Game:

Serious Sam 4 (2020)

Duration: 2:41

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There is an unused parameter for the Soldier Puppet entity (which is what the Octanian Troopers and Octanian Snipers are) named 'Call Reinforcement'. Within it is a parameter for targeting a spawner ("Reinforcement spawner"), two parameters related to timing ("Call period" and "Call delay"), a parameter for its spawn limits ("Max alive spawnees"), and a boolean tickbox parameter for calling reinforcements when player is sighted ("Call when foe is assigned").

It's unclear what the timing parameters do, though setting Call Period to a lower value seems to increase the frequency of the reinforcement calls. The default values are 10 for Call Period and 2 for Call Delay but for the purpose of this video, Call Period is reduced to 3. No more reinforcement calls will be attempted when the maximum alive amount of enemies spawned via the puppet's reinforcement calls is reached, but the puppet will continue to attempt reinforcement calls even if the spawner entity has reached its total amount of enemies it can spawn as long as the alive amount of enemies spawned via the puppet's reinforcement calls is below the specified maximum amount. The reinforcement call animation also appears to be cut off by the shooting animations every now and then, indicating that this feature wasn't completely implemented.

When you target a spawner entity to the Reinforcement Spawner parameter of a Soldier puppet such as Trooper or Sniper, the console will print out an error saying that they do not possess a shoot attack named "CallReinforcement". Only one entity parameter in the game does; the Octanian Commander's. However, in the final game, the Commander is a Legged Character Puppet. By loading the Commander's .ep and .cb into a Soldier Puppet will enable the Reinforcement Call ability for him.

Enemies that are to be spawned via Reinforcement Calls are meant to use the Trooper Reinforcement Spawn Effect Configuration, which is a new type of Spawn Effect Configuration to simulate enemies teleporting from the sky through a beam. The specific resource file they are meant to use is thankfully included in the game since it's used exactly once in the whole game in Breakfast in France, where it is used as the spawn effect for the Troopers that show up right after you get the Rage Serum in the Fun Guy side quest, though without any reinforcement calls involved. It's unclear if game's default spawn effect is meant to be used in conjunction with this or if the Octanian Commanders are meant to spawn anything bigger than human-sized enemies (or anything other than Octanian Troopers) since the particle effect for this spawn effect configuration is human-sized and will not scale for anything bigger.

The first clip of the video shows a normal spawner puppet used for the reinforcement calls while the second shows a spawner puppet that uses formation markers to spawn in different places, both with default spawn effect turned off. The third shows the default spawn effect used in conjunction with reinforcement call beam spawn effect for larger-sized enemies.

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