Yeah, no joke, Serious Engine 3 IS THE REAL DEAL. Its not an 'official' announcement by Croteam, but the beta testers have been given a glimpse of what the engine can do in all of its real time prettines. The movie was basically for the beta testers only so we have been advised to NOT redistribute the link or the file for the movie, nor take any screen shots, but Alen said that we may discuss the contents of what we have seen freely.
What we had in the video was basically a technology demo like SS: FE and SS: SE had showing us some of the graphical goodness like illuminated color bleeding, sub surface scattering, normal mapping, and some very very realistic looking enviornments. Its amazing that teapot model that was used in the very first Serious Sam can look so much better with shaded textures and lighting that one would swear it was almost real with all the nuances and imperfections emulated in render! And this was also only a fairly short video that shows only some of the features of the new engine. The only other engines I've seen that I've seen that will even come close to the quality in the video so far are Unreal 3 Engine, and the new Far Cry. We also get to look forward to real time water surface interaction, surface illumination, GPU radiosity, enviornment effects (effect in the video was a very realistic looking rain splash on the interactive water surface, every rain drop making its own ripple), subsurface scattering (like new Far Cry), dynamic lights (with what looks like realtime soft shadows, makes me happy), water surface physics, the teapots I mentioned earlier with a variety of awesome looking materials that were applied, and the best reflection refraction effects are the better than in HL2.
I'll figure since this is the absolute first we've heard or seen of it that it is a very preliminary work and isnt quite complete enough that they feel warrants a press confrence. I think they want to tweak it up a bit and show off some of their other effects when the time comes for a major public announcement.
Im posting in OFF TOPIC for now because of the lack of redistributable content to provide to everyone and that this is NOT a major public official announcement. Shrinker has also handled the topic in a more appropriate category. I dont think Alen will be upset as he said we dont have to keep it a secret that we've seen the video, but the contents of the video were for our eyes only.
