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'Serious Sam 1' Engine Released As Open Source

Posted by timothy on from the teachers-take-note dept.

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.)

11 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Engine specs? by Black+LED · · Score: 3, Informative

    A about a million headless, exploding zombies.

  2. Serious Sam was to much... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 4, Funny

    I never gotten into Serious Sam back in the day. Probably because of the endless hoard of enemies that keep on coming and coming and coming. A guy needs to rest between repeated comings, especially as he gets older.

    1. Re:Serious Sam was to much... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 4, 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.

    2. Re:Serious Sam was to much... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 2

      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.

    3. Re:Serious Sam was to much... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 2

      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?

    4. Re:Serious Sam was to much... by Faw · · Score: 2

      Instead of watching that boring video watch this one. Is more representative of serious Sam gameplay.

    5. Re:Serious Sam was to much... by spire3661 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      When you go to a museum, do you completely ignore the history of art and shit on anything that is not in the modern realist style?

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      Good-bye
  3. Learn with it. by erapert · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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. (ioQuake3, ioDoom3, Irrlicht, Unreal 4, Unity, etc. and now Serious Sam)

    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!

  4. Re:Engine specs? by Faw · · 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...

  5. Re:Why is this engine significant? by malditaenvidia · · Score: 4, Informative

    It was noteworthy by means of throwing hundreds of enemies at you, all with distinct patterns, which forced you to switch between different weapons. The engine was noteworthy for generating gigantic maps and dozens of enemies on screen without chugging, and it managed to do so efficiently on fairly low end systems even at the time. It is also of note that croteam is a small dev house who developed it with really limited resources. Serious Sam is one of the biggest indie releases of all time.

  6. Re:Why is this engine significant? by Megane · · Score: 2

    So it was a 3D shooter version of a "Bullet Hell" 2D shooter game?

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    #naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }