
Serious Sam’s Serious Engine source code released - doener
http://www.croteam.com/serious-sam-source-code-released/
======
nerdy
Also from a week ago:

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

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

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pori
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.

~~~
flohofwoe
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
> 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.

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jpgvm
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
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.

~~~
Kristine1975
This question was asked in 2014 on the Unreal Engine forums. Tim Sweeney
wrote: [https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?1515-Older-
En...](https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?1515-Older-Engine-
sources&p=8748&viewfull=1#post8748)

 _> 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._

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

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

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

~~~
AimHere
Indie game developer Brendan Chung
([http://www.blendogames.com](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).

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

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

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

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

~~~
Kristine1975
_> Doom is not out yet, and after Quake 4 I am sceptical._

They don't have the same developers though: Quake 4 was developed by Raven
Software, Doom 4 is being developed by id software.

