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Serious Sam: The Random Encounter

From PCGamingWiki, the wiki about fixing PC games
Serious Sam: The Random Encounter
Serious Sam: The Random Encounter cover
Developers
Vlambeer
Publishers
Devolver Digital
Engines
GameMaker
Release dates
Windows October 24, 2011
Reception
Metacritic 64
Taxonomy
Monetization One-time game purchase
Microtransactions None
Modes Singleplayer
Pacing Turn-based
Perspectives Top-down view
Genres RPG
Art styles Cartoon
Series Serious Sam
Serious Sam: The Random Encounter on HowLongToBeat
Serious Sam: The Random Encounter on IGDB
Serious Sam: The Random Encounter on MobyGames
Serious Sam: The Random Encounter on Wikipedia
Serious Sam: The First Encounter 2001
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter 2002
Serious Sam 2 2005
Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter 2009
Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter 2010
Serious Sam Double D 2011
Serious Sam: The Random Encounter 2011
Serious Sam 3: BFE 2011
Serious Sam: The Greek Encounter 2012
Serious Sam: Kamikaze Attack! 2012
Serious Sam VR (series)
Serious Sam Fusion 2017 EA
Serious Sam's Bogus Detour 2017
Serious Sam Classics: Revolution 2019
Serious Sam 4 2020
Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem 2022
Serious Sam: Tormental 2022

Serious Sam: The Random Encounter is a singleplayer top-down view RPG game in the Serious Sam series.

General information

Seriously! Forums
Steam Community Discussions

Availability

Source DRM Notes Keys OS
Humble Store
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Windows
Steam
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Windows
Amazon.com (unavailable)
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Windows
GamersGate (unavailable)
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Windows
Green Man Gaming (unavailable)
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Windows

Game data

Configuration file(s) location

System Location
Windows <path-to-game>\config.txt[Note 1]
Steam Play (Linux) <Steam-folder>/steamapps/compatdata/201480/pfx/[Note 2]

Save game data location

System Location
Windows <path-to-game>\sam*.sav[Note 1]
<path-to-game>\sam*i.sav[Note 1]
Steam Play (Linux) <Steam-folder>/steamapps/compatdata/201480/pfx/[Note 2]
Each save is made up of two files numbered based on the save slot (1-3).

Save game cloud syncing

System Native Notes
Steam Cloud

Video

In-game options menu.
In-game options menu.

Graphics feature State WSGF Notes
Widescreen resolution
Pillar-boxed in fullscreen at aspect ratios wider than 16:10. Resolution upscaled from 640x400.
Multi-monitor
Ultra-widescreen
4K Ultra HD
Field of view (FOV)
Windowed
Only available window size is 640x400.
Borderless fullscreen windowed
See the glossary page for potential workarounds.
Anisotropic filtering (AF)
See the glossary page for potential workarounds.
Anti-aliasing (AA)
See the glossary page for potential workarounds.
Vertical sync (Vsync)
See the glossary page for potential workarounds.
60 FPS and 120+ FPS
The game is capped at 30 FPS.

Input

Keyboard and mouse State Notes
Remapping
See the glossary page for potential workarounds.
Mouse acceleration
Mouse sensitivity
Mouse input in menus
Mouse Y-axis inversion
Controller
Controller support
Use an external applications like Joy2Key.
Controller types

Audio

Audio feature State Notes
Separate volume controls
Surround sound
Subtitles
All speech is text-based.
Closed captions
Mute on focus lost
Royalty free audio

Localizations

Language UI Audio Sub Notes
English

Issues unresolved

"Failed to Load Data. File seems to be corrupted."

There is no known fix for this issue, some players got the issue fixed on Super Crate Box by deleting the Save Files.[1][2]

Issues fixed

Game crashes when many sound effects are played (Windows 8)

Many users report sudden game crash when many sound effects are played at once. The developers have not commented on this issue, so an official fix is not expected. However, an unofficial fix was made.

Use an unofficial patch[3]
  1. Make a backup of <path-to-game>\sstre.exe in case of failure.
  2. Download the fix from here and extract sstrcf.ips to <path-to-game>.
  3. Download Lunar IPS from here and extract Lunar IPS.exe to <path-to-game>.
  4. Run <path-to-game>\Lunar IPS.exe and press Apply IPS Patch.
  5. Select <path-to-game>\sstrcf.ips and press Open.
  6. A window will pop-out and it will ask for the file to patch; go to the bottom right and change Most Common ROM Files to All files (*.*).
  7. Select <path-to-game>\sstre.exe.
  8. After the patching is finished, the application should end itself. Lunar IPS.exe and sstrcf.ips can be safely removed from <path-to-game>.

Notes

Old save files are not compatible with this patch. A debugging tool will pop-out non-stop.

"Failed to initialize Direct Music Audio" error dialog

A common error dialog.
A common error dialog.
This is only known to happen with ASUS Xonar series audio cards.

Many ASUS audio card drivers suffer from an issue causing DirectSound[citation needed] whilst having GX mode; ASUS' version of Creative Alchemy enabled not be available to initialize due to driver issues causing a crash to the desktop.

Disable GX mode in Xonar Audio Center[4]
  1. Open the Control Panel.
  2. Select Xonar Control Center.
  3. Near the bottom right is a button with GX on it, press it and GX mode should now be disabled.

Notes

This solution disables the ASUS version of Creative Alchemy (An EAX Emulator).
Try updating your audio card driver[citation needed]

Game won't launch

This issue is caused by KERNELBASE.dll when a third party application is interfering with the file.[5]

Temporarily disable any process that might interfere with KERNELBASE.dll and add the file to antivirus exception lists.[citation needed]

Other information

API

Executable 32-bit 64-bit Notes
Windows

Extended configuration file information

Line Restrictions Effect
1 0 to 1 Toggle fullscreen on or off. 1 for on, 0 for off.
2 0 to 1 Toogle ingame music on or off. 1 for on, 0 for off.

System requirements

Windows
Minimum Recommended
Operating system (OS) XP
Processor (CPU) 2.0 GHz
System memory (RAM) 1 GB
Hard disk drive (HDD) 100 MB
Video card (GPU) 256 MB of VRAM
DirectX 8 compatible


Notes

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 When running this game without elevated privileges (Run as administrator option), write operations against a location below %PROGRAMFILES%, %PROGRAMDATA%, or %WINDIR% might be redirected to %LOCALAPPDATA%\VirtualStore on Windows Vista and later (more details).
  2. 2.0 2.1 File/folder structure within this directory reflects the path(s) listed for Windows and/or Steam game data (use Wine regedit to access Windows registry paths). Games with Steam Cloud support may store data in ~/.steam/steam/userdata/<user-id>/201480/ in addition to or instead of this directory. The app ID (201480) may differ in some cases. Treat backslashes as forward slashes. See the glossary page for details.

References

  1. Steam Community - last accessed on 28 May 2023
  2. Steam Community - last accessed on 28 May 2023
  3. Steam Community - last accessed on 28 May 2023
  4. Steam Community - last accessed on 28 May 2023
  5. [1]