Duke Nukem Forever

The Duke Nukem Forever demo is out. I can't even convey how surreal it is to me to be typing those words. But anyway, I've been poking around the demo for the last couple of days, and a new version of Noesis is up now that supports extracting 5 different variants of its included .dat packages.

The picture is of the world's first (well, probably) right and proper DNF content mod, with Duke sporting his brand new Takei Pride tanktop. Noesis spits out all of the info you need to re-inject textures while it's extracting them, and I've already got a fully functional repacker that I intend to release sometime relatively soon. I've also finished hammering out the model format now, and Noesis v3.27 and later can view/export them.




The process of exporting the models is pretty simple, but requires a few steps. Here's a step by step of what you need to do.

1) Using Noesis, extract the contents SkinMshes/defs.dat, SkinMeshes/meshes.dat, and SkinMeshes/skels.def. By default, Noesis will want to extract these to separate folders. You don't want this, and instead you want to extract them all to a single folder. (e.g. "c:\steam\steamapps\common\duke nukem forever demo\SkinMeshes\allfiles")

2) Browse to the .msh of your choice in Noesis and open it.

3) If .skl or .def files cannot be found automatically you will be prompted for them. Additionally, Noesis will attempt to find MegaPackage.dat and TextureDirectory.dat relative to the path of the .msh file. If it cannot, you will be prompted for those files as well.

4) Export and enjoy. Note that materials are still a work in progress, and it can't automatically find the right materials in most cases. But certain models are working. (like Duke and one of the Holsom twins)

I've got model re-import/modification working, but the material situation limits it pretty severely. In the coming days/weeks, I'll be continuing to reverse that data and trying to figure out a reasonable process for replacing/overriding assets that doesn't involve rebuilding all of the game's packages.

Also, if you haven't heard yet, you can play the vehicle sequence in first-person. It's much nicer this way.

Update: I've successfully exported a model to COLLADA, modified it (re-weighted, added and modified geometry, modified the texture), re-exported it to .msh using my in-progress Noesis exporter, and got it to load in the demo. Have a look:



Wait for the scene with the twins.

Comments

131 comments in total.
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Duke nukem help

February 17, 2022 at 11:48 pm (CST)
Duke nukem needs you, rich...........................even through anon contributions. Pls join duke4 discord to discuss. You could be so useful.

Killah

February 12, 2020 at 11:28 pm (CST)
Please get back to DNF Modding brother, PLEASE

DavoX

December 5, 2013 at 4:15 pm (CST)
Hey man!! great work! Do you know if there's a way to get the commander to appear with textures in preview? I direct noesis to the megapackage.dat and it just appears without textures, whereas other enemies look fine, what Am I doing wrong? thanks!

Michael

July 19, 2013 at 1:03 pm (CST)
Hello,
Why textures are always greener than their original color ?

Thank you !

Rich Whitehouse

May 16, 2013 at 9:11 am (CST)
Well, there are a couple of things to note here. One thing is that MD3 is a terrible format. It has 16-bit precision for positions, and no explicit scale+bias to compensate for it. Not to mention, your skeletal animations would be baked to terrible-precision vertex animations. You'd want to use something like FBX for getting data through various import/export processes.

The other thing is that DNF animations aren't supported. I dropped DNF shortly after the game went to retail, because Gearbox made it pretty clear that they didn't actually want people modding the game, sad as that might be for a game with the Duke Nukem name.

Spirwell

May 8, 2013 at 9:07 pm (CST)
I know that at least one other person has asked about, but I haven't been able to figure it out. How do you export animations?

I specifically want to export everything into one MD3 file if that's possible. So I could say import it into a model editor or something and view the animations. Any help is appreciated.

Thank you for all of your hard work.

TheZombieKiller

April 25, 2013 at 8:21 am (CST)
Ah, okay then. Apparently someone was able to decompile the entire source tree anyway, but he didn't say how. I guess I'll contact him and see if I can decompile it myself as well.

http://forums.duke4.net/topic/6208-dnf-gearbox-downgrade-patch-wip-testing/

Rich Whitehouse

April 25, 2013 at 7:52 am (CST)
I never properly decompiled any compiled script files, I just sifted through them in a hex editor to find stuff.

TheZombieKiller

April 25, 2013 at 6:33 am (CST)
Hi Rich,
Could you let me know how you managed to decompile the .u files? I've only been able to decompile Engine.u and Editor.u, all the other files cause UT3 to crash while it attempts to load the u package.

Cheers,
Ben

kazachidla

March 18, 2013 at 8:59 am (CST)
People, can i export animations from Duke Nukem Forever? I try open this file Duke Nukem Forever\SkinMeshes\anims.dat and this animdirs.dat use a Noesis version 4.06, but programm say me 'File could not be previewed.' or 'The file type could not be determined.' How can i unpack this files?


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