Serious Sam 4 - Carnage Mod

Serious Sam 4 Carnage Mod

This guide describes the functioning of the “Serious Carnage” mod, which allows you to configure enemy count multipliers, weapon stats and some player stats.

Disclaimer: Modding is not officially supported by Croteam at the moment – there is no Serious Editor and the Moddable version of the game isn’t launchable through Steam. Proper modding support will be added in the next couple months, as stated by Croteam. Until then, modding capabilities are very limited to the stuff which can be done without operating with internal Croteam formats, such as scripts, sounds replacements, small gamemode tweaks.

Please keep in mind that using mods until the official support launches can be more unstable than usual and direct all your problems with mods towards mod’s authors and not Croteam (this is a good thing to do in general).

This mod in particular can cause heavy performance issues, mainly if you multiply enemies too much.

This mod is a set of scripts which allows you to tweak different gameplay parameters (those which are tweakable using scripts during the game), such as:

Monsters count multipliers (universal and per “monster toughness” groups);
Weapon multipliers, such as damage, fire rate and ammo consumption (universal and per weapon);
Player movement multipliers (movement speed, jump speed).

The mod contains several predefined configurations which you can use and it is possible to save your own configurations to load them later.

Video Guide:

How to Install This (and any) Mod and Run The Moddable Version of The Game

Download the .gro archive (bit . ly/SeriousCarnage) (remove spaces) with the mod and put it into the folder “Steam/steamapps/common/Serious Sam 4/Content/SeriousSam4/”. You should see some other files with .gro extension in this folder, this means you’re putting it in the right place;
Navigate to “Steam/steamapps/common/Serious Sam 4/Bin/x64/” and launch the “Sam4_Unrestricted.exe”. This is the executable for the moddable version of the game – it loads content from custom .gro files;
Enjoy your mods!

Note that it’s not required for anyone other than the host to have the mod installed!

How to Operate The Mod

This mod can be configured only by the host of the game. Load into any level (SP or CoOp, it doesn’t matter), hold “Left Control” and press “T” (the “Voice Chat” command binding) to open the menu.

Navigate through the menu and configure parameters using the following keys:

“Move forward”/Arrow up and “Move backwards”/Arrow down keys to scroll through the menu options;
“Jump”/Enter keys to enter a submenu, save a parameter or confirm an action;
“Strafe left”/Arrow left and “Strafe right”/Arrow right keys to modify the selected parameter;
“Crouch”/Backspace to return to the previous menu or exit the menu altogether;
“Voice command” key (“T” by default) to exit the menu from any position.

Description of The Parameters

Whenever you change a parameter in the menu, your have to press “Jump”/Enter to confirm and save the change. An unsaved parameter is marked with an asterisk* after the value. (Almost) all changes in parameters are applied immediately – see below for more details.

“Enemy count multipliers” are used to multiply spawned enemies’ count. Please note that changing enemy multipliers will only take effect on spawners which have not yet spawned anything – so if e.g. a fight has started, monsters which have already started spawning will not be affected by the change in these multipliers. Enemies in huge quantities tank your CPU very hard, so take into account the power of your PC and of other people on the server, and be ready for low framerates!
“Universal multiplier for all enemies” specifies whether enemies’ count will be multiplied by one universal multiplier or by one of the five “power group” multipliers;
“Universal multiplier” is the value used for multiplying all monsters if the above option is set to “true”;
The next five values are used for multiplying specific monster types (based on their max health) if the first value of this submenu is set to “false”;
“Weapon multipliers” are used to configure certain weapon parameters. You can configure both universal multipliers and per each weapon – hold the weapon in your right hand to configure its stats. If an individual parameter for the weapon is set to 1, then the universal multiplier will be used, otherwise the individual multiplier will override it.
“Damage” changes damage (duh). Note: certain weapons are not affected by script damage multipliers, such as: Knife;
“Firerate” changes fire rate (duh). Note: certain weapons are not affected by script fire rate multipliers, such as: Knife, Pistol (affected but in a weird way). This multiplier also doesn’t affect reload speed;
“Ammo consumption” affects the amount of ammo consumed. Since it’s not possible to affect actual ammo consumption using scripts, and decimal ammo amounts are not supported, this multiplier works by awarding/removing extra ammo while shooting, so your ammo counter might look like it’s spazzing out. Note: unfortunately, it is not possible to add or remove extra ammo from the weapon clip at the moment, so weapons with reload willl be able to only shoot the same amount of shots before each reload regardless of this value – the extra ammo will be awarded/removed to the total ammo pool instead;
“Player speed multipliers” change movement speed.
“Horizontal (movement) speed” modifies horizontal movement speed;
“Vertical (jump) speed” modifies jump speed. Please note, the jump speed, not the jump height. The jump height is proportionate to the jump speed squared, so e.g. increasing jump speed twice will increase jump height 4 times;,

Saving and Loading Configurations

You can load any of the several predefined configurations and save/load up to 5 different custom configurations. After saving/loading a configuration, check the console (“~” button on the keyboard) for the confirmation/error messages.

Predefined configs include:

“Default”: sets all multipliers to default 1’s;
“Moderate (Singleplayer)”: x1.5 damage, x1.4 fire rate, x0.7 ammo consumption; x2 all enemy types except “very heavy”; x1.1 movement and jump speed;
“Intense (Singleplayer)”: x2 damage and fire rate, x0.5 ammo consumption; x4 fodder enemies, x3 light/medium/heavy enemies, x2 very heavy enemies; x1.25 movement speed, x1.2 jump speed;
“Moderate (Multiplayer)” and “Intense (Multiplayer)” are the same as singleplayer configs but without any weapon/player multipliers, only the enemy count is increased.

I didn’t do any extensive playtesting to estimate the balancedness of these predefined configs (read: pulled the numbers out of my ass), so feel free to configure all parameters to your liking and to suggest changes to these predefined configs.

Short Q&A (will be extended as new questions appear)

Q: Can you make reload faster? Can you change clip size? Can you change max ammo? Can you add more pellets to the shotgun shot? Can you change shotgun’s spread?

A: No, I can’t. Weapon parameters which are already in the mod are the only ones I know which can be modified by scripts during the game.

Some Notes and Known Issues

First, I want to reiterate, if there is a problem with the mod, leave the comment here, don’t bug Croteam. But before leaving a comment with an issue, check the “Troubleshooting” section below!
As noted in the parameters description section, some weapons ignore some weapon speed/damage multipliers;
Extra enemies spawned can easily get stuck in unintended locations, so prepare to use cheats (or wit) to be able to proceed in some levels;
Without the Serious Editor, I’m not able to create any custom text effects, and no default text effects (aside from one which doesn’t seem to work) are included in the base game. So the mod uses the ‘ShowMessageToAll()’ function to display the menu, which produces text which is (1) visible to all clients, not only the host and (2) will interfere with the tips provided by the central HUD element, like “Press RMB to explode C4” or “Press RMB to cycle gadgets”;
You can disable the mod by using “Restart current level” and pressing “yes”. When the mod is disabled, the menu is available but the multipliers are not applied. This is included so that the mod doesn’t interfere with other mods which change these script multipliers (such mods don’t exist yet, but may in the future), so that you don’t have to remove it from the game folder. For now keeping the mod enabled should be pretty safe.

How to Troubleshoot This (and any scripted) Mod

Note: first step is applicable to any mod.

If the mod doesn’t seem to work at all, check that the .gro file with the mod is in the correct folder (see “Installation” section). Make sure that you are running the moddable executable – in the main menu, in the top right it should say “MODDABLE” next to the build number;
If the above didn’t help and the mod still doesn’t work, or works but with issues, it’s best to provide the log file:

Launch the game, launch a level and reproduce the issue you have (mod not working, some other bug);
Close or minimize the game. Navigate to the “Steam/steamapps/common/Serious Sam 4/Log/” folder. Right click on the “Sam4_Unrestricted.log” file and open it with any text editor you have (Notepad will do). Press Ctrl+A to select the contents of the log, copy them and insert into a paste on pastebin dot com.
Save the paste and post the link to it to the comments of this guide along with the description of your issue.

Serious Sam 4 – Carnage Mod