level had in total without counting monsters the player missed in a way that caused them to not spawn in, and even if you killed everything in the level, if you noticed that the monster count in the level changed each time you took a different route through the levels, you might initially be even more confused than you would be if you thought you killed everything and were still missing a kill or two, which you could, at first, just chalk up to "maybe I missed one here or there", which, while not good for people with OCD, is better than having the monster count potentially causing the Mandela effect.
In Level 5, the spawner that has no flags set to show up on any difficulty? I have a hunch. The designer was likely trying to test some part of the level and got tired of having to deal with the twelve skeletons. A quick way to fix this would be to disable the spawners, and then forget to reenable them. When I'm talking to people about designing games, I often focus on testing and how to build in test paths that are "non-destructive" for this reason: you have to remember to undo every change you make. When testing you want to skip or add things, and it's easy to just "break" the game for convenience only to end up with twelve broken spawners 21 years later.
The many broken spawners aren't developer mistakes, they're deep lore showing how sloppy, haphazard, and possibly overconfident Mental's rule is. He can't be bothered to make sure all of his countless hordes get correctly deployed at all. Most showed up somewhere, whatever, close enough. Gotta get back to making 100,000 psychic squids with shotguns made of lasers in place of tentacles.
So my best friend and I used to LAN our PCs back in highschool and we were pretty competitive when it came to games like Serious Sam, I distinctly remember us going half crazy because we could never 100% so many maps! I think I'm gonna link this video to her for sure Going through your channel has been a treat, even 4 years ago your quality is top notch!
Oh my! When I read "Broken Kill Counts in Classic Serious Sam", I never expected an actual complete breakdown of every single map 0_0 Great job - as always!
The Jewel of the Nile DLC was pretty good though, except for the terrible underground section, and to a lesser degree, the confusing layout of the first level, everything else was a lot of fun
@@Dargonhuman At least 2 wasn't an endless deluge of drab colours caused by the gritty realism schtick of the PS3/360 era of games that apparently happened just for the sake of system resources, despite the fact that things like polycount and resolution aren't everything and you could make colourful games on the PS3 and 360 if you remembered to give a crap because realistic doesn't fucking mean brown, gray and desaturated!
@@DeisFortuna Pretty graphics don't mean squat if the game is unplayable, which 2 is without a fan made patch that sort of fixes most of the bugs and glitches the game shipped with. I'd much rather have a game that looks "drab" but is playable than a "pretty" game that I can't play at all.
It feels like every single one of these was caused by a combination of simple human error, QA testers not being able to 100% every level from a view similar to the one in the level editor to see things like the broken spawners and presumably, for things like the suicidal fish, it being ten minutes before quitting time on a Friday after a stressful week.
This would be easier to fix through simple validation, after all: that's most of what Decino is doing, just by hand. Testers might have noticed, but even if they've been told to get max kills, and try all difficulties, it wouldn't help the counts get fixed which would still need to be identified. What's needed is for the level editor to validate spawns, spawners and templates. This wouldn't catch all errors, the fish for example, but since 90% of them are simple flag and data errors, it would allow fixing the most obvious mistakes before testers ever get their hands on it.
@@ItsHyomoto True, but having a debug view of some kind for the testers would *probably* help at least a little for any spawners that pass validation, but would never spawn in "normal" play, like super delayed spawners.
@@DeisFortuna Well, as Decino shows: there is one. Testers can play with all the spawns and whatnot showing. So Croteam got that part! I do wonder a bit: they had to know such mistakes were possible. It really seems like, and I say this not to condemn, that they either didn't care or just thought no one would notice.
This could have been avoided if spawners that weren't referred to by anything with the relevant flags automatically deleted themselves, and anything that deleted itself decremented the kill counter (like the fish)
There should be at least one broken spawner as a joke. Like, the joke is it doesn't actually break the kill count, but instead it's like, a broken teleporter spawner that's meant to teleport in an enemy.... That's already in bounds to begin with.
Except for the disappearing fish and enemy-occupied spawners being unable to spawn, almost every other clause that makes broken spawners would be easy to write in an if statement and have the editor programmed to warn you about broken spawners. They could have covered this with a bit more attention.
Fascinating video. It does make you wonder though why Croteam didn't more thoroughly playtest and fix the errors. Maybe they thought it wasn't worth the effort as only the most accomplished of gamers would run into these broken spawns anyway.
Most problems seem to be errors in the maps, not the engine. So since you can open the maps in the editor, those should be fixable there, right? And even the disappearing fish could be saved by tweaking their waypoints. Maybe you'd have to take some creative license/interpretation where it's not clear what the level designers originally intended. E.g. trigger completely missing, instead of just badly configured. Or like, maybe it was intended to take 27h. Just sayin'. :^) Also, the editor _screams_ for automated sanity checks ("This spawner isn't connected to any trigger", "This won't activate on any difficulty", etc.). Keeping track of this 3d conspiracy-pegboard-like maze of triggers & conditions in your head, yeesh...
I’m not going to lie, I always suspected something was broken given how much I’ve played this game when I was younger and rarely getting a perfect kill count despite how many times I’ve tried and killed everything in sight. Nice to know I’m not just loosing it lol
Oh gods, it triggers me so much when I'm trying to search through literally the entire map twice and can't find where the hell all the other monsters are at. Thanks for trying to explain this. Y'know, I thought this is what Revolution was trying to accomplish by fixing all the enemy spawns. Was praying the same would be said in something like Fusion.
Hi Decino. I love on you that you not only dominate this games like Serious Sam and DooM etc. like just a few others. You know them inside out and what you don't know you find it out by dismantle the game to pieces and explain it little by little. So from you everyone who likes can get the whole package and that is awesome. So thank you my friend. 👍👊🤘❤
With the rather simple mechanics behind the enemy spawns, a mod to fix them wouldn't be a Herculean endeavour to make, so I'd be surprised if such a thing doesn't exist.
Interesting. This is first time I'm seeing this formant of level builder, and it looks almost identical to Hammer Builder in Source. Anyways, the kill counts reaching skies.
Yo, Level designer here- almost all older level design tools past Doom are the same style of editor. Hammer, Radiant, and almost all other games have this style. Modern games are moving toward using 3D meshes for their levels, so these things are going the way of the dodo for the most part. It's sad, since they don't have the same magic.
@@FairweatherBaah For sure, level creating has changed from years and years, I have been lately doing a Doom Mega Wad in a Doom Builder than building a TF2/HL2 map in Hammer Builder. Measurely it makes me way better and takes less time to design in older builders than nowadays. I understand why.
@@igamesthehero I've used Hammer and GZDoom Builder and I have to say, it's way easier to throw together and test something in the latter. In Hammer, each wall has to be moved separately, perfectly, without causing any leaks, and building rooms…oh, it was tedious compared to drawing a couple shapes then setting up their properties.
@@XaneMyers I get you, as someone who grew up making levels for Brush based editors I don't feel the same lethargy however. Even in semi/professional lines of work, most engines run fine while leaking and almost all maps are either cordoned (boxed in as to make leaking impossible) or just allowed to leak until they're moving on in development and start getting props and detail added. The main thing here is if your brain likes Additive or Subtractive design, most people seem to take better to Subtractive at first, but people who have learned Additive first take a long time to grasp Subtractive tools like Doom, where you're carving from something as opposed to creating from nothing.
Not sure if intentional, but I love how you always play a pain sound from Sam whenever you decrease the kill count, as if hearing the number of enemies removed makes him go "Fuck! Shit! Seriously, Croteam?!"
I keep meaning to play some Serious Sam one of these days. I'm sure I'll eventually get around to it. But this video is a shining example of how things can go very wrong as the tools to make things get more and more complex. It reminds me of some of the broken secrets/kill counts you can find in DOOM, both the commercial releases and many fan-made WADs. Granted, you can't break the counts with difficulty levels or accidentally deleting an item if staying strictly vanilla-compatible, since it's linedefs that trigger all that and not interacting with Things, but the concept is very similar if you make a monster spawner closet and forget to properly tag a linedef or sector, or outright forget your teleport destination Thing. And, of course, who can forget the two secret torches in The Ultimate DOOM E4M3?
That's something I never knew about Serious Sam: The First Encounter for Steam or PC had broken spawns. That's a shame that you can't 100% kill every of Mental's army. This seems like a similar situation to some of the coins and enemies not being reachable in Super Mario 64. This does makes me wonder though if Croteam did fix the enemy spawns and counter in the Xbox Original version and in the HD version? Oh! And to answer your question about getting out of bounds on Moon Mountain, you can actually do a glitch at the end of the level where you go towards the left hand side over the wooden fence before spawning the big orange Reptiloid, you can get out of bounds and explore over to the box rooms. This works in the Xbox Original version as well as First Encounter and Resolution.
It's nice that Serious Sam Fusion isn't letting some monster counts slip by because even in the HD releases (TFE HD in 2009 and TSE HD in 2010), some levels have their odd quirks when going for 100% on everything. Anyways, amazing video, I like the Serious Sam games quite a lot.
That's not really a surprise. I can easily see how small errors like this could be overlooked when you're trying to hit a release date. Having testers go through every single spawner, or write some code to check them, probably isn't worth the cost of doing so. I expect similar errors in any game with lots of spawners.
But ensure that you dont run the games uncapped. I had Fusion uncapped before and with a 9900k and 2080 Ti I was on 700+ fps. Almost all spawners were broken :D Limiting the fps fixed it then.
What a fantastic and informative video. The editing is also spot on and hearing Sam grunt about each of the broken spawns was more entertaining than I'd like to admit
I've been looking forward to this despite being one of those Turbo Nerds (as well as a Complete Doom Nerd) who must get 100% in everything. I have to ask though did anybody play test this, and if they did why did they allow so many broken spawners?
Very possibly a deadline. They had to abandon 6 more planets from alpha to make the game come out in time. So you got only Egypt. They didn't have time to check 1000 spawners on each level to see what was wrong xD
@@decino I'm thinking both. Deadlines, because they always force developers to prioritise what gets finished. Checking every single spawner to see if they work seems like a very low priority. As for level design, think of all the spawners that are turned off once the player advances far enough. To me, that design says that they want players to push forwards and stop enemies spawning. Otherwise, why would they have the spawner turn off ?
I feel like the spawners they had the trigger entity trying to activate it, I think it's some of the new developers that don't know what triggering does and think activating is how you spawn an enemy.
This made me kinda speechless. Thinking about all the research and time used doing this. And the patience. Checking triggers, waiting for 3 days to mob to spawn. Excellent job! Always nice to see work, where someone has put all the passion in it.
That's some really solid camerawork and editing there. As for this being a part 1, don't you think uploading part 2 *after* uploading the full SS:TSE playthrough would be heaps better? I mean personally I don't even remember the game that well and watching a spoilery rollercoaster of debug triggers isn't exactly an ideal way to get reintroduced to it. I'm sure a portion of your audience has never played it to begin with. Besides, you could be teasing the viewers with "we can't get the final two kills here and I'll show you why in a later video". I just feel like it would be a lot better to explore the game 100% like a regular player (even if with extra knowledge at hand) would first, and *then* going into the technical side of things after.
Gotta say that i'm not such a stats nerd but i really love the representation, i have watched those 2 like a few times already and i would love to see something similar for Sam 2 or 4
I,ve no idea about creating games, levels, etc. but i like to find bugs, broken things, and thanks to your videos i got some knowledge what could cause such things. Very educational and well explained, Sir :)
This is awesome tbh. I never knew about broken spawners until you mentioned them in your series so I always thought that I have somehow missed them. This is a very good analysis video and I can't wait for part 2!
Hey, this video randomly popped out in my recommended, since i nostalgically watched some SS videos. You spent a lot of time making this video and it was interesting to watch.
Wow, just wow. Bravo on this painstaking analysis. I can't imagine how tedious it was to look through those thousands of spawners looking for bugs. Thank you for all your great work.
Very quickly these types of videos became my favourites on your channel - watched all of them, even for Doom even tho I have yet to watch the 100% playthroughs. Ah, and almost forgot - you def earned a new sub and a viewer!
I don't even play Serious Sam (or any other FPS really) and i found this interesting. You did a great job explaining why things didn't work as well as an excellent job editing the video.
I don’t even play Serious Sam and I was pretty hooked through the video. You also explained how the system works very well. Already subbed, and I’m glad I’m did.
I love your videos, I didn't even know the kill counts in SS games were so broken. I'd love to see even more bizarre facts about older FPS games, keep it up.
I have never seen a game flaw stripped down and explained in such a way that would make no sense to me, without your brass tacks commentary. Sure wish I had the means to replay it now, applying what I've learned. 17:58 That seal clap is gold, lol!
Very nice video, I love it, thanks for sharing, i've never play Serious Sam before and it was very nice to see someone play it with some serious research :D Can't wait for the second encounter!
You know in all my time with Sam (we're talking 15 years), I've never noticed that game had broken spawners (or atleast very rarely), this comes off, as a surprise infact. Also, this has got to be the ONLY time I've ever seen Serious Editor Classic on RU-vid ever, you went into detail with it and the inner workings of maps, and reading through these comments it seems to have quite a few people interested in it, nice. Oh yeah, and your not using that piece of shit revolution! Your covering it on the old fashion First Encounter, major props to you for that, I can't tell you how pissed I got where whenever people talk about the classic games, they always do it in revolution and view it as the "superior version" Serious Sam lacks proper youtube coverage, so it's finally nice someone went deeper into this game than most ever would have, you didn't just dip below the surface, you completely submerged under it.
One thing i must admit: playing on serious without saves is not that easy by itself. Dealing with this mess to spawn enemies can ruin the day. I hope these efforts really pays off to you, decino, and you mostly enjoy the process just like i enjoy your vids. Let's go TSE!
You are a magnificent solver of FPS games mistory of all times You deserve much moooor subscribers I love your channel and your amazing content Keep it up 👋👍👌🤩💎
...Secretly taking notes on how to use serious editor (Also, you ever consider trying to reactivate the broken spawns, just to see what they'd look like?)
Serious Editor 1 was really great and powerful, but navigating the map takes so much time to get used to. It's not intuitive and all. If it was the early 2000s I'd invest time learning how to use it, but I don't have the patience now, lol.
Youve done us a Great Service Decino, thanks for unraveling the mystery of broken Spawns in Serious Sam I never really went for 100% Kills, 100% Secrets Yes but kills never really bugged me i guess. Looking forward to Part 2 of this as well as the very likely SS : TSE pkaythrough :)
This video is gonna be super helpful. I run the HD versions and managed to route all kills for every level except Moon Mountains. The editor for HD is less intuitive so I hope to use the info in this video. Such a shame that I got every level sorted but mm being that thorn, if I can sort it then HD can be true 100%.
My comment is nothing original. I would just like to thank you very much for your videos, their style, their topics. This is all just wonderful. Thanks Decino!
Damn you sure are seriously devoted to serious Sam. I always wondered why many times I swore I killed every enemy but it said I missed some. Thank Jesus for this video
I thought this was a complete "difficulty thing" not a broken trigger. "I'm missing 20 enemies, playing on Normal. Hm, probably spawning on Hard or Serious."
Major props for being so dedicated that you actually waited those 27 hours for that one spawn… WOW. I guess changing it in the editor and then running it would be considered cheating at that point x D There are definitely tons of spots they missed out or forgot about, mistakes happen, maybe they really didn't check thoroughly.
