SERIOUS SAM CHARACTER MOD

Sadly, the game does not support ray traced caustics from the water as seen in Minecraft RTX and instead, the same animated textures from the original game are used. And when looking through the water, objects refract in a realistic manner too. In the path-traced version of the engine, water is now fully reflective - capturing the nearby environment and sky in its surface. In the original game, water surfaces were similar to those from the original Unreal: hyper blue textures to represent the look of water with moving texture and blue lights placed nearby to emphasise the watery look. This extra spectacle when firing weapons adds some welcome extra impact, as the guns in the original were not known for their amazing animations or sound.ДЄ final flourish comes from transparent surfaces, like water. Weapons like the mini-gun muzzle flash cast a dancing cascade of light and shadow around the environment, the green laser bolts do much the same, and each rocket flares spectacularly as it flies and detonates into the distance.

Beyond that, dynamic lighting flares with each bullet fired and with every explosion. So, these sections of the game now have a different gameplay feel as your flashlight illuminates these long dormant pyramids and crypts, casting shadows across the environment.ДЄlongside the flashlight, there are other new light sources in the path-traced renderer: power-ups, for example, are now treated as emissive surfaces and can help illuminate surrounding environments. This would be a problem, but the author of the path tracing engine added in a player flashlight, like that one found in Serious Sam 3. This means that a lot of areas designed around unmotivated lights are now pitch black in the path-traced version of the game. Instead, all these sections only have light coming from things like torches or fire-pits. The path-traced version of the game eliminates these unmotivated lights as presumably, they looked rather odd when path-traced. 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. 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. In the process, not only are materials compatible with the path-traced renderer, they are also of a much higher resolution too.

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.

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. 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. 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.

SERIOUS SAM CHARACTER MOD

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. 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. We've been down this route before with Quake 2, of course.

Serious sam character