Seriously lit

It's not silly, it's an integral part of the original art design. It should be relatively easy to add it back? I'm not sure why it was taken out

…. All the work this dev did for free…. And we’re talking about missing Lens flares? Really?

@@sanctemify yeah..? Just cause it's free doesn't make it perfect or immune to critique. Specially constructive criticism.

@@sanctemify What? It's constructive criticism. I'm not going "this sux lol"

Before all these fancy RTX nonsense I always used to be mesmerized by a good lense flare in a game. Just like the guy that reviews toilets in videogames I used to be obsessed for light flares in my games and line them up by slowly moving the camera

what ?

Thank god Croteam are under Devolver Digital.

Serious Sam games tend to have official mod support tho

I know this has been said a hundred times but I’ll say it again… if companies would just realize that these fan made projects INCREASE their game’s value and community and don’t detract… they make MORE money in the long run from a vibrant user base. Man…..

@@fensoxx of course, but then they can't release the same rehash yearly which makes more $$$

oh jeeze that would be really great actually

Just buy Cyberpunk 2077, with RT lighting set to “psycho” you get RTGI.

@@psionski as nice as this sounds, I'm afraid people want to play good games instead

@@theavidgamer6213 I don’t think I’ve played many games where I’ve sunk 130 hours and it seems like I could easily play for 100-200 hours more... for me at least, CP2077 is up there with the best of them (although I know some people don’t like it - but no idea why, I couldn’t find a single person that was able to coherently explain what they think is wrong with that game).

Yeah that's cause old games fake lighting was very crude, while modern games raster lighting got insanely good at "faking" it to the point the differences are minimal/a matter of taste.

I can only agree.

This is why I like limitations. They force developers to go with their own art style. Some game devs placed lights at places where they shouldn't be for lightmap generation but it still looks good. Realistic? NO. Interesting? Definitely. Look at Quake 64. I personally like the lighting. Many of the colored lights don't make any sense there but... it looks nice.

Absolutely

Completely agree, especially with the water. It goes from mystical and fantastical to drab and boring in this “update”.

Serious Sam has aged better than most games of it's time visually. When I played it recently I was surprised how gorgeous some parts look. The blue sky contrasting with the the whitish yellow sand is just beautiful and a lot of it is due to the art style. The remakes unfortunately have a way more photo realistic look.

Even those shadow volumes like in Deadly Shadows would be nice.

BRO! How come no one thought about this before, if there's one game that needs it it's the OG thief games

It wouldn't really work since Thief's gameplay & noir-ish art direction depends on very deliberately placed, unrealistic shadows. Would still be cool to see though.

@@schlockd3830 Well observed, but I disagree, you can dim the lights and adjust the roughness cutoff to the point you'd get very realistic soft indirect, but still very dark and deep shadows. The reason it kills moody and dark atmospheric games is because of bad and haphazard implementation that don't account for the art and atmosphere of a game(like Metro Exodus), but it certainly can be done.

@@victfv I LOVE how graphics looked during that little period like thief: ds and dx:iw. That really would be a dream come true

You can see some combat in dark areas in the video. The flashlight iluminates the entire room well enough to fight and several guns emit light as well so it didn't look lik too much of a problem. Though it may actually be an interesting gameplay mechanic using things like the plasma rifle more in darker areas EDIT: I forgot that the other hitscan guns probably also have muzzle-flash that also illuminates the room, so what ever you do, there will probably be enough light.

Another issue is whatever is going on with health bottles. They become almost invisible because there isn't any liquid visible, they just look like perfectiely reflecive shapes.

It looks like the both the muzzle flashes and the flashlight provide quite a bit of illumination though (remember, this is ray traced illumination, not the typical worthless static illumination from flashlight in non ray traced games) and this is serious sam... the guns don't stop firing when the fight starts..

The flashlight isn't tiny

So it’s… realistic because the real world isn’t designed to perfectly lit all the time? Light doesn’t care what you prefer or what’s best for your eyes, it’s a bunch of photons following causality.

Remember how works our eyes, we see the light, then colors. Serious Sam games had ever taken colors very SERIOUSLY!

Hd version

a couple of years ago, i ported the first doom map to Unreal 4 using the original textures plus handmade normals and roughness map, it looked like a whole different game :)

To be honest, the original game looked absolutely incredible in 2001. Look at 3:44 on the left, that's pretty good to begin with, though it just uses precalculated lightmaps. It used so much technologically impressive eye candy, like detail textures (which are visible once you're close to an object, in addition to the main texture), specular, reflections, even bump mapping, though very sparingly. What's even more important though is the art style and decisions they made. You could be handed a good engine made by another studio and end up making unimpressive environments. They not only made the technology, but also used it creatively and thoughtfully.

Isn't there Quake with Raytracing already?

@@AchiragChiragg Only Quake 2

@@deemster4249 i feel you

Q1 wouldd be sic!!

@@Tomico. there acctually is a very glitchy and unbalanced version

Meh

@@HShango why meh!?, serious sam is one the best stress buster game ever made, this is a good time for rdna2 and post turing gpu owners to play it again...

A surprise to be sure but a welcome one

I’m pretty sure he was joking :D If something has raytracing in it, that’s 100% guarantee that DF will cover it. And they’re also huge fans of retro gaming. So them covering this is a no-brainer.

Would be great to see something like this for Outlaws (LucasArts, 1997). What a great game!

People have hacked RTGI into it with very good success. I think all three can work with it very well. I always wanted to use it with infinite, but after playing it the last time I think it has a GI solution anyway. Fully RT version would be insane.

KZfaq is not very serious, it seems

I mean all ranked matches be like that in CS:go right it’s been awhile since I’ve played.

Lol

It's clearly source

I always wondered about those.. I played lots of xbla in the day but these didn't get released in my region

@@RodniDemental I wanted to buy it back then, but then my XBL-account got stolen.

The HD remakes are missing some features such as gravity-changing level sections, but they've aged beautifully and run very well on modern hardware. They also have a Vulkan renderer if you use Serious Sam Fusion :)

@@RodniDemental the serious sam collection consisting of serious sam FE HD, SE HD & 3:BFE; are on xbox one/series X|S and ps4/ps5.

@@Calinou yeah, those miss gravity tricks, but TSE HD has at least new 10 secrets. I would like also mention that HD versions also have some balance fixes.

Idk, for me all the scenes look better, except the one where lensflare is present on the 2001 version i suppose lol.

Lack of fog and also lack of any motion blur, modern antialiasing and filtering etc. make this game very hard to play on modern displays, like my ultrawide 34". Fast turning and running are extremely uncomfortable on my eyes. This is true even for the unmodified game that at least has the fog. I guess it worked better on the 15" Trinitron CRT monitors that gamers had back in 2001; the much lower FOV of smaller monitors helped a lot, and also the natural persistence of CRT phosphor which did not require motion blur.

@@opinali motion blur lol. Ultrawide with high frames yet everything looks like vaseline whenever you turn or move. Yeah, great idea

Well if anyone is susceptible then don't play it.

nah i tryed it oud and its totally fine, but the problem is more that the pathtracing isnt really good, there is a LOT of noising, ghosting and flickering, and also the aiming is very strange because there is some kind of mouse acceleration you cant turn off..... its just not fun at all. i recommend the quake 2 RTX...... but its ok, serious sam TFE was only 7 bucks. but yea, even on ultra RT its not very impressive in this game, and the gameplay also totally sucks because there are constantly spawning enemys behind you.

How to turn on flash

What is this? Doom 3?

I would assume the overly bright interiors were done for gameplay. I can't imagine anyone would make it look so hideous because of art direction.

I don't think exterior shots look great either.

I agree. I think the fully lit outdoor areas look great. Removing the lighting from enclosed areas, to the point the creator felt the need to add a flashlight to compensate, has to have a major impact on how those areas play. This is true to varying degrees in other areas, like how the new weapon textures make the weapons less distinct when in shadow, or how the mod creator (IMO) went overboard on the potion's glass and liquid. Honestly, the more I see of lighting "upgrades" (not just recent path tracing, but also new dynamic lights and color effects of other efforts as well), the more often I find the results can feel worse than the original game.

I agree. I just don't see the hype behind rtx.

@@dnegel9546 Ray Tracing is one of the next steps towards much more realistic lighting and reflections in games.... it's just not *quite* there yet in terms of performance, ect.

I agree with this assessment as well. While I applaud the effort put into the renderer by the community, I still prefer the look of the original game. It is also impressive how well the original holds up for being such an old game. The path tracing removes more than it adds (in my opinion). The original art is quite good and designed around the limitations at the time, whereas I feel the path tracer is fighting against those limitations and often not coming out on top (because the art was not designed around a path traced lighting solution). Very cool project, though, and I'm sure the people working on it are learning a lot.

@xg223 also as a normal and in my case casual gamer/consumer I just don't think it's worth having rtx on exchange for a huge hit on performance or resolution. And in many rtx enabled games both take a major hit. I mean in the video that's a rtx3090 barely hitting 60fps on a game from 2001. In exchange for better looking water. 😒.

To me, the ray-traced one just looks way better in that particular scene, but I do agree in parts where the game is pitch black, the game's art style just doesn't mesh well there.

Same. I still enjoy this as a tech showcase

... and don't it look good.

It didn't look cartoony but yeah it had a nice atmosphere.

Dude heck yeah! I was just thinking about the original a few weeks back. Those were very zen like games. The quiet lack of music (mostly), the slow paced exploration and tricky ass jumps. I would love a reason to replay them.

​@@fensoxx Totally agree! The menu music give me chills to this day.

But does it play beautiful? 😉

My vote is for OG Doom

@@DarkReturns1 Doom would definitely look terrible. It didn't have light sources like Quake did.

U trippin

To be it looks like 2002 game under the same generation..

ermm idk about that, 2011 gave use BF3, Deus Ex Human Revolution, Crysis 2, Rage....I dont think any part of this ermm remaster makes it look like it belongs amongst those. Not to harp on it though, I love this crap, I want this to be done for WAY more older titles (Like Ngreedia said they would.....)

still look like crap tho

Eh, not really. Poly count and texture detail is still untouched and thus makes the game look extremely archaic. Path tracing for a game that came out only a few years later, like Half-Life 2, or other games from around the mid 2000s, could bring them up to early 2010-levels, simply because the poly count and texture detail increase for that period wasn't as dramatic as the early 2000s. The increase in poly count and texture detail from 2001 to just 2004 is huge. This still doesn't really outgrow its 2001 look despite the increase in lighting quality and texture resolution (it does look damn good though, it's just still very noticeably 20 years old)

@@KayJay01 if you say so. but i dont see path tracing being a thing for 4-5 or more years

Mate, turn on the flash light. And watch teh video before commenting.

It depends, in principle yes (TL;DR: OFF - WALL OF TEXT: ON) but the question, imho, has two sides: the engine and the assets. Keeping in mind that not all path tracers are born equal, in general you're seeing a simulation of how light works, the thing that changes most compared to an off-line path tracer (the kind being used for movies) is the amount of rays cast per pixel and the amount of bounces these rays are allowed to calculate before giving their resulting color, this is what causes effects like noise or "limited" recursive reflection and refraction, for example if you only allow 1 bounce per ray, this ray will be able to show a reflection of an object, but if said object is also reflective, its reflection won't be seen in the reflection of the main object (recursive reflection, the best example is the infinite mirror effect, a reflection of a reflection of a reflection, etc.), if the reflected object is a perfect mirror, its reflection on the main object will appear as a black silhouette because its appearance is entirely tied to be reflective. In Quake 2 the number of recursions is limited to 8. Also, diffuse reflections require a higher number of rays per pixel to be accurately calculated, because the diffuse look originates from a supposed roughness of the material in question, rough materials scatter the light in multiple directions instead of deflecting it in a perfect and predictable manner like a mirror would do, hence there is a lower chance of a ray returning to the observer (in this case the original pixel it was shot from) and more rays are needed to resolve the reflection, hence perfect mirror-like reflections are much cheaper to calculate and that's the reason why they are so common in ray traced games. Also, accurate caustics (the light patterns formed by water, and other reflective or refractive objects) are exceedingly heavy even in off-line path tracers, so they're either missing or faked in real time engines (even some off-line path tracers heavily approximate them). The good thing is, from a theoretical standpoint, these limitations are bound to disappear over time by virtue of the hardware getting better, without having to change the engine: lets say in 5 years we have RTX 6000 series capable of doing RT at 500% the current performance, something like Quake 2 RTX might then use 10 samples (rays) per pixel instead of 2 and 16 bounces instead of 3, and this would automatically improve visual quality, especially in low light situations, because: less light>fewer rays>more noise>heavier denoiser>less definition and accuracy, whereas with more powerful hardware you can achieve the opposite effect just by changing the values of these parameters, a higher number of samples and bounces will always produce cleaner and more accurate results that require a less aggressive denoiser or no denoiser at all. The second part of the equation pertaining to old games is the quality of the assets, setting aside the poly count (how complex the models are in terms of geometry), very old games like Quake and Serious Sam had flat textures with no material properties associated with them, sometimes they included "hard coded" shading information (so called baked lighting, think of taking photographs of a lit cube and creating a 2D unfolded version of that, including shadows and whatnot) which doesn't go well with a path tracer (as path tracing is dynamic and requires "neutral" materials, whereas the original were static and the way they were lit cannot change), so these textures need to either be reworked or substituted in order for them to look right when path traced. In the so called PBR (Physically Based Rendering) workflow, materials have a series of properties that define their characteristics, the most common are: albedo ("proper" surface color), roughness (which can be defined with a so-called normal map), reflectivity, metallicity, translucency, transmission (transparency) and IOR (index of refraction, think of it as "how much light is bent going through this material", e.g. water has IOR of 1.333, glass 1.500, diamond 2.480). Even in its most basic form, a material like those we see in Serious Sam, let's say "stone", will need at the very least that albedo, roughness and reflectivity are defined in the material: it's possible to quickly obtain additional maps from the original textures with clever "tricks" (which seems the case in this game), however it's usually not ideal and it will likely not look accurate, the ideal workflow would be to recreate the materials from scratch using appropriate software (like Substance) that are capable of exporting the appropriate maps for the materials, but of course it's a big ask for a single individual doing it for free as it's very time consuming (and he possibly lacks the skills to do it in the first place). Sorry for the wall of text, some info might be less than accurate as I'm just an enthusiast, so take it with a grain of salt, but this is the gist of it, it's a complex subject.

Simple. Look how many polygons are in many of the models. The best example is the small spider enemy. You know, the one that can come in swarms of hundreds, potentially...

@@JustinQuinn623 high poly models arent actually as big of an issue as people make it out to be, LODs typically solve that problem by themselves.

This is totally path traced, as Quake II RTX and Minecraft RTX are, otherwise you wouldn't be seeing these performance figures.

It's probably the old textures fault

The lighting is way too blown out on surfaces directly hit by the sun and the reflections are set to several times the value they'd have in real life.

Sorry, final thing, just to say I don't know anything about color management or how the translate from different spaces in the games' render pipeline. This is just what I've observed as an armchair enthusiast playing games on an ultra high quality calibrated display (So I'm 99% sure its not a fault on my end).

Oh crap, my 1st comment got eaten, hope that still makes sense: TL;DR - its not a good situation, some games have rubbish blown out output like here and some have gamma issues in general, its pure luck, sometimes 100 million dollar games have what I'd call approaching a "broken output" and indie games have a "perfect output". There is no standard so sometimes devs are just using the knowledge they have and their own judgement to assess whether something looks "good" to them.

If you're calculating rays you should be doing the math in linear space.

@@blitzwing1 Nope. I can watch this at a pretty crisp, high resolution and it is VERY different. I noticed later on that they don't just have less noise, some of the areas, mostly the interiors, look *entirely* different and are pure pitch black, not mostly dark with some light bounces coming from the hole in the ceiling. I wonder if I have an older version or something but they told me there was nothing they could do about it even tho my computer can run it fine. Not as good as a 3080 I imagine but 2080Ti can get me 60 with the right settings.

for the games i have tried in vr, it is THE best. Every game ever: are you a rightie or a leftie? Sam: haha, just use any/both! I just love how croteam's ports are ambidextrous.

Yeah absolutely.

Croteam doesn't care about SS anymore, they are fine with leaving broken versions of their games up for sale.

"SS fans" :)))