Dreamy GRO

Released: 2022-11-08

Time to say goodbye to old-fashioned AutoGRO!

Dreamy GRO is a custom utility designed to help mappers automatically pack their Serious Sam levels into GRO archives with all the needed resources that the levels may use.

Supported games

• Serious Sam Classic: The First Encounter
• Serious Sam Classic: The Second Encounter
• Serious Sam Classics: Revolution (works even better than RevPacker!)
• ...and even other games on Serious Engine 1?!

FAQ

Q: Is there going to be a version with custom user interface?
A: Someday, hopefully.

Q: Why is there a Linux version?
A: Why not? Even though you can't use Serious Editor or barely play classics on Linux, you might still want to work on it. Plus it's my very first application for Linux, so you're welcome.

Q: The program closes without creating any GRO file! What is happening?
A: Some error must have occurred. Make sure that you're packing WLD files strictly from the "Levels" directory of any Serious Sam installation folder, otherwise double-clicking on them will not work! And if something else goes wrong, the application will display an error. To see it, just add a "-p" command line argument to the execution or add a "pause" command at the end of a batch script to prevent the application from closing immediately.

How to use

This utility uses command line interface to function, so because of it there are two ways you can utilize it:

• Associate WLD files to open using Dreamy GRO.
• Write a batch script (.bat file) to run Dreamy GRO.

Upon opening the WLD file, you will be prompted to display the world dependencies. If you type "Y", it will just list all of the files the world depends on aside from the default resources and checks if they physically exist on a disk. Any other input will initiate a packing process.

The program will ask you to enter the resulting GRO filename and then ask if music and world files should be compressed. The resulting GRO file will be placed in the game's root directory.

If you'd like further customization, you can just run Dreamy GRO by itself and it will display useful help text describing each and every command line argument you may use in a batch script. Using these arguments you can pack any levels from anywhere however you'd like.

For example, this script will set root path to the Steam's SSR installation and pack two world files from the "Levels/MapPack" directory into a GRO file on the user's desktop without packing resources from "TexturePack.gro" and default SSR GRO files ("All_01.gro" and "All_02.gro"):

cd C:/DreamyGRO
DreamyGRO.exe -r "C:/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/Serious Sam Revolution" -w Levels/MapPack/Level_01.wld -w Levels/MapPack/Level_02.wld -o "C:/Users/JohnDoe/Desktop/MyMapPack.gro" -d TexturePack.gro -f ssr -f gro