'Serious Sam 1' Engine Released As Open Source 82
jones_supa writes: id Software is well known for publicly releasing the source code of its old first-person-shooter games. Now Croteam is joining the club by releasing the source code of the engine of the very first Serious Sam game. It's the very same engine that the company used for Serious Sam Classic: The First Encounter and The Second Encounter. Croteam's Vyacheslav Nikitenko, who worked on the source code and prepared Serious Engine v.1.10 for this release, had this to say: "Historically, this version of Serious Engine is very important for Croteam and for me personally. I created several mods for Serious Sam back in the day, before even starting the work on the source code, and it was a great tool for learning. And it's even better today! Obviously, Serious Engine v1.10 won't produce top-notch graphics, but the source code is very well commented, easy to modify, and there are lots of user generated mods out there. This version has everything you need to build your own game – or just experiment. If you're looking to get started, just download the files from GitHub and head over to SeriousZone, it has a great community and lots of tutorials." Happy hacking! (And here's a video with some game play that shows what this engine can do.)
Re:Engine specs? (Score:4, Informative)
A about a million headless, exploding zombies.
Re:Engine specs? (Score:5, Insightful)
There was nothing scarier than hearing those screaming exploding guys coming from the distance.
Well maybe it was scarier to find lots of ammo and health because you knew that as soon as you picked it up something bad was coming.
Probably lots of screaming guys...
Serious Sam was to much... (Score:4, Funny)
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^ Minute Man spotted.
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Minute Man spotted.
My attention span these days are 15 minutes or less. My days of playing video games for hours at a time are long gone.
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That isn't what I was talking about.
Be polite to others by keeping your personal problems to yourself. ;)
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You've only been laid by your hands.
Being celibate has its own rewards.
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Another settlement needs your help.
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Serious Sam does have loads of bad guys and multiplayer.
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Serious Sam does have loads of bad guys and multiplayer.
And it scales up in multiplayer: 12-player co-op on Serious difficulty was a site to behold.
Re:Serious Sam was to much... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wasn't the point of the FPS games generally loads of bad guys, multi-player and a sense of claustrophobia?
The "sense of claustrophobia" came from the limitations of most FPS engines at the time, which resulted in room-and-hallway level design to limited how much detail and how many NPCs got drawn on the screen. The Serious Sam engine was different as it featured wide open spaces and an endless supply of NPCs.
Plus being dark meant you imagined rather than saw generally rather full graphics?
Depending on the FPS engine, colored lighting requires time to calculate bounces and drop offs from each source. Some levels are dark because of the storyline, other levels are dark to compile faster. Serious Sam went with full brightness.
This is awful; was it ever impressive?
It was back in the day.
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Serious Sam Was a parody game of a Genre that took itself much to seriously.
The only game I can think of from that era would be Duke Nukem. Or was it Shadow Warrior?
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Instead of watching that boring video watch this one [youtube.com]. Is more representative of serious Sam gameplay.
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Also funny, only things serious are the coding and gameplay..
Re:Serious Sam was to much... (Score:5, Insightful)
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If i saw something that was a pale, derivative version of something else I'd already seen, sure. The Monkeys/Oasis, John Williams, Tracey Emin... no point. Get the originals.
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It's more like ignoring the artists who have, for the last 100 years, used their art to deliberately exclude and belittle the rest of us, while laughing about it and looking down on the little people. Previous to this, art was an integral part of people's lives and was appreciated by pretty much everyone.
"Art is dead"
-- Russian dadaists, 1915
They were right.
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so says 'creimer'
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Let's examine it ... (Score:1)
Hmm .. MSVC 2013 or MSVC 2015, DirectX8, GPLv2 ...
Looks useless!
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It's a Windows game. What did you expect?
icculus.org port (Score:2)
What did you expect?
He expected that. by the time he had fired his git client,
Ryan would have already release a "ioSeriousEngine" branch, completely ported to SDL2 + Vulkan + OpenAL.
Worst part? It's not that far from being plausible. [twitter.com]
Learn with it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Want to build a therapy tool or viz tool or prototype but don't want to re-invent the wheel? Use an existing engine. (see above)
Thank you, id, Croteam, Epic, and others for your generosity. Stuff like this helps keep up the momentum of innovation and drives human progress forward.
Don't misunderstand me, though: I think it's perfectly appropriate to charge money for software. A man/woman has gotta eat!
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Want a job in the gaming industry?
To get paid shit and treated like shit? Yeah, sign me up!!
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"Sucker born every minute" is a perfect description of the long line of people who think they want to be game programmers. Unless you're a Carmack, there's no really no point unless you're in to being shit upon.
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So having even less job security? Oh goodie!!
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I like making games, too. But there's no way in hell I'd work in a game company. Working 80+ hour weeks while always being just around the corner from being fired is not worth it. Unless you can hook up with a great indie studio, pretty much all the other choices are crap.
But, hey, if you enjoy being shit on go right on ahead. :)
Couch multiplayer or handhelds with buttons (Score:2)
I like making games, too. But there's no way in hell I'd work in a game company.
If you want to make games focused on couch multiplayer, or handheld games that rely on buttons instead of a touch screen, the platforms designed for those use cases are consoles. Console makers demand "financial stability" and "relevant experience" from developers, and other Slashdot users have told me that working in an established game company is the most reliable way to show "relevant experience".
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To get paid shit and treated like shit? Yeah, sign me up!!
Depends where. I'm in a cow-orking space where an independent mobile game developer has one of the private offices. I often chat to the various staff members over tea or coffee since the kitchenette is shared. They seem pretty happy to me. I don't know what the pay is like though.
Not all game shops are EA-like meat grinders. Some of the are ex-EA. Apparently it's not as bad as you hear about online, I got told, before being told about perma-crunches,
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You forgot Lumberyard.
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Want a job in the gaming industry? Make a mod or make improvements to an open source game engine and instantly impress at the job interview.
I doubt that will work in Las Vegas. Their gaming industry is a little bit different.
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Want a job in the gaming industry?
Hell no.
(And because my parents were married, I can't be in Marketing either.)
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First of all, one can't play Serious Sam on ioquake3. So for someone like myself that wants to play Serious Sam it's irrevelant what games run on ioquake3 if Serious Sam isn't one of them. Secondly, all thise games you mentioned for ioquake3 didn't exist the very second the engine was released. So you're comparing apples to oranges.
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2. This isn't really about getting a bunch of derivatives up and running. It may just be as simple as letting people port Serious Sam to new and weird platforms.
3. I love Urban Terror and I've been playing every night for close to a decade. Frozen Sands, the team behind UrT, has been good about releasing updates over the years. The fact that the Q3 source code was released was a big help to that game
"... A man/woman has gotta eat!" (Score:2)
But not everyone is a (wo)man. I am an ant! :P
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Maybe someone can replace every cool enemy with something mundane and fuck up the controls.
WE DON'T NEED A REMAKE OF DAIKATANA!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana [wikipedia.org]
Why is this engine significant? (Score:1)
There are plenty of open source 3D engines. What makes this one different on a technical level? What is its historical significance? What are the things it's good at? What are its flaws?
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Re:Why is this engine significant? (Score:5, Informative)
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There are plenty of open source 3D engines. What makes this one different on a technical level?
It runs Serious Sam and those others engine don't?
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It's very efficient. Not only does it support enormous levels with tremendous draw distance, and not only does it handle enormous enemy counts, it does all this while supporting four player on one PC splitscreen.
And it does all this on what was modest hardware at the time.
Serious Sam's poly counts per enemy were never the highest, but when you throw entire mobs of them on the screen without slowdown, it gets impressive.
I recall a user-made level that was just one big field with the player, a minigun, ammo s
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I recall a user-made level that was just one big field with the player, a minigun, ammo spawns, and one thousand enemies. In one wave. And the engine handled it.
Wow! Sounds like nuts.wad has found its true spiritual home. Anyone else remember that one?
Final Solution (Score:2)
Maybe someone can open source the code for Arkham Knight so modders can finally make it work.
Awesome Features (Score:2)
This engine had features that you simply could not find in other engines of the day. Multiple gravity sources, real-time visibility to other parts of a map, extremely round objects, the ability to handle 50+ enemies on the screen at once (with zero slowdown), ability to handle huge outdoor areas.
You could do things with the Serious Engine that would make the Quake, Half-Life, and Unreal engines choke, at best.
And it still looks pretty good today. The guys at Croteam did a phenomenal job.
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Multiple gravity sources
That was one that blew me away when I first played it. That cylindrical room that you could run up the sides freely in. The only other FPS I've seen to do anything like that was Prey.