Serious Sam gets a fully path-traced RT upgrade - and it's beautiful
We've been down this route before with Quake 2, of course. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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. In the process, not only are materials compatible with the path-traced renderer, they are also of a much higher resolution too.
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. 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. The path-traced version of the game eliminates these unmotivated lights as presumably, they looked rather odd when path-traced. Instead, all these sections only have light coming from things like torches or fire-pits.
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