Before we start, we want to thank everyone for their continued patience while we work on Proving Grounds. All of us are dedicated to making a game that we are proud of and makes the community not just happy, but feel like they are in the right hands. While we can’t give a firm release date for PG just yet, we’re cooking up something special for all of you that we think you will all enjoy. In the meantime, we’ve made some massive strides in development during this year and we want to show them off as we wind down for the holidays. Be on the lookout for an End of the Year video on Friday that shows off a little more of what we've been doing.

Before we get to the meat of this year-end wrap-up, we want to take a moment to honor one of our community members for making our lives easier. As you all know, we are building DNFRP alongside all of you and being as transparent as possible about everything we do, including posting our source code to previous builds for community members to tinker with. QuackCola, one such member, took a look at our code and our toolsets and identified a couple key points that helped us a lot. They helped us modernize some of the codebase and helped us to properly setup OS identification in the logs to make life easier for us with end-user support. We also want to thank Neophus who has helped us with testing out and ironing out some of the kinks in the editor with valuable feedback on the editor itself and some of the AI Changes. We are super grateful to both of them and hope to see more involvement and collaboration from the community like this in the future.

One of the biggest developments that has happened over the past year has been the complete refactoring of the various art and sound packages that make up DNFRP. The reason why we did this is simple: it was becoming a total mess. Due to choices made in previous years, we started 2024 with our assets mixed in with 3DR assets with no reliable way of telling which is which, spread across multiple package files. Eventually, LiquidOtacon and Oktober (our Project Director and Lead Level Designer, respectively) had enough of working with this mess, and set off on combing through the packages, combining them where needed, to make our lives easier.

Outside of the purely organizational benefits of this (which should not be taken lightly!), it allowed us to do a complete art and sound review of the game. We identified assets that either had mistakes, were duplicates of existing work, buggy or not up to our quality levels, or wholly unimplemented on 3DR's side. We spent the past year creating new assets with these in mind, as well as tweaking existing ones to bring them up to our new standard. In terms of raw numbers: we have somewhere around 330+ brand new assets authored by the MFP team and 44 assets recovered from the 3DR asset CD’s including as well as tons of obsoleted classes and meshes.

This refactoring was happening while the art and sound pipelines were humming along, so any assets we decided needed to go were quickly replaced with higher quality work that reflects our vision and standards much better. This has sped up internal development and revisions significantly and led to us adopting better development practices and guidelines to make sure we only ever have to do this once. This does mean that any custom maps will need to be modified to point to the new asset names, but we’ve been working with known mappers in our community to make sure that when PG drops, their maps will be getting an update to fix asset pathing.

Outside of asset refactoring, the biggest area of development has been in interactions. Following on from our work on Actor Classes that began at the end of last year alongside the refactoring, we’ve been hard at work making Duke’s world that much more interactive. We’ve added a ton of new objects that Duke can interact with via his hands. Basically, if you can imagine a way to hold it or use it, Duke can interact with it. As just one example, this means objects like bottles of alcohol now can give small ego boosts with zero extra work for us to set up. All we do is place the Actor, and the game logic takes care of the rest.

But that’s not all, we’ve also implemented deeper environmental interactions, such as gas cans catching on fire when shot, rather than just breaking. We won’t go into every single new interaction because there are hundreds. Obviously, there are limits to the level of interactions, as we’re not a full 0451 game and don’t want to be. We are striving to honor 3DR’s desires to make futuristic Las Vegas and its surroundings an incredibly reactive world that responds to your curiosity as much as it responds to your destructive impulses.

Speaking of destruction, w4s9 has been hard at work on making the dismemberment ever more visceral and satisfying. Hours have been lost re-creating scenes from RoboCop during testing, making the most of the Snatched NPC's ability to keep fighting without their limbs. We’ve also added more subtle interactions, such as making sure all decorations have an appropriate sound effect for when Duke’s boots are moving over them. We’ve touched up the AI as well, so that they can now actually hear and can even be alerted by Duke’s interaction with environmental props, shooting, etc

One area where we’ve reduced interaction is in Duke’s VO. We felt that past releases that Duke was a bit of a chatterbox, and have increased the timer between one-liners in order to keep that satisfying impact a good one-liner can have at the end of an intense firefight.

There have also been some various tweaks to existing interactions, such as Duke screaming when falling, giving the Motorcycle a health value and being able to destroy it based on the level designer's choice, making the ezVend able to ‘remember’ if Duke mistreated them with an ‘angry’ state with brand new VO, and enabled auto-use of some Quest items so that players don’t have to fiddle with the inventory if they don’t want to.

While poking around in the code one day, we realized there were some unfinished graphical features that were commented out: one for simulating underwater caustics (the simulation of light and movement refracted through the water) and one for simulating the Glide color space. The new underwater caustics makes Duke’s underwater adventures take on a new physicality with the subtle sway of the aquatic realm, though this is an optional feature.

The second feature requires a quick bit of history: 3DFX’s Voodoo cards had a unique way of rendering color via a driver-level filter that sampled pixels and blended against a certain color threshold, which helped to eliminate dithering artifacts from the limitations of 16-bit color. This led to a very unique colorspace for Voodoo cards and Glide API games compared to the competition at the time, Colors on Voodoo cards were often more washed out and saturated due to this blending process.

When DNF was in development, it was being developed targeting this colorspace for all art assets. When it became clear that 3DFX was no longer going to be commercially viable, 3DR re-targeted the game for Direct3D8 and began dropping all Glide support. We believe this function was used in an interim period to help port over Glide-driven art and we’ve re-enabled it for users who have a nostalgia for the noisy, dithered look of Glide. While we won’t be designing our new art for it, we think it’s a fun way to see the game and what could have been.

Along with these two new ways of experiencing Duke’s journey, there has been a ton of other progress on VFX and visual related things. Some highlights include fixing facial animations, redoing the model for the Atomic Health pickup, implementing spent shell casings for shotgun shells, reworking world models for the Freezer and Flamethrower, adjusting the muzzle flash effect for all weapons, implementing a model for the Steroids pickup (which is used for the 'Classic' Steroids, an unique version that behaves closer to the DN3D's own Steroids, and is usable by level designers who are making more DN3D-oriented maps), and much more.

We’ve fixed all UI overlays to make sure they fully fill a 16x9 display without any gaps or visual errors, as well as adding a few new ones to the SOS UI for flavor, including a new ‘patch’ notification for when the player gets a new SOS ability. We’ve also added new UI elements for DOT timers so that players have a visual indication of how long a certain status effect will be active. We’ve also continued to make our auto HUD scaling solution smarter for resolutions above 1080p in order to make scaling for the HUD something that works out of the box. We’ve also done significant work to the in-game multiplayer scoreboard UI, as well as the player select menus, and have implemented further Debug UI elements to help us and any custom map or mod developers with testing.

One feature we’re particularly excited about with Proving Grounds is the long-awaited ability to play DNFRP in Borderless Fullscreen mode! We’ve had this feature on our wishlist for a while now and we know the community has been requesting it. We’re super happy to announce that, thanks to the hard work of w4s9, now you can play DNF, alt-tab over to the 200 tabs you have open, tab back in and the game plays without missing a beat. No more need to play in a bordered window! We’re super happy to launch this feature, and we’re excited to make playing DNF easier for everyone.

The editor has seen some more love over the past year. While we were quite happy with the state of the editor at the end of the last year, we’ve implemented many unused icons and ported some others from 2011 for ActorClasses such as FocalPoints, CreatureFactories, ParticleSystem and Obsolete, fixed SMK VideoTexture playback so that they play back in realtime in the editor, and fixed some particularly nasty bugs that were causing some menus to completely disappear.

Last year we mentioned some pretty huge developments in terms of music and sound design, with the recruiting of Giovanni Mengarelli and BouncyTEM, respectively. Both have put in some serious work over the past year. Giovanni has completed the entire soundtrack not just for the first chapter of the campaign, but also every multiplayer map we will be shipping the update with. At this point, we have over an hour and a half of fully original music, across a variety of genres. We’ve been uploading tracks from the OST to our YouTube channel and socials for the past month, we highly recommend giving them a listen to appreciate the tone and style we’re going for, musically. We could not be happier with Giovanni’s work and we hope you are just as thrilled.

Along with all the new tunes, Bouncy has been hard at work making sure every placeholder sound effect has been replaced with our own work and also making sure that everything in the world of Duke has its own juicy sound effects. The build currently has over 280 new sound effects, not including new voice lines. Everything from the sound of paper being shredded to the sound of a building collapsing from missile strikes, our new soundscape makes such a dramatic difference to the world that past releases feel empty otherwise.

Adding on to this, our new VO director Bobby Taormina has gone through our existing VO and we’ve re-recorded a bunch of existing lines to meet our quality standards and implemented new ones in order to make the denizens of Sin City that much more real. We’ve also added our first multiplayer announcer voiced by our social media manager ETPC, with more planned to come in future updates. Speaking of more choices, we’ve re-enabled the leak Duke VO as an option for people who want that classic Jon St. John voice. We’ll have more news on VO in the coming months, so stay tuned for that!

All of the original multiplayer maps have seen some sort of visual touch up and all of them have received new music by Giovanni. Currently we have two new multiplayer maps reaching final stages along with three still in the work in progress stage. We hope to see at least three of these maps make the release with the others possibly at a later date.

Our programmers have found a way to resolve the limitations with the MDS files that make up the different multiplayer choices people have, which has allowed us to restore some original multiplayer models along with adding additional ones as well. We have women characters in multiplayer now, and an early version of an accessory system that allows you to attach objects like glasses or hats to your model.

We have also begun to work on the alternative game modes as well and trying to get them into a functional state. While this is not something we are aiming to have completely finished by Proving Grounds, we hope to release these, along with more finalized maps, at a later date.

As you can see from this update, we’ve been working non-stop on DNFRP, and we are confident that by the time we put our keyboards down, Proving Grounds will showcase everything we’ve learned over the past two years and give us a solid base to rapidly build content off of. Again, we don’t want to give you a release date that we don’t think we can 100% honor and disappoint all of you. But trust us, it will be worth the wait.

If you aren’t already in our Discord (Discord.gg), we routinely post sneak peeks at in-development content and features. So if you wanna be on the bleeding edge of Duke Nukem news, that’s the place to be.

And then after that? Well, we’re just getting started.

Special thanks to LethDavidson for editing and leilei for the technical explanation of how Voodoo colorspaces worked!