Serious Engine 4

Serious Engine 4 is a natural development of Croteam’s previous technology, Serious Engine 3.5 , used in Serious Sam 3: BFE .

The first mention of the engine appeared in June 2014, simultaneously with the announcement of Croteam of its new game - the three-dimensional philosophical puzzle in the first person of The Talos Principle . In a press release it was announced that a new version of the engine allowed developers to add scanned real objects to the game using proprietary photogrammetry technology. The announcement also said that in addition to personal computers , The Talos Principle will be released exclusively on the PlayStation 4 console. ^[one]

In July 2014, Croteam CTO Alain Ladavac, in response to fan questions on the Steam forum , said that Serious Engine 4 had a huge amount of improvement over the previous iteration of the engine. Ladavac noted that the developers have made numerous improvements to improve engine performance, and in particular, dramatic changes in terms of rendering more objects on the screen. Like Serious Engine 3.5 , the new engine natively supports Direct3D 11 . Alain also emphasized that most of the changes in the engine concern technical aspects that are not noticeable at first glance, but in general it is much faster than its predecessor and has better rendering. According to him, Serious Engine 4 also uses accelerated multi-core rendering by default. ^[2]

In August 2014, Alain Ladavac and studio programmer Dean Sekulic made a small comment on the GamingBolt website. The developers said that The Talos Principle will work on the PlayStation 4 in 1080p with 60 FPS . At the same time, the developers noted that a version for the Xbox One has not yet been planned, since Croteam has not yet received special development kits for this console. ^[3]

On November 4, 2014, an interview appeared on the VentureBeat website in which the developers said that one of the employees of Croteam, while porting Serious Sam 3: BFE on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, created a test bot for the game, which was subsequently significantly improved and added to The Talos Principle for testing the game to identify logical errors in puzzles. In total, this bot played about 15,000 man-hours, while due to the program nature and speed of the bot, the passage of the entire game took him from 30 to 60 minutes. This technology has allowed developers to significantly save time on testing the game. ^[four]

On November 6, 2014, developers released a free trial version of The Talos Principle called the Public Test, powered by Serious Engine 4, to identify performance issues and game launches. She demonstrated new engine features and basic gameplay. Due to the numerous complaints of players about headaches and nausea during the game, the developers added a special menu to The Talos Principle with settings to reduce the likelihood of motion sickness. ^[5]

The Talos Principle was released on December 11, 2014 . Critics have noted good engine optimization and a beautiful picture, as well as a rich number of additional graphics and performance settings. Soon, Serious Editor 4 was released, allowing you to create custom maps and modifications .

On May 28, 2015, The Talos Principle was released on Android devices . To run the game requires productive devices such as Nvidia Shield . ^[6] On October 13, 2015, the game was released on the PlayStation 4 console. ^[7]

In January 2016, Alain Ladavac on Steam forums said that the studio’s next game, Serious Sam 4 , would use a much better version of Serious Engine 4. ^[8]

On February 16, 2016, the open specification of the new Vulkan graphics API was released , and support for The Talos Principle was added that same day. On October 17, 2016, Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope was released, presenting the Serious Engine version 4.5.

Being an evolution of the previous version, the new iteration of the Croteam game engine takes into account the experience of its predecessors and contains mainly technical improvements and changes “under the hood”, hardly noticeable at first glance compared to Serious Engine 3.5. The engine has become as cross-platform as possible, having acquired support for seventh and eighth generation game consoles , modern computers with multi-core processors, and mobile devices running Android and iOS. ^[9]

Most of the changes concern the optimization of processes and the processing of more objects with increased detail of models. Improved graphic rendering and visual effects. Compared to Serious Sam 3, the performance of multi-core rendering has been significantly accelerated. One of the most important features of the new version of the engine is pre-caching , which allows you to speed up the loading of levels many times, reducing the time it takes to move from one card to another to several seconds.

Due to the fact that for the first time Serious Engine 4 was used in a spatial puzzle, the developers once again improved the physical model for more realistic interaction with other objects in locations.

The engine initially supports Direct3D 11 , and since February 2016 received experimental support from Vulkan .

Since version 4.5, the engine fully supports the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift virtual reality helmets, as well as nVidia VR SLI technology.

• 2014 - The Talos Principle (Serious Engine 4)
• 2016 - Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope (Serious Engine 4.5)
• 2017 - Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter (Serious Engine 4.5)
• 2017 - Serious Sam VR: The Second Encounter (Serious Engine 4.5)

In December 2016, Serious Sam VR was announced : The First Encounter , a special version of Serious Sam HD for virtual reality devices ported to the new version of the Croteam engine called Serious Engine 2017. Technical Director Alain Ladavac on Steam forums said that the company accepted the decision to abandon the usual sequential numbering of versions of its engine in favor of annual names. According to the developer, this step was due to the fact that the numbering of the games themselves and their engines no longer coincided and in general led to confusion. The new version of the engine is based on the technologies used in The Talos Principle and Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope , as well as several new features from Serious Sam 4 , while The Last Hope has also been updated to a more modern version. Among the distinguishing features of Serious Engine 2017, Ladavac listed support for the Vulkan API (Croteam finally abandoned DirectX 9 support), multi-threaded rendering, a new “lightweight save” system, a custom sound API, a new proprietary three-dimensional sound system, similar to the approach to Serious Engine 1 , an improved physics engine, stream textures and an improved game modification system that allows you to create new types of weapons and manage internal scripts. ^[10]

• Serious Engine - the first version of the game engine Croteam, which was used in the shooter of the same name , as well as several third-party projects.
• Serious Engine 2 - the second version of the engine with significant innovations, was used only in the game Serious Sam 2 .
• Serious Engine 3 - the third version of the game engine; was introduced in the games Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter , Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter and Serious Sam 3: BFE .
• The Talos Principle is the first game using Serious Engine 4.
• Serious Sam (Game Series)

• Croteam - the official website of the company.
• Croteam Technology - a page with a description of the Serious Engine engines on the official website of the developer ..