This engine is (or was) awesome. I remember playing Serious Sam back in the day, in my old computer, with maximum quality settings and the game ran smoothly, with amazing details and the characteristic bright colours and open landscapes of these series. I was amazed by this. Back in the day I found it superior to Source and ages ahead from any DirectX game.
Croteam makes awesome engines and awesome tools. Back in the Half Life/Quake 3 era when this game was originally released, it had by far the best tools for level editing, modeling, and scripting. Glad to see The engine reborn as an open source project!
Apparently, this trend continues. For Talos Principle, they programmed bots to solve the puzzles. These boys could learn how to solve puzzles by watching humans do it. They would then run the bots as an automated test suite to test if any of the puzzles were made impossible as a result of engine or level changes, and if there were any places where a bot could get stuck.
Winelib is a development toolkit which allows you to compile your Windows applications on Unix.
Most of Winelib code consists of the Win32 API implementation. Fortunately this part is 100 percent shared with Wine. The remainder consists of Windows compatible headers and tools like the resource compiler (and even these are used when compiling Wine).
Thanks to the above, Winelib supports most C and C++ source code, resource and message files, and can generate graphical or console applications as well as dynamic libraries.
There is no need to do that since 15 years ago Icculus already made native Linux version for games on that engine. It's just question of time when he'll be allowed to release source code and manage to merge it into released codebase.
Also Winelib isn't something that magically make Windows-only software compile on Linux. It's just helper library that may make it easier, but it's usually wrong way to do things since it's not going to be run better than normal Wine.
There most likely some legal issues (like he probably had to sign some sort of contract that protected the source or some shit), but luckily both parties involved seem to want to open the Linux port. So it should really be an issue. And I think he mostly ends up using SDL rather than middleware that would cause issues.
It's slightly updated version of engine their early games used in 2001 so it's older than Doom's 3 engine id Tech 4. Should be still interesting for fans and study how old games work though.
It's actually a good contrast to the biases of id tech 4 - bright, huge scale outdoor landscapes and arenas with hundreds of AI opponents vs. dark interiors with mood lighting and smaller engagements. It's an early example of heavy usage of "modular" model instances to add detail instead of relying on brush geometry to do everything. There are plenty of nifty features like split screen.
From an overall technology standpoint, both engines should prove worthy of study given the radically different focus.
Oh boy, I wish I could get Serious Sam on my Android phone. I've got a PSX emulator and that keeps me pretty happy, but this would complete everything!
