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Croteam is still working on Serious Sam 4, all Serious Sam games will support Vulkan instead of DX9

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Croteam has informed us about a number of updates and improvements that will be coming to all Serious Sam games. In addition, the team re-confirmed that it is working on the fourth major part of the Serious Sam series.

According to Croteam, Serious Sam 4 is still happening and its core team remains hard at work on this, while two much smaller VR teams will continue to grow and work on more VR projects.

Now, regarding the improvements for all Serious Sam games that have been released so far, Croteam will add support for the Vulkan API and will remove DX9. In addition, these new Vulkan builds will come with better multithreaded rendering, will support split-screen, improved physics engine with better handling of character movement and texture streaming.

These enhancements will be part of the Serious Sam Fusion 2017 update that will be rolled out gradually, starting with The First Encounter, and then The Second Encounter and Serious Sam 3: BFE.

Furthermore, the Serious Sam Fusion 2017 update will enable multiplayer between “flat” and VR versions of games. This basically means that if you have Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter and one of your friends has The First Encounter HD, you can connect and play coop or versus with one another.

Here are the key features of the Serious Sam Fusion 2017 update:

  • All games now support SteamOS/Linux/OSX!
  • Split-screen!
  • 64bit executables
  • Support for Vulkan API (DirectX9 is now being removed; so long and thanks for all the bugs)
  • Multithreaded rendering
  • The new “lightweight” savegame system; savegames are now saved much faster, are very small and stored in the Steam cloud, and savegames still work even if a level is changed in a patch, or if a mod is updated
  • Full support for all controllers including Steam controller, PS4 gamepads, all older DInput joysticks
  • Proper multimonitor support
  • Borderless window support
  • Customizable sound outputs
  • Proper 3D audio using a proprietary sound-mixer (the same approach as used in the old Classics games)
  • Improved physics engine with better handling of character movement
  • Texture streaming in all games
  • Much better modding support with customizable weapons and items, improved scripting (including better support for scripting networked games)
  • Lots of other improvements, optimizations and fixes