Jan 24, 2023

Serious Sam Classic: The Second Encounter - THE LAW

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

BASEMENT CHATS WITH YASEN

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!

Sep 17, 2021

Featured Mod - Serious Sam Ray Traced

Serious Sam Classic: The First Encounter - IIIIDANNYIIII

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

BASEMENT CHATS WITH YASEN

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.

Sep 9, 2021

Serious Sam gets a fully path-traced RT upgrade - and it's beautiful

Serious Sam 2

We've been down this route before with Quake 2, of course. Taking an ancient, relatively simple 3D game and upgrading it into a fully path-traced graphical experience can be revelatory - and that's exactly what we see with this recently released, highly modified version of Serious Sam: The First Encounter. Yes, that's TFE, not Serious Sam HD - so it's a mod of the original game, largely bound by the limitations of the 2001 release. However, as you'll see from the video and head-to-head screenshots on this page, the results of a transition to a fully path-traced experience are impressive.

To get the game working with RT, author Sultim Tsyrendashiev delivers extensive modifications - not just in terms of the renderer (which is running via the Vulkan API) but also in terms of its core art assets too. For path tracing to work and for light to propagate around a scene, textures need updating with elements like normal maps and material values - so the author of the path tracer has gone in and tweaked all the game's textures to have these characteristics. This involves a good understanding of art as well as coding because fundamentally, we want the materials to look realistic but at the same time to evoke the aesthetic of the original game. In the process, not only are materials compatible with the path-traced renderer, they are also of a much higher resolution too.

In terms of how the global illumination solution works and the ways that light and materials interact, this really is best left to the video embedded below, but the bottom line is that the GI works not just on the light bounces from the primary light source - the sun - but also from man-made light sources too, like torches and fire pits. With interiors, the challenge faced by the developer here is pronounced: the original game essentially placed what are called 'unmotivated' light sources around the levels - fake lights, essentially, to provide some level of illumination. The path-traced version of the game eliminates these unmotivated lights as presumably, they looked rather odd when path-traced. Instead, all these sections only have light coming from things like torches or fire-pits.

Apr 27, 2021

Serious Sam 2 Update 2.091 is Live

Serious Sam 2 - IIIIDANNYIIII

Hey, yo! Bet you thought we’d just drop the previous update and then forget about it. Well, the joke’s on you, because we have another one coming.

What started as a hotfix, ended up as a full-blown patch with some much-needed fixes introduced with the huge update from a month ago, along with some cool tweaks and fixes based on community feedback. The powerful Nate has been working around the clock with our testing team to wrap this bad boy up, and while we are happy with it, we’ll be looking out for any and all additional feedback.

For the full changelog, please read below.

Much love from Croteam!
Danny

Serious Sam 2 Update 2.091 Changelog

What’s new:

We have added the "Toggle sprint" keybind. Sam can’t get out of breath anyway, so we may as well make him sprint all the time.
We’ve got freshly recreated serious bomb weapon and ammo icons. Feast your eyes.

Fixes:

The profile options will now initialize and save correctly.
You know that feeling when you’re dual-wielding cannons and shoot yourself in the face? Well, it’s not going to happen anymore.
Fixed issue with “InSamnity! 2” stopping levels from loading.
Fixed an issue that allowed the player to pull out weapons while driving.
Fixed improper order of outro movies to the statistics menu.
Fixed an issue where the serious bomb ammo would carry over even when you lose your weapons.-
Recreated fonts to fix missing characters (All translations should work fine now).
Fixed various soft-lock issues. We won’t list them here because we are ashamed of their existence.
Fixed helicopters colliding in Greendale
Moved Rocket launchers further apart in the first-person view to stop them from colliding when dual wielding.
Fixed missing materials and other issues on new DM maps.
Fixed an issue where the Albino would not spawn after you activate the Ursul Gardens chicken secret
Made the gear on the side of the minigun spin. Super important!

Other changes:

Brought back the original display for the minigun. Updated bullet feeding mechanism.
Brought back original Klodovik mesh.
Brought back original Serious Bomb mesh.
Brought back the "Use auto jump" profile option.
Created a new version of the lock texture.
Raised tool throwing Simba's target marker locations to fix items sometimes getting stuck on the model they stand on.
Reduced bullet damage from 9 to 8 for the Uzi.
Removed darkening overlay from the loading menu.
Reduced spacing of characters in the conversation text.
Moved Netricsa icon up so it's not as close to the Armor text.
Recreated beam gun animations to improve the bring up/put down animations.