DUDE 0.9.2

DUDE 0.9.2 — RTX elements, GPU skinning, and Lost Mission

A feature release on top of 0.9.1.
The big story is ray tracing: on a Vulkan RTX GPU, DUDE now ray-traces sun shadows,
moving-light shadows, and shadows cast by animated monsters, wrapped up in a new
Ultra Nightmare preset. GPU skinning becomes the default on Vulkan, and The Lost
Mission now runs natively.

Changed since 0.9.1

The Lost Mission

• The Lost Mission (d3le) runs natively on DUDE via a built-in game library — no
  extra DLLs. Drop the Lost Mission data in and it loads by name.

Ray tracing (Vulkan + RTX)

• New "Ultra Nightmare" preset — the RT-gated tier above Nightmare. Enables
  ray-traced sun and moving-light shadows on capable hardware; falls back cleanly to
  the Nightmare raster path on everything else.
• Ray-traced sun shadows (r_rtSunShadows): crisp, leak-free sun/moonlight
  shadows. The expensive raster sun shadow-map render is now skipped entirely whenever
  the sun is served by ray tracing.
• Animated monsters cast ray-traced shadows (r_rtMonsterShadows): enemies and
  other skinned characters now throw correct RT shadows, including alpha-tested
  (perforated) surfaces.
• Ray-traced shadows for moving point lights (r_rtMovingLights): dynamic lights
  that move through the world cast true ray-traced shadows instead of the raster
  scratch cube.
• RT stays cheap at rest: the acceleration structure is only rebuilt when the scene
  actually changes, so ray tracing costs almost nothing in a static view.
• RT shadow toggles are exposed in the in-game Shadows settings group (shown only
  when your GPU supports ray tracing).

Rendering

• GPU skinning is now the default on Vulkan (Medium preset and up). Animated
  characters are skinned on the GPU, freeing CPU frame time. Potato/Low keep the
  faithful CPU path.
• Better tessellated characters: MD5 mesh seams are welded on the plain
  tessellation path too (not only under GPU skinning), fixing visible cracks at arms
  and shoulders on the tessellation presets.
• Cheaper dynamic shadows: moving lights' scratch shadow cube renders at half
  resolution by default (r_shadowMapSplitDynDrop), full-resolution on Nightmare —
  a measurable cube-pass cost cut with no visible difference on movers.
• Chromatic aberration post effect (r_postChromaticAberration): a subtle
  scene-only lens fringe that runs before the HUD, so the crosshair and UI stay crisp.

Content & UI

• Simpler anti-aliasing menu: post-AA is now a single selector —
  Off / FXAA / SMAA / FSR2 (TAA) — instead of overlapping toggles.

Setup (same as 0.9.1)

You need the original DOOM 3 / Resurrection of Evil game data (base/*.pk4,
d3xp/*.pk4) from your own copy (Steam/GOG classic, not the BFG Edition).

• Windows (64-bit): unzip and copy the contents of the dude-0.9.2-win64
  folder into your Doom 3 directory, next to base/ (the included pk4/config files
  merge into base/). Or run from anywhere with +set fs_basepath "C:\path\to\Doom 3".
• Linux (x86_64): untar and copy the contents into your Doom 3 directory the same
  way, run ./dude.

Renderer selection: +set r_graphicsAPI opengl|opengl3|vulkan or the in-game menu.
Ray tracing requires the Vulkan renderer and an RTX / ray-query-capable GPU.
Configs/saves live in ~/.local/share/dude (Linux) / Documents/My Games/dude (Windows).

Optional download: baked ambient-occlusion pack

dude-0.9.2-baked-ao.zip (~100 MB): precomputed per-material AO maps for subtle
contact shading on world surfaces, props and weapons. Extract into your Doom 3
directory the same way. Entirely optional.

DUDE is GPLv3 — source at https://github.com/Inkub0/dude.