DUDE 0.9.3

DUDE 0.9.3 — RTX improved: ray-traced shadows on every light, RTX reflections and occlusion.

A feature release on top of 0.9.2, and
almost all of it is ray tracing. 0.9.2 introduced the first RT elements (sun, moving lights,
monster shadows); 0.9.3 turns Ultra Nightmare into a real hybrid ray-traced tier: every
shadow-casting light is ray-traced and softened, reflective floors and glass show ray-traced
reflections of the room and its monsters, and screen-space AO is replaced by ray-traced
ambient occlusion with NVIDIA's NRD denoiser. Abrand new HDR tonemap curve improves
vastly the visual perception of the game. it has "HDR gamma" and "HDR knee" knobs so you
can fine tune it to your liking.

Everything here needs the Vulkan renderer and an RTX / ray-query-capable GPU. On anything
else Ultra Nightmare still falls back cleanly to the Nightmare raster path.

Changed since 0.9.2

Ray-traced shadows

• RT shadows for every light (r_rtAllLights, Shadows → Ray Tracing → RT Shadows for All
  Lights): every shadow-casting light — point, projected and parallel — now takes the
  pixel-exact ray route that only the sun and moving lights had in 0.9.2. No shadow maps are
  rendered at all while it is on: no map resolution, no bias artefacts, no light budget.
• Soft RT shadows (r_rtShadowBlur, Soften RT Shadows): ray-traced shadows stay sharp
  where an object touches the surface it shadows and soften as the gap grows, like a real light.
  Deterministic — no noise and nothing accumulated over frames, so nothing swims or lags when you
  move. Tune it under Debugging → RT Shadows: Blur Intensity and a Blur Falloff Curve
  that shapes how quickly shadows soften with distance from their caster.
• Distant soft shadows refresh less often (r_rtShadowBlurStagger, Refresh Distant Soft
  Shadows Less Often): lights close to you refresh their soft shadows every frame, farther ones
  every 2nd, the farthest every 3rd, re-projected to the current camera in between. Roughly
  halves the cost of softening a light-dense room, with no visible change in testing. The two
  distances are tunable under Debugging → RT Shadows.
• All three are part of Ultra Nightmare.

Ray-traced reflections

• Ray-traced reflections (r_rtReflections, Reflections → Ray-Traced Reflections):
  reflective floors and metal now reflect the real room and its monsters — including things
  that are off screen or hidden from the camera, which screen-space reflections can never show.
  Reflected surfaces are textured per texel, and the result is temporally upscaled so it stays
  affordable.
• Glass reflects the live scene instead of a static cube map, with grazing-angle Fresnel and
  a sky gradient where a ray escapes; on the SSR tier glass gets a screen-space version of the same.
• Fireflies on glossy floors are clamped (r_ssrFireflyClamp), and reflection fall-off with
  roughness is tunable (r_ssrRoughnessFade).

Ray-traced ambient occlusion

• RTAO (r_rtao, Ambient Occlusion → RT Ambient Occlusion): one ray per pixel against the
  real scene, denoised by NVIDIA NRD (ReBLUR), replaces the screen-space GTAO at Ultra
  Nightmare — occlusion from geometry the screen can't see, no screen-edge fade. Own intensity
  control (r_rtaoIntensity).
• NVIDIA NRD 4.18 is now built into the engine as the denoising foundation for the RT tier.

RT under the hood

• Animated monsters as GPU-resident ray-tracing instances: skinned characters feed the
  acceleration structure straight from the GPU skinning buffers and are refitted instead of
  rebuilt (r_rtAnimBlas) — the groundwork RT reflections of monsters are built on.
• Stability: fixed the GPU hangs / device-lost seen in heavy combat with RT on
  (acceleration-structure rebuilds are now ordered after in-flight ray traversal; rays with
  degenerate directions are never launched).

Rendering

• New "DUDE" tonemap curve (r_hdrTonemap 5), HDR gamma control and an experimental adaptive
  white point. Default HDR exposure raised to 1.5 (r_hdrExposure).
• Cutscenes render correctly with every depth-based effect. The game lowers the camera's near
  plane during cinematics, but SSAO, RTAO, screen-space and RT reflections, soft particles and the
  new soft shadows all assumed the gameplay value — so in cutscenes they worked from positions
  three times too far away. They now read it from the view itself.
• Eye adaptation stands down during cutscenes and resumes by itself afterwards, so the
  exposure no longer pumps across camera cuts.
• Smooth rendering above 60 fps by default: render interpolation (com_interpolate) is now
  part of every preset above Potato.
• Cheaper ambient occlusion: the normal pre-pass is merged with the depth pre-pass on Vulkan
  (one geometry pass instead of two), and Ultra Nightmare runs AO at full resolution.
• Cheaper GPU skinning: the joint palette is uploaded once per character instead of once per
  surface, fixing the frame-rate drops around multi-surface monsters.
• Fixed: with FSR2 / motion vectors on, the first-person weapon and hands could render black and
  the GPU could be lost (invalid motion vectors on the view weapon).
• Smoke darkness blending defaults retuned (darkness floor 55%, full opacity at 20% light);
  refreshed PBR material list.

Performance notes (RTX 3080 Ti, 1440p, busy Mars City scene)

• RT shadows for all lights: about +0.25 ms GPU — the rays replace every shadow-map render.
• Softening all of them: about +5 ms; with Refresh Distant Soft Shadows Less Often (on in
  Ultra Nightmare) about +2.7 ms.
• If that is too much for your GPU, turn off Soften RT Shadows first: the hard ray-traced
  shadows on every light are nearly free.

Known limitations - to be addressed later

• With RT Shadows for All Lights on, grates and fences do not cast shadows (they did
  through the shadow-map path). Turn the option off if a scene depends on them.
• Under a light that refreshes at a reduced rate, shadows of moving things can be a frame or two
  late, and re-projected pixels without valid data fall back to a hard-edged ray for that frame.
• Ray tracing is Vulkan-only and needs hardware ray-query support; the OpenGL renderers are
  unchanged by the RT features.

Setup (same as 0.9.2)

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-0.9.3-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.
For the full RT tier pick the Vulkan renderer and the Ultra Nightmare preset.
Configs/saves live in ~/.local/share/dude (Linux) / Documents/My Games/dude (Windows).

Optional download: baked ambient-occlusion pack

dude-0.9.3-baked-ao.zip (~100 MB): precomputed per-material AO maps for subtle
contact shading on world surfaces, props and weapons — unchanged since 0.9.2, so skip it if
you already have it. Extract into your Doom 3 directory the same way. Entirely optional.

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