Well, well, Serious Sam Fusion 2017 sounds great right? All relevant Serious Sam games in one, all along with the most advanced editor of the engine yet. However, you made quite a few maps for the older games yourself, and I'm sure you wondered "Can I port my maps to Fusion?" Yes, you can!



However, the process is not that easy. You have to go through the same ordeal as the developers did. And your first ordeal, I'm sure you experienced is that you can't just load your map. You probably got this error:




Fortunately for you, there's a magic command to get around this! (Okay, technically it's not magic, it's technology, but you might never know!)

Enter the following into the Editor's Console, and press enter:




MAKE SURE YOU DO THIS EVERY TIME BEFORE LOADING AN OLD LEVEL!

Load the level, and voila!



If everything went right, your level loads up. Also spews out a million error messages to the console.

NOW, SAVE YOUR LEVEL! With this, you have converted your level into the Fusion engine! But, it's not over yet!

(NOTE: This step can be skipped in SS3. I think.)

So, you can finally open your level. But what's this??



All the items are blue boxes!

This is because originally Serious Sam HD used items the same way the classic Serious Sam 1 did: Every item was its own separate entity. In Serious Sam 3, this system was replaced by the "GenericItem" entity, that can hold any sort of item.

Fortunately, Croteam invented a magical (Alen will kill me if I describe all this science as magic) command for this as well!

Just enter this:




The ("SeriousSamHD") part is especially important!

If everything went right...



Ta-da! All items work again! Now unto the next step!

So, with your map mostly working (that's a laugh, the hard part is yet to come), you might notice a few other errors.

Like the sky is black. Or everything is disappearing weirdly. Or wrong lighting. Or all of those at once. You PC might also be on fire, but can't help with that.

If you click to Sector view on a level you know you added Visibility sectors on, and you see this:



Then you are somewhat in luck! If you see something more, like completely screwed up sectors... well you are still in luck, because the solution is the same.

First of all, find your Visibility Mesh model. Open it in the mesh editor by pressing E, then exit it. Save both the mesh and the model. With this, you ported it to the Fusion engine.

Now, you need to bake the visibility. Press B.




It is the best if you bake the Navigation as well, because Fusion's engine now auto-generates the navigation mesh that makes enemies not stuck on everything, but actually get smarter and avoid them!

Press OK, and you are good to go with visibility (and navigation; it might take a while to bake that)!

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After this done, time to do the main thing: You have to re-bake the Global Illumination of your level.
Press Alt+G (or press "Export Solution" on the Bake panel).



Press OK after reviewing the window and if all settings are ok. You might notice that the baking process is somewhat more smoother than in the old editors, and after finished, that you actually succeeded without getting an "Out of Memory" error at least 3 times during it! Aw yeah, 64-bit editor!

Once you're done, save your level again.



You might notice that instead of saving the Lightmap into the WLD file, like in SSHD, the editor will now create a separate "Lightmaps" folder. It also creates a "DistantLights", "Navigation" and "Probes" folders as well. When packing your map, all these folders have to be included, don't forget this!

THAT'S IT! (I came up with a new recipe!)

With this, your map is ready for Serious Sam Fusion 2017!

However, your ordeal just started. You can see all those errors in the console, right? Your map might work without fixing those, but it is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED that you fix all of those for your map to run stable, in Singleplayer and in Multiplayer as well!

Please look at the next Extra Step for some optimization tips!

SAVE ALL YOUR LOCAL FILES!

If you were a SSHD mapper/modder, you might encounter a list of errors like this:




In SSHD itself as well, local models, meshes and other resource files were commonplace; even Croteam used them! Not so for Fusion.

PLEASE SAVE EVERY MODEL, MESH AND OTHER RESOURCE FILES! LOCAL FILES DON'T WORK PROPERLY IN MULTIPLAYER!
They also speed up your level quite a bit!

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Use SimpleModels instead of StaticModels for scenery!

Any model that doesn't need to be moved, or doesn't have destruction should always use the SimpleModel entity! They are basically the same as the StaticModel entity, but hold way less features. This makes them lightweight and cause less slowdown. SimpleModels were implemented for Serious Sam 3, so likely all your SSHD maps use StaticModels.

There's a command for this as well! Just enter the following:




This will select all the "candidates" for SimpleModel conversion.

Then go to the Entity List tab, and find the Geometry folder. Open it, and select/highlight the "SimpleModel" entity. Then, click the little icon above that says "Convert selected entities".



With this done, most of your StaticModels will be converted to SimpleModels and your map should get a speed boost!

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Unfortunately, this is all I can help. You will likely have to fix a lot of other errors on the map. But if you are somewhat of an experienced modder, I'm sure you'll have no problem figuring it out! Good luck!