Serious Sam’s Serious Engine source code released

http://www.croteam.com/serious-sam-source-code-released/

by doener • 10 years ago

183 36 10 years ago

croteam.com

nerdy• 10 years ago

Also from a week ago:

- (Same link) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11268130

- (Github) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11267450

jpgvm• 10 years ago

I loved this game, it and games like Painkiller feel like the last of the super face paced crazy FPS that defined the genre for me.

Would like to see more older engines released.. technically they can't be that important now and with engines like Unreal being developed in the open the tech is no longer really any secret to anyone.

Zardoz84• 10 years ago

For example, the Unreal Engine 1.x and 2.x would be great. The original Unreal Tournament have actually problems to run on modern hardware.

Kristine19752• 10 years ago

This question was asked in 2014 on the Unreal Engine forums. Tim Sweeney wrote: https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?1515-Older-En...

There is a long history on this topic, but the short summary is: We've looked at this extensively and concluded that releasing UE2 & UE3 source would be impractical due to the large number of integrated third-party libraries which have limitations on redistribution. The public source code release only became practical with Unreal Engine 4, due to an extensive effort to clean up external dependencies.
UE1 might be possible at some point in the longer-term future, but that would be more for nostalgia than practical utility.

lomnakkus• 10 years ago

Not an FPS, obviously, but your mention of fast paced games reminded me of this insanity: http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2015/03/01/score-rush...

venomsnake3• 10 years ago

The engine was absolutely breathtaking back in the day. And SS games are aging very well. Sadly they were one of the last pure FPS games.

mattmanser• 10 years ago

What do you mean by pure? The new Wolfenstein is only 2 years old and a new Doom is coming out soon.

venomsnake3• 10 years ago

Wolf was classes below Return To Castle Wolfenstein. Doom is not out yet, and after Quake 4 I am sceptical.

frik2• 10 years ago

The new Wolfenstein was more like Half Life, and not a pure FPS. With restricted movement in several gameplay passages, slow narrated passages, etc. A very good game for sure.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein was a real FPS.

abcd_f• 10 years ago

Let's not forget SSam's greatest contribution - a copiously lubricated revolver that shot in 1us of clicking a button and with a very satisfying * thump * :)

DanBC2• 10 years ago

Sadly they were one of the last pure FPS games.

I haven't heard about pure FPS before. What elements make a FPS pure or not?

venomsnake3• 10 years ago

Typical games I can think of are Doom 1&2, Quake 1,2,3 , UT, Serious Sam and Painkiller.

Big weapon pack, Six axis free camera movement, free movement in the levels, free jump, no contextual actions,no cover mechanics and the ability to save during arbitrary points (how the games regressed from that to the current checkpoint absurdity is anyone's guess).

mrob• 10 years ago

To me, Serious Sam feels more like a 3D version of Robotron: 2084 than a traditional FPS. Very high numbers of simple enemies, enclosed featureless arenas and large open spaces, interactions between the various enemy types forcing improvisation instead of memorization. Robotron is a great game, so this is a clever way of designing interesting fights without needing to spend a long time on map design. The later games switched to a more traditional FPS style, but the original is something unique and I highly recommend playing it.

kbeckmann• 10 years ago

Would love to read Fabien Sanglard's review of it in a couple of months...

douche• 10 years ago

Me too. Not sure if he's doing that anymore though

Semiapies• 10 years ago

Has anyone done anything interesting with the various open-sourced games and engines, or is this mainly of historical interest?

pori2• 10 years ago

The GPL version of the Quake II engine has been used to make a few games:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_II_engine#Games_based_on...

mynewtb• 10 years ago

People port games like Doom and Quake to every new device and architecture. They fix bugs and integrate modern technology.

dietrichepp• 10 years ago

There are a few out there. Xonotic is one.

AimHere• 10 years ago

Indie game developer Brendan Chung (http://www.blendogames.com) used a very lightly modified Quake Engine for his two short-form experimental narrative-based games, Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving. (The first is freely downloadable, the second you have to pay for). He's also working on a new game, Quadrilateral Cowboy, using the Doom 3 engine - apparently the gameplay might be more conventional for this one, though hopefully not too conventional...

The Quake 3 engine is used for fairly well-received open source arena shooters like Tremulous, Xonotic, and Nexuiz.

The Dark Mod is a Doom 3-based Engine for fan-made games in the style of the Thief Series

You also have a few ports of engines to cope with modern windows versions or non-Windows operating systems or just updated gameplay (Jagged Alliance 2 straciatella or 1.13 springs to mind).

pori2• 10 years ago

It's really cool to see an old game engine released like this for historical purposes. Not to mention, it's nice to be able to experiment and see other games become derivatives.

Still, I can't help but feel that the game industry is always a bit behind in FOSS. They don't usually open source anything until a decade or two after the tech is irrelevant. Perhaps it's to prevent competition.

Another thing that bothers me with these releases is how little documentation there is. They put up a repository without much intention of helping/building a community around it, which is a shame.

All that said, they still have the right to approach in this manner. It is their property and they are still generous when making releases like this.

DanBC2• 10 years ago

Another thing that bothers me with these releases is how little documentation there is. They put up a repository without much intention of helping/building a community around it, which is a shame.

I hope there's a way to link all the people who used to make mods and maps with this repository.

flohofwoe• 10 years ago

Most higher level game code is actually fairly uninteresting (if not to say 'a tangled mess') and wouldn't really bring the programming world forward if open sourced. On the other hand, most of the building blocks and information to build games is in the open and can be contributed to, even if not permissively licensed. And there are a lot of lower level building blocks that are open source with a proper license (mostly MIT).

So basically, the lower you go, the more open source you will find, and the higher up you go in a specific game's code, the less useful releasing as open source would be.

zanny• 10 years ago

less useful releasing as open source would be.

Developers would find an immense amount of use in open sourcing their engines like this. It lets the community port them to every OS in existence including your toaster. A great/bad example is gemrb, which was an open source reimplementation of the Infinity Engine that almost certainly incentivized Atari / Bioware to let Beamdog re-release the games with modern engine updates across many platforms due to the free engine's popularity on mobile.

The open source nature of all the id engines is what keeps Wolf3d through Quake 2 games relevant this day. Their engines are bought to every new platform almost as a benchmark for porting software period, and you can play them effectively everywhere as a result. Compare that to abandonware titles like Blood that were their contemporaries, but never saw source releases and thus are effectively dead software that would only run on DOS.

I'd argue almost every console game release since the Xbox would benefit astoundingly from open sourcing their engine code. If we could see the APIs they wrote their renderers against we could reimplement them for modern cross platform tooling to enable native compilation and execution of games we still cannot emulate well because the hardware is similar enough to what we have now that we don't have the magnitudes of ghz to throw at it easily or often. And even older console titles would benefit, because they could be modernized with new resolution support, higher refresh rates, and modern rendering techniques.

This is all around immensely beneficial to developers because it is basically free money - people will keep buying copies for the assets even if they use much better engines you didn't have to put developer hours into making.

FranOntanaya• 10 years ago

Or even worse, it's not released until there's noone left to answer about the licensing of the code and assets. The community that took over Microsoft Allegiance's code has been trying for years to find someone able to make decisions about it.

grrowl• 10 years ago

The code is usually terrible in various ways (mostly due to the culture in game dev studios). Even Quake's code, which is quite good, includes various "what the fuck?"[1] comments

[1]: Literally https://blog.dave.io/2011/10/0x5f3759df-true-magic-number/

nazka• 10 years ago

It's not the culture it's how the industry works.

Unless you are a huge company that can have his own in house engine with it's own team working on it, you will basically start a game from scratch with DirectX and with an engine built only for the needs of your game. You will finish the game, release it, and now you will have to start everything again because the game you just built - with its code - is not advanced enough to ship the next game with the graphics required in 2 years. So rather to have to fight by refactoring 60% of your code you start a new engine again, or else you cut hard in it.

And secondly, a game is here to be consumed for a short period of time. After that the whole product just died. Maybe it will have a few patch, but that's it. Where for a software, it is supposed to be constantly evolving and here to stay a few years, rather to be consumed for say 6 months, and then discontinued.

And lastly because it's an entertainment industry. There is nothing huge happening if a bug comes. No fortune 500 will be down, just the computer of someone somewhere. So it's "better" to ship fast and correct a bug when you see one, rather to spend a big amount of time writing tests that you won't be able to use for your next game anyway.

cdr• 10 years ago

If you're nostalgic, the complete collection of Serious Sam games is US$9.99 until Mar 22: http://store.steampowered.com/sub/17410/

DmitryNovikov• 10 years ago

Serious Sam shooter anniversary - finding bugs in the code of the Serious Engine v.1.10: http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0384/

Serious Sam’s Serious Engine source code released

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