Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass [Official Site] from Croteam has me rather excited, it also has more information out and some fresh screenshots. Click the shots to make them bigger.
Firstly, they're saying it's going to be a much bigger game with "huge environments populated with optional objectives, secrets and deadly ambushes". To be clear though, they do say it's not an open-world game, but the same linear experience as before. There will be plenty to shoot of course, with practically everything trying to kill you.
They've also now confirmed that the motorbike shown in the teaser trailer is actually something you will use. Not just that, they amusingly said you will be able to drive "a combine or even a bulletproof popemobile and drive your way through unfortunate enemy pedestrians".
On top of that, companions will be joining you directly in the game, not just cut-scenes. That sounds good, should be interesting for the co-op side of it!
Hopefully a proper trailer will be released soon!
Quoting: AryvandaarYeah, and camera work in the Devolver conference was super wierd. It almost looked like the audience wasn't there. Super freaky.
They weren't. All the audience shots were either staged or taken from stock footage. Some of them were clearly in different rooms. Not sure why they prioritize that over, you know, talking about the games.
They seriously could have given three links to YouTube, and you'd know more about what they're offering.
Quoting: KelsQuoting: AryvandaarYeah, and camera work in the Devolver conference was super wierd. It almost looked like the audience wasn't there. Super freaky.
They weren't. All the audience shots were either staged or taken from stock footage. Some of them were clearly in different rooms. Not sure why they prioritize that over, you know, talking about the games.
They seriously could have given three links to YouTube, and you'd know more about what they're offering.
I think they did awesome, it's not as dry or "look at this shiny thing" as all of the other conferences. They are entertaining, interesting and mock things. It's great and I respect them greatly for it.
Very exciting.
Quoting: EikeQuoting: GuestThere were too much desert levels in TFE and BFE. I would say that it was the major flaw of level design in these games - the levels became boring too fast due to similar design.
While I'm fine with desert levels, in my memory BFE (the only Serious Sam game I've ever played) consisted solely of desert levels.
The first game , Serious Sam first encounter was all set in Egypt. So sand and pyramids all the way. There was some variety with gardens , pools etc , but sand it was.
The second game , Serious Sam second encounter was set in parts of South America but there was variety with temples, caves and jungles.
Serious Sam II had a variety of environments.
Quoting: GuestSure, but not just CPU bound due to whatever reason. Say, if the game is bound by AI or complex sound calculation Vulkan isn't going to help either. But it helps when you need to feed different types of resources to the GPU (from my understanding after watching the Feral talk), like constructed pipelines, textures, shaders (or is it the same as pipelines? Not sure) and vertex data. I'm not an expert and I have no good knowledge of what exact part of a renderer could load the CPU apart from sending data to the GPU.Quoting: rkfgThat Russian word on the crane means "sunflower seeds" it's so weird. The graphics look even more detailed than before, truly badass. I guess this is exactly the type of games that would benefit greatly from using Vulkan, they could fill the screen with hundreds of enemies using all the cores efficiently.
Just to keep expectations in place: using Vulkan gives a lot, but doesn't mean that hundreds of enemies can be on-screen at once. Especially if they're animated and need some form of interaction with. Such scenarios can quickly become GPU bound, or data transfer bound. Vulkan will not help in those cases.
There's more to it than that, but broadly speaking Vulkan only helps if CPU bound.
So yeah, maybe it's not that beneficial for many identical objects (instancing helps with that) BUT it could help with streaming a lot of data for big, seamless and diverse environments. And SS4 promises exactly that.
I found a short but sweet presentation from NVIDIA that shows how one can benefit from Vulkan's multithreading support. Basically, it's updating buffers and shader compilation in parallel. For example, you can update animation data (which is done fully on GPU in modern engines I believe) for multiple objects at the same time instead of doing that sequentially.
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