Hello and welcome to the first Featured Mod episode for 2023!
In today’s episode, we won't highlight a single map, but a whole package of them that we recommend you guys to check out. Today we are highlighting a contest organized by https://www.serioussite.ru/ called “Jingle Bombs 2022”.

Jingle Bombs 2022 is a contest in which the contestants have to create a single-player or a cooperative map with a Christmas theme. The creation that captures the spirit of the Holiday the best and has the most effort put into it, gets the top prize.


The top 3 ranked maps are:

Winner - "Break the Loop" for Classic: TSE by “Cr1sTaL”
2nd Place - "Stolen Snow" for Serious Sam Fusion by “Riba4оk13”
3rd Place - "On the eve" for Classic: TSE by “TesLineX”

Those maps deserve a featured mod article of their own, but as I've said today, we will focus on the contest as a whole, so I strongly recommend heading over to the SeriousSite.ru website and giving those maps and also the rest of the ones submitted for the contest a check. There are a total of 8 submissions: four maps for Classic: The Second Encounter, three maps for Serious Sam Fusion, and one map for Siberian Mayhem.
Now you have plenty of variety and Serious Content to play in the upcoming snowy days!

In today’s basement chat, we will talk with the contest’s organizer who’s also a member of TimeLock Studio: Ar2R-devil-PiNKy! This is just one of the competitions that he has organized. He has been doing mapping contests since 2010 on various themes such as: Speedrun, RetroWave, Escape, Horror, Puzzles, and many many more. You can check all those competitions and maps on the SeriousSite.ru website. Now let’s head to the basement and talk with Ar2R-devil-PiNKy about all this stuff!

Link to the maps: https://www.serioussite.ru/forum/33-3959-1


Hello everyone! It's an honor for me to welcome our first guest in the basement for 2023- Ar2R-devil-PiNKy! He is a co-founder of SeriousSite.ru and a member of TimeLock Studio. He has been organizing contests and activities for Serious Sam for way too many years now!

⚪Welcome Pinky, nice to have you here finally. I've known you for many years now as we have co-hosted some community activities back in the day. Please introduce yourself to those of the community members that don't know you. When did you become a community member and when was the first time you started getting involved in creating community activities?

Hello Yasen, thank you for inviting me. My name is Arthur, I've been a fan of the series for more than 20 years, and have been modding for more than 17 years. I think probably every fan has come across at least one of my works, be it maps, mods, art, video content, etc. I became a member of the community back in 2009 when I was just connected to a good stable Internet. Loved playing Serious Sam 2 a lot, and during one of the co-op sessions I met two guys, they were ZIM and ALEX. ZIM introduced me to a website that he had just created. That's how it all started. The first contests were held by my friends, but a few years later I decided to make this event an annual one (with honorary members of the jury, of course). And a few years ago we added an additional second contest for every new year.

⚪You've had quite a long journey! There have been over 15 mapping contests. Which ones hold a special place in your heart and you would strongly suggest to the community to try? My personal favorites would be "Brainiacs" and "Manhunt".

Oh, honestly it's hard to give an answer to such a question, since each contest has its own gems, heh. I would advise to start with "Treasure World", "Brainiacs", "RetroSeriousWave" and "Masters of Horror" - that's my favorite ones.

⚪How would you rate last year's two contests that you hosted: "Please fly" and "Jingle Bombs 2022", in terms of community activity (submissions) and quality of maps? I'm interested in hearing from you since you have been a member of the community for such a long time, what do you think about the state of the Serious Sam community currently, and is there something that you think we can all do to improve it further?

Very solid. Did not even expect that there would be such a number of works. Mappers never cease to amaze with their ideas. I think the state of the Serious Sam community is more or less good now. Of course, due to the long time interval between the release of the main games of the series (Serious Sam 3: BFE and Serious Sam 4), a lot of time has passed and a lot of people have come and left, but this is a common thing. Sometimes old members who have left the community come back- once a fan of Sam, always a fan of Sam. People just need to be nice to each other and, if possible, not to disturb others too much with their Marsh-Hoppers in their heads.

⚪Very well said, people should always be nice to each other. It’s been almost 14 years now since you joined the community and you are now part of TimeLock Studio, and Croteam and you also have your own personal life. What motivates you to keep doing this volunteer work for the community and still be so engaged on all fronts?

The community itself. It's always nice to bring a little piece of joy to your favorite game and share it with others, and the process of creating something is still very exciting, even if there is very little free time for it now. It was also influenced by the fact that since the age of three I have been burning with the desire to create my own games (and in secret, I am slowly going to this) and Serious Sam modding has become a confident starting point in all this.

⚪Speaking of creating games, you now have a Serious Sam game behind your back! Could you please share some behind-the-scenes pieces of information on Siberian Mayhem: how did you join the project and what is your overall experience of working on it and having Croteam's support for it.

Sleepless nights and lots of fun. The story is quite simple, Kadath offered me to work on the project and I agreed. And sure I can tell you something interesting behind-the-scenes. You won't believe it! One day [REDACTED] and he, like, [REDACTED]. We look at [REDACTED] scene, and after that, we decide [REDACTED] until it's done. We finished at 4 o'clock in the morning (according to my time) and the result was great

⚪Well, I'm sure the community will love it so much once they read all this spicy information exclusively here in the Featured Mod article! Thank you for sharing it all. Now that we have covered Siberian Mayhem and the contests, I have to ask you about my personal favorite work of yours… Samolash. Do you plan on doing another episode and if yes then when can we expect one? Please tell me soon, the world needs more of it!

I am very glad that you liked it. Unfortunately, I can't give an exact date when, but I do aim to finish work on a new episode sometime in 2024. A lot of ideas have accumulated for the new episode and I'm hoping it will turn out to be the biggest and most interesting one! Moreover, new games have been added to the series and this is a huge scope for new jokes and parodies. And by the way, just like last time, I accept work from everyone who wants to participate in a new episode!

⚪Exclusive news right here: Samolash is returning in 2024! I think we have gone through most of the topics, so I have to ask you: what does the future hold for you? What are your future goals and things you would like to achieve in the upcoming 1-2 years? Should we also expect more contests?

Hehe, the jury members and I have already come up with themes for the following contests for years ahead. For example, the "Please Fly 2022" contest concept was invented in 2020. Annual contests have already become a SeriousSite legacy and we are not going to stop. We also have plans for other things, but it's too early to talk about them yet.

⚪Happy to hear that there are no plans of you stopping any time soon. I would like to thank you for coming by the basement and having a chat with me. I can't wait to see the future content from you. For the finale, by tradition, the stage is yours to address the community. Share anything you wish for them or simply give shout-outs! See you in the next episode everyone!

Thank you Yasen, and thank you handsome stranger who read this right now. Bye!

Special Reserve Games has teamed up with Devolver Digital and Croteam to create outstanding physicals!

This is a PREORDER for a physical product. Estimated shipping date is NOVEMBER 2022.

At the heart of our SERIOUS SAM COLLECTION is SRG's signature RESERVE EDITION for the game, which is LIMITED TO 3,000 COPIES and features:

SWITCH CARTRIDGE
Includes critical updates, patches, and DLC at the time of manufacture
INCLUDES MULTIPLE GAMES
Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter
Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter
Serious Sam 3: BFE
includes The Legend of the Beast expansion
includes Jewel of the Nile expansion
SEQUENTIALLY NUMBERED GAME PACKAGING
REVERSIBLE JACKET ARTWORK
SHIPS IN A SPECIAL RESERVE BOX
Makes a great shelf display and protects your game
SPECIAL RESERVE ART CARD
Exclusive Reserve-only art card
Metallic paper (4" x 6") with foil treatment
24-PAGE INSTRUCTION BOOKLET
Inside the shrink-wrapped game packaging

SERIOUS SAM COLLECTION is also available in an SRG SINGLE, and a SPECIAL RESERVE ART PRINT for the game is available as well.

PREORDER NOW! Only 3,000 copies of the SERIOUS SAM COLLECTION physical Reserve are available, while supplies last.

Hi all!
More than any time before, I bet you didn’t see this one coming. While there was a lot of talk about the next big thing coming for SS4 within the Serious Sam community, nobody came even close to what we are revealing today.

Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem is a stand-alone expansion to Serious Sam 4, working just as well whether you’ve played SS4 or not. Siberian Mayhem cranks the action up to 11. It’s a hybrid experience ready to deliver explosive fun to fans of classics, and the latest installments to the series.

Siberian Mayhem is very important in another way. This game was designed, and its development has been led by some of the most talented members of the Serious Sam modding community, joined together under the banner of Timelock Studio. The team consists of well-respected names including DedKadath, Asdolg, YaNexus, UrbanDeHuman, FreekNik, MintFritter, NSKuber, and Ar2R-devil-PiNKy, who worked closely together with Croteam to deliver absolute Mayhem, and we can’t wait for everyone to experience it.

We’ll leave the story of how this all came to be for another day. Until then, check a look at the reveal trailer, wishlist, or pre-order, and get ready for the madness that arrives this month.

Much love from Croteam and Timelock Studio!

Hi everyone! As many of you must have found out by now, one of the craziest members of our community recently released a brand-new Serious Sam: The First Encounter mod which updates our original Serious baby with state-of-the-art technology - Ray Tracing.



I remember vividly seeing the mod in one of our community Discord servers a long time ago. Back then, Sultim was about halfway through, and very excited about the stuff he learned while making it. We were instantly impressed and could barely wait for the mod to finally drop, and here we are. Serious Sam: The First Encounter can be played with Ray Tracing. I bet you thought you’d say that out loud. Come on, do it. Say it out loud.

The mod is available for download on GitHub. For sure check it out:
https://github.com/sultim-t/Serious-Engine-RT/releases

Sultim has spent an insane amount of time on this project, and it definitely shows. That’s why we simply had to send our community master, the artist currently known as THE LAW, on another mission – to interview a superstar modder in the making. Make sure to check out that interview below.

Much love!
Danny

---

Good day, dear readers! Today, I am joined by the guy everyone talks about, the master of Ray Tracing – Sultim! We chat about his latest mod, what motivated him to make it, and how it all came together.

⚪ Hi Sultim. Glad to have you here in the basement. Please introduce yourself to the audience. How long have you been a Serious Sam fan and when did you first start modding for it?

Hello, I'm Sultim and I've finished my bachelor's degree in Software Engineering this Summer. Not sure what to say more about myself, I think this is the most appropriate introduction currently.

I've been a Serious Sam player since 2013, I think, but back then I didn't understand what the game is even about. It was just another game. Over time, I was experimenting with game engines and tried to make my own, of course. And only after figuring out that games are really complex systems, I tried to find a game I could clone for fun. That's how I've returned to Serious Sam because on the surface level it seems like it's a simplistic game. However, after experimenting with trying to clone it, I've found a lot of obstacles. For example, the core gameplay of my clone wasn’t as engaging as the original.

After that, I've been more involved in graphics programming and, like other beginners, started with OpenGL. I was in my second year of university, and we were given a task for a semester to make a finished project with a requirements specification, planning, etc. So, I've chosen to make a very simple game engine. At the end of that semester, it had graphics in OpenGL, a very coarse physics engine that works on triangles and spheres... But anyway, it was finished in a way that it did have an example game (which was set in Egypt). And since then I started to look at Serious Engine 1 more closely as it’s been open-source since 2016.

In January 2020, when I had 2 weeks of holidays, I decided to make a Vulkan port for Serious Engine 1. At the time, I and my friend had a one-year project which was based on Vulkan API, so it was another chance to improve my limited knowledge of Vulkan back then.
After 2 weeks it was ready. Seeing this code now is devastating. But it just works. What I remember is that it was really hard to get it to work at the start, I had numerous issues because of my poor knowledge of Serious Engine 1 architecture, WinAPI, Vulkan, C++, etc. I couldn't see The Second Encounter anymore after that - I really tired from it throughout these 2 weeks.
The grand idea of that Vulkan port was making a ray tracing port, after seeing Quake 2 RTX. But I didn't have a ray-tracing GPU, nor a strong knowledge of APIs and SE1.

⚪ Ray tracing is a relatively new graphical development. How challenging was getting this technology to compile on a nearly twenty-year-old engine? Did you have to perform significant code rewrites for it?

The initial compilation was quite challenging. Introducing Vulkan API wasn't hard – it was already there. But the problems were related to the fact that ray-tracing extensions require the application to be 64-bit. SE1 was initially 32-bit. So, SE1 had to be ported to 64-bit. Fortunately, there was an open-sourced x64 Linux port of SE1! That was a great relief because SE1 has some places not prepared for x64, like some pointers, which are assumed to be 4 bytes long, but with x64 they can be 8 bytes.

The project itself has roots in September of 2020 when the 4th year of my education started. Since it's the final year, all the students must make another one-year project, namely "Graduation thesis". So, after much deliberation, I've finally chosen to make a library that should help to port games to path tracing and I've started to make a research of the subject, concepts of path tracing, light physics, what are the current hardware limitations, etc.

I really needed a ray-tracing GPU to test so I decided to buy an RTX3070 which was released at the end of October 2020. Buying one was a pain in the ass. At the release hour, I was sitting for 2 hours straight and reloading the online store page to get just anything. The first time I tried to order an available GPU, it just disappeared in front of me. But I got one eventually.

The development of the library started in November 2020 and I started to sort out the old graphics engine of Serious Engine 1. Of course, the old graphics engine was really optimized for rasterization. And it wasn't possible to make a few changes to it to make it work with ray–tracing primitives. More grand changes must've been introduced to the engine. Almost every day I was assembling piece by piece the library. And I got something working in Serious Engine 1 itself by the middle of January 2021.

After that it seemed to me that with enough passion I'll be able to release Serious Sam: Ray Traced in May 2021. But now we all know how that went.

Each component of Serious Engine 1 had to have been reworked; dynamic geometry, static geometry, static movable geometry, particles, water, light sources... The main problem is the lack of game resources and meta-information: like, what light sources are not "natural" (like torches), what geometry can't be visible (in Oasis, in Moon Mountains, and others there was overlapping geometry that should not be visible from one side, but visible from another), what are the water polygons, the lack of normal maps, roughness, metallicity, emission maps (SE1 uses up to 3 textures per polygon, and each of them should have additional 2 PBR textures, it increases the load on GPU to fetch that data), etc etc.

With all that, path tracing is limited with current generation GPUs -- only a very limited amount of rays can be cast per pixel, around 4-7. Offline path tracers are using thousands of rays per pixel! So because of maintaining the real-time-ness (very few rays per pixel), there's a lot of noise on raw ray-traced images. So there are denoising techniques that are designed specifically for such cases: they require only 1 sample per pixel, one of them is A-SVGF, which was used in my library and consequently, in Serious Sam: Ray Traced.

Another kind of problem is how to draw particles and other semi-transparent geometry, and since with ray tracing it would cost another few rays, I've decided to draw them with classic rasterization but using ray traced depth buffer, so semi-transparent geometry can be hidden by ray-traced geometry.

⚪ Where else have you spent time reworking engine aspects? Did you have to perform case-by-case fixes in certain levels or were your changes global?

There are a ton of such fixes on each level. Testers really helped with that - they've pointed out most such inconsistencies. Like no lights in cutscenes or Sewers which were too dark (so the flashlight angle is wider there), invisible Gnaars are hard to see, etc. The fresh point of view is very useful because after 10 months of development one gets too used to everything in a project. I would say the most time-consuming part is level tweaking.

⚪ Testers are always lifesavers! So now the most important question is, was your thesis graded and what grade did you receive?

I've finished my studies successfully and got an "Excellent" grade (which means 5 on the scale from 2 to 5 [it's the Russian academic grading system]) for my thesis and its defence. It was challenging to make this thesis, to create such a library, to make the ray tracing port of SE1, but it was enjoyable, in a way that it was genuinely exciting to develop it, and also interesting and funny to see the people's reactions, to read their comments.

⚪ Congratulations, you really deserve it. When you first told me about the mod I was absolutely sure it's one of those mods that would never see the light of day, but you proved me wrong and did a great job! What are your plans for the future now that you have graduated?

My current plans are to rest a bit from such intense work, because I was thinking and developing it almost every day, especially after graduation when there were almost no distractions.

For the future, I really don't know. There are several ways for me, and until November it's very uncertain. I don't know, maybe there'll be another port. We'll see.

⚪ Thank you for this interview Sultim, I really appreciate you taking the time to be here with us. As always, please take the stage to share whatever you wish with our Serious community! As for you my dear readers, I’ll see you soon in the next episode where we are going to interview one of the biggest Serious Sam fans in Russia “Samson”

Oh, god, never underestimate the power of open-sourced projects.

Hey, everyone!

This Saturday we are starting to warm up for Serious Sam 4’s release with another community event! We are going to kill a horde of enemies and hopefully, we are going to have a horde of people in the voice chat so make sure to join it too!

Game: Serious Sam 3: BFE (stand-alone)
Game mode: Classic Co-op
Servers: Serious Saturday Powered by Croteam #1, #2, and #3
Date: May 30th, 2020 (Saturday)
Time: 21:00 CEST

For discussions about the event please use: #community-events on our Discord server @ http://www.discord.gg/croteam


We're hosting Serious Sam themed events regularly, leading up to the launch of Serious Sam 4. To stay in the loop with all future events make sure to join our Discord, or follow our developer Steam page.

Hey everyone!

I'm pretty sure many of you have already seen what's up by today, but here's a breakdown.

Serious Sam 4 is launching this August, and pre-orders are open now. You can get your hands on a Standard and Digital Deluxe editions with cool bonuses. The store page has a ton of new info and some new screenshots, so check it out!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/257420/Serious_Sam_4

We have released a cinematic trailer, as well as a few behind the scenes videos that show some actual gameplay. Both are listed below.





Love you all! Byeeee.

All of us at Croteam wish you have a great Winter break.

Happy Holidays and have a great New Year. 2020 is about to get Serious!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yvz1-pWeq7I

All of us at Croteam wish you have a great Winter break.

Happy Holidays and have a great New Year. 2020 is about to get Serious!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yvz1-pWeq7I

All of us at Croteam wish you have a great Winter break.

Happy Holidays and have a great New Year. 2020 is about to get Serious!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yvz1-pWeq7I

Hi everyone!

I can’t believe it’s been a month already, but we’ve been hard at it, trying to make Revolution into what it was meant to be at first. We were all over your reports and feedback, fixing, readjusting, rebalancing and expanding in the meantime.

Our main focus was fixing game-breaking issues as well as the Workshop issue that came up, as we love seeing your mods shine. This was sorted out, so please make magic happen, we can’t wait to check all your custom stuff out.

This update also takes care of the leaderboard issues with survival levels, as well as many smaller issues with Netricsa, collision, textures and such. More detailed update notes can be found below.

Stay Serious!
- Danny, on behalf of Croteam.

• Workshop items will now show up properly in the custom level menu.
  
• Sniper zoom has been adjusted to be more in-line with the classics.
  
• Fixed an issue where inverting vertical look would only work on a mouse and not on a gamepad.
  
• Fixed erroneous time estimates on Bright Island.
  
• Added updated model for the final boss of Bright Island.
  
• Leaderboards for Survival levels should now work as intended.
  
• Fixed smaller issues with wording in Netricsa.
  
• Fixed several collision issues across the board.
  
• Fixed several issues with textures on multiple levels.
  
• Fixed visibility issues across South American levels related to the faulty rendering of several pyramid models.
  
• Several smaller balance and gameplay changes on the Bright Island levels, based on community feedback.

• BrKeen Chevap Xbox - Fixed an issue where the wrong music would play during matches.
  
• Crystal Cove - The secret laser will no longer clip through the floor.
  
• Forlorn Ruins - Rebalanced the last arena to align the difficulty with previous areas.
  
• Forlorn Ruins - Added additional platforms for bridges to make passing them easier.
  
• Forlorn Ruins - Changed Arachnoid Adult spawn positions and movement patterns.
  
• Forlorn Ruins - Rebalanced the Kleer fight to keep it in-line with other encounters.
  
• Forlorn Ruins - Players should now be able to progress through Tree Village arenas on lower difficulties.
  
• Forlorn Ruins - Overhauled the final arena.
  
• Ruins of the Abyss - Lava golems in the fire elemental area should spawn more consistently now.
  
• Ruins of the Abyss - Readjusted the position of the coop portal to better fit intended gameplay.
  
• Ruins of the Abyss - Increased the sensing range of elemental enemies.
  
• Ruins of the Abyss - Rebalanced several fights.
  
• Ruins of the Abyss - Platforms will no longer wound the player in the water element room.
  
• Ruins of the Abyss - Enemies will no longer be able to see the player when it’s not expected.
  
• Ruins of the Abyss - Mud golem no longer floats when awake.
  
• Sunken Pyramid - Redesigned the gravity room to provide players with a more balanced experience.
  
• Sunken Pyramid - Slowed down spinning platforms on the 3rd floor of the pyramid.
  
• Sunken Pyramid - Players should now be able to progress through some arenas on lower difficulties.

NOTE: This update will once again render your saves useless. Unfortunately, this is due to some limitations of the old engine, and there are no workarounds at this point in time. That’s also one of the reasons we are trying to provide you with substantial updates less frequently, rather than smaller updates that would break saves constantly. Sorry about that.

In the future, we will be keeping one older build live even after updates, so you can continue with your progress in case you don’t feel like you’d benefit from the update. We use a similar thing in our other games as well.

We value your input, and we want you to reach out to us with all feedback. For general thoughts and ideas, please use the General section of the Revo forums on Steam. Should you encounter any issues or bugs, please report them on the Tech & Support subforum, along with your game log (located in the game installation folder) and a detailed description of the issue.

For all things Serious Sam hit Mr. Stone up on Twitter and Facebook. Follow Croteam on Twitter and Instagram, like us on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel. Oh, and don’t forget to join our ever-growing Croteam family on Discord and Reddit.