So there is a great deal of hype around #Croteam and the release of Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter. While now available on Steam for Windows PC, it appears a Linux build will be coming. Well, at least when #LinuxVR is available.
According to the Steam Discussions:
This is the latest iteration of the engine, and has all the bells and whistles from everything in between. Including Talos and The Last Hope, and a lot of things that are as side-effects of Serious Sam 4 development.
The engine tech is completely sharing between TLH and TFE, so any feature one of them gets, the other will too.
It has support for Vulkan (which is not yet too great for VR, but will be soon), it will allow us to ship this game (as well as TLH) on Linux, as soon as VR on Linux is publicly available. Here’s a short list:
- Support for Vulkan API (DirectX9 is being withdrawn)
- Multithreaded rendering by default
- The new “light-weight” 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
- 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
- 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
This is a rather big deal, Linux VR and Serious Sam. While not only that, but both of the Serious Sam VR games plus The Talos Principle VR will have native support. At least when the VR system is available for Linux. Hence still a grey area.
So it’s also interesting to note that Vulkan support is not that great on VR. While sometime this year we will see some sort of native Linux release. But that API performance will have to be stepped up a notch or two in order to make gameplay prominent.
Consequently, we realize that this can be a huge discussion. Pulling facts from every corner of the internet, trying to define the truth. Let along the current state of Linux VR. The probability of seeing vast improvements. Yet the main concern still comes down to system performance.
Again, a lot of what is to come for Linux VR revolves around the adoption and performance of the Vulkan API.
How do you see the Serious Sam VR release unfolding? Will you be getting into VR gaming?
What are you thoughts on Linux VR?
