Serious Engine texture file

File Format
Name	Serious Engine texture file
Ontology	Electronic File Formats Graphics Serious Engine texture file
Extension(s)	.tex, .tbn
Released	2001

Serious Engine texture file is a graphics format associated with Serious Engine, a video game engine developed by Croteam for its Serious Sam series.

The format was also used by some third-party games that licensed the engine, such as:

• Alpha Black Zero: Intrepid Protocol, by Khaeon
• Carnivores: Cityscape, by Sunstorm Interactive
• Nitro Family, by Delphieye Entertainment

A version of Serious Engine was released as open source in 2016.

Identification

Files start with ASCII "TVER". At offset 4 is a version number that's either bytes 03 00 00 00, or more commonly 04 00 00 00.

ASCII "TDAT" usually appears at offset 8.

Software

• Serious Engine, at GitHub (e.g., Texture.cpp)
• wuimg

Sample files

• dexvert samples — image/croteamTextureFile
• Nitro Family → NitroFamily.rar → .../{*.tex, *.tbn}
• [1] → Textures, etc. (some v3 files in Thumbnails dir)

Links

• Serious Sam Wiki: Serious Engine
• Serious Sam’s Serious Engine source code released