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…..
It's such a shame that lens flares aren't in the path trace mod because to me, as silly as it sounds, those lens flares is a huge part of the original games look to me.
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
Path tracing does more for old games than new ones. I would still dearly love to see someone make a path-traced Deus Ex. That game, with neon and shiny surfaces everywhere, is basically the ideal.
@@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.
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.
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.
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.
The dark interiors look nice, but it would probably be a complete pain to actually play since the game wasn't balanced for this lighting. You'll be getting swarmed by dozens of enemies in near-complete darkness, with only a tiny flashlight and some muzzleflashes to light the way.
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..
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.
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.
@@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...
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.
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 :)
@@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.
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.
Don't get me wrong, I love raytracing, but here - in any scene that doesn't have reflections in it - the path traced version either looks very same'y or it changes the art direction in a way where the original's less harsh lighting and shadows made the game look better imo.
Going back and "path-tracing" from a technical standpoint doesn't account for the ART team's vision / motives. That's why a flashlight had to be added- and I'm sure that's not what the original art team intended.
For me this is one of those cases where the idea is cooler than the execution, which is pretty much how I also felt about Quake 2 RTX. Technically this is probably superior in every possible way to the original, but I just don't like how it messes with the original art direction. Taking levels that were designed with a certain lighting technology in mind and plopping path tracing into them can often completely change the way they feel and play and not necessarily for the better. Of course, this is all subjective, so don't kill me for this opinion.
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.
@@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. 😒.
It's interesting, but the ray tracing feels tacked on instead of meshing together and adding to the atmosphere. Some scenes look pretty good and improve the atmosphere, but others not that much and even take away from it. Maybe it will look better if it's remade from the ground up with ray tracing in mind. And WTF, no lens flares and fog? Blasphemy! 😄 These were one of the highlights of the Serious Engine and it blew my mind as a kid. They add so much to the graphics and the art of the original Serious Sam games. So yea, I think I still prefer the original graphics more. I appreciate the effort though. Maybe they will try to improve in these areas.
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.
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.
The light from the heart would look better if it increased it's intensity as it pulsated. The surface area would increase, and the light should become more intense.
Peeps are still looking for ways to discredit the value of ray tracing. The original look being better isn't a reason to not experiment with new tech and the ways it can change games. This feels like the old "graphics don't matter" folks from years past, seemingly angry at cutting edge tech and the people who enjoy the innovation involved.
Sometimes more accurate =/= better looking. For example at 5:00, the non ray traced version just looks more pleasing to the eye, despite the lighting being inaccurate.
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.
If you have to implement an entirely new mechanic to make the game visible, then you've probably in some wary majorly distorted the original intention of the artwork. Looks great in exterior shots, but interior is an epilepsy-inducing headache.
Awesome. Any word on the Nvidia studio that was supposed to be upgrading old classics with RTX? Nvidia announced it shortly after Quake II RTX, and given the dev time of that update it seems strange we haven’t heard or seen anything since…
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.
I can't believe how much effort the author(s) put in, this looks great. I imagine it is deceptively difficult to get path traced RT looking so good in an old game like this, that wasn't designed around that kind of tech
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.....)
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)
8:12 It looks like the rate of muzzle flashes is capped and doesn't match the weapon's rate of fire. Maybe it's to prevent the screen from flashing too quickly?
Digital foundry, please do a modern tech review on battlefield 3. It's a phenomenal 10 year old game that still holds up surprisingly well in terms of graphics and gameplay. This is suprising, since its approach in its art style is realism. Nice video by the way.
BF3 very much looks like a product from the late 2000s early 2010s too me with it's horrible, ever present blue ting on everything. I don't think it ages well at all.
About 80% of the time, all I see in those interior spaces in the new renderer is darkness. At least the original baked light maps, I could actually see all of the interiors without cranking up the gamma to an extent that would wash out the exteriors. I like the vivid colors of the original better too (everywhere). My guess is that all of this can be fixed with some tweaking in the engine.
I am glad the Ray-Tracing affects have been made for the classic version, because the classic version also has special gravity mechanics from Second Encounter (as well as the multiplayer game). Not to say that the HD version should not also get Ray Tracing.
Never really cared for the serious sam games but this is definitely impressive none the less. For SS fans i hope Croteam notices this and makes it an official version of the game.
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...
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.
Seeing the boulder in the gun's reflection at 16:38 is both funny and amazing. I still can't believe we're at this point in graphics, and it's still young.
Serious (ahahah) question, how's the state of color management in videogames? Are they using linear space? Is math calculated that way? Or is it that everything happens in sRGB o similar output spaces? I'm only asking because the game looks way blown out.
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.
In fact, if it wasn't for the thorough analysis, showing the micro details, I wouldn't see the difference (minimum) between this RT port of Serious Sam and Quake 2 XP, which doesn't use RT.
When he says "path tracer", does he mean that this game is fully path traced, and not some rasterization-raytracing-mixture like the usual deferred shading approaches? Something like Unreal Engine does use path traced method as well, right? Do we call it ray tracing because it is only partially ray/path-traced? I'm always confused with the ray tracing terms in real-time ray tracing.
The lack of fog and lens flares really are a bummer, but overall it looks amazing. Still I think the best retro gone ray traced yet is still Quake II and Super Mario 64 haha
@@JFinns as much as it's an amazing showcase for RT GI I don't quite like the Metro implementation, I feel it completely kills the atmosphere in a lot of scenes and the lack of real RT reflections for water, glass and specular reflections in general is quite a bummer. It's amazing to show how modern high end games could look "fully Ray Traced" but of the ones I've seen it's the least transformative RT conversion, specially cause Metro engine's Raster lighting is already so capable and impressive.
15:00 it looks beautiful. You know they say 'time flies when you're having fun'. Well that video seemed to pass in about three to four minutes. (It would be great if Croteam let this be a workable mod on Steam. A mod with all the stuff you need to play it, included in the download.)
THIS is what I imagined "next gen" gaming to be for the past 20 years, and it's crazy that this is mostly being done more effectively for older games... It's crazy how behind we were lagging and how we accepted it for this long
Nvidia needs to quit releasing half baked Ray Tracing hardware and actually come out with a fully dedicated Ray Tracing card. And give us a proper GTX card so that I can run games at 8K120, which we would have been doing quite easily by now if it weren't for the hybrid RTX nonsense.
Love the lighting, I don't know about the bloom kernel tho, I feel like the bloom needs to either be turned down in intensity slightly or needs to have a steeper, wider falloff to look correct to my eye.
It's a mixed bag for me. I think the path tracing looks amazing in dark areas, the flashlight bouncing around the scene and muzzle flash creating meaningful light is a much more interesting while still very practical way to light the scene. In outdoor scenes, the path tracing messes with the contrast and colors so that everything glows while at the same time looking more washed out than the original, yuck. Not like I can run it anyway though, still rocking the 1080ti 🥳
The bloom effect definitely needs tweaked, it detracts from the realism and clarity a bit. It's too dense. Obviously it's nothing to do with raytracing
Impressive but why are bright parts bitten out/over exposed?? Or to ask it in a different way: Why do games emulate a camera's handling of exposure instead of human eyes?
Just commenting to say, I put my 4090 up against this and it hits a locked 120FPS without DLSS. Granted, 98% usage, but still. With DLSS, that drops to ~68%. Amazing mod. It got me to do another play through of my childhood favorite.
Pardon the pun. But when you said that it is seriously cool you weren't joking either. The difference is just mind-blowing and phenomenal. The difference between the standard and the Ray Tracing makes the game more welcoming and gives it that WOW factor.
DLSS can't be legally integrated into this mod as the Serious Engine is licensed under the GPLv2 (which doesn't allow incorporating proprietary libraries). Otherwise, DLSS support would have been possible if it was licensed under a more permissive license.
Blows my mind how this ray tracing works. There's sun bouncing around the screen which isn't on the screen so essentially it's not there. And acts like it's bouncing on distances objects correctly, only these objects are not distant. It's just a flat picture. Fuuuuuu I need a cuppa tea thinking about it.
So in the case of path tracing, does that mean we're seeing "true ray tracing," the way CGI films do it (not necessarily in terms of fidelity, but in terms of technique)? Or is there still an element of this process being altered for real time?
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.
@@threecats8219 I think the original graphic should get ray tracing, anniversary while looking technically good doesn't really fit with the original game's look, feel, and atmosphere. Plus the anniversary graphics have misaligned collision due to all of the code still running off of the original game.
@@chrisfratz Maybe. This Serious Sam path-tracing shows that ray-tracing can add a lot to old games. Maybe the original Halo: CE would buff up nice with ray-tracing. However the Anniversary Edition was gorgeous in places, and it would be nice to see that ray-traced.
I don't think this looks better in all scenarios and actually looks worse or changes the art direction in a lot of the scenes. All the reflections and materials look bad, they don't look like real world materials, the reflections are way too sharp and glaring like everything is a mirror. Lighting on displacements does not smooth over polygon transitions so you see the triangles on hills. Everything feels over-exposed for a higher contrast that just looks bad. Water while technically better looks worse in the world with those super sharp reflections. There are no lens flares either in this version, and weapon reflections do not look realistic. You need to be more objective and stop fanboying for new tech. Better graphics are always welcomed but they have to be done right and respect the art direction and intent of the original. This is why Hao CE Remastered was taken so poorly as it was technically better looking but completely changed the art direction and actually looked worse in many respects. This sort of thing should not be encouraged.
You guys need to look at Tear Down, its a voxel based game with a fully destructive environment, and it includes software based ray tracing. its gorgeous, and even runs nicely on my 1650 mobile with a 9300h 4 core/8t i5
Would love for someone to do the same thing to Hexen 2. That was one of the first games I've ever played on my first PC, I still have fond memories of it.
While this is interesting in a technical sense and I applaud the effort put into this mod, it doesn't really make this particular game very pleasing to look at still imo. I wonder which other 10+ or so year old games might be good candidates for ray tracing updates, with regards to their art styles.
8:00 ANOTHER thing that the initial Doom software renderer from way back in 1993 had and was REMOVED from modern "source ports" of the game (except Prboom which mostly remained intact original code)
