1998 Asset Leak - Area 51 Map Restoration Release news

WHERE DID THIS NEW MAP COME FROM?

Today we bring you a small piece of Duke Nukem Forever history, both in its original form and in a restored form as well.

Earlier this week many new assets from Duke Nukem Forever from the 1998-1999 period were found. It includes a lot of props and other assets we intend to include in the current Restoration Project.

However, there was one small map based on Area 51 that was included as well, now this is a VERY SMALL map, it consists of one large room, one smaller room, one long hallway and one smaller hallway. There isn’t a gameplay loop or puzzles, enemies etc. so please temper your expectations here.

OUR INTENTION WITH THE MAP

The intention here was to make this map widely usable for the community. The map that was found, named kslab3.unr, was last modified on Wednesday October 21st, 1998 at 1:08pm EDT. Given the timeframe and the puzzle pieces put together, this may be one of the very first maps that 3D Realms made for Duke Nukem Forever using the Unreal Engine, immediately after the switch from the Quake 2 engine. It is very likely that multiple devs at 3D Realms were working on getting the first levels made and we luckily now have one of them.

To put this into perspective, this map is 3 years older than the 2001 version we are currently restoring and that we saw in that E3 2001 trailer. This is a piece of Duke Nukem Forever history that has never been seen before! Or has it...

Here is a short video one of our devs, very hastily put together the night the assets were found, as the community was digging along with us we found a lot of great stuff from Duke and Bombshell’s models with animations to Gus’ model from this era as well. The video includes many videos put together by devs and other community members, many thanks to all of them!

GETTING THE MAP TO OPEN

Let’s focus back now on this only map that was found within these assets. First the map was .unr instead of .dnf which 3D Realms started to use by 2001. So Duke ED would not open the map, even after doing some changes it would try to load the map but was missing various textures packages and more to allow it to run.

After some more work by the development team, we were able to spoof the packages and get the map to load. Here are screens of what we found that night when the team was able to open the map for the first time in Duke ED:

FILLING IN THE GAPS

Our first big hurdle was the conversion from Unreal to DNF. While the t3d to unr converter works pretty well, it doesn’t always move the geometry over properly. LiquidOtacon spent the first evening just rearranging the geometry in the map so proper lighting and additions could be made to the map, as if you rebuild the original map, everything is cut up incorrectly. We copied the geometry into a fresh new DukeEd map so it would also no longer require the dependencies it was missing.

After more digging, the team was able to find the actual textures intended for the missing ones in the photos. One of our devs, Dark1 was able to identify these as being Unreal Gold texture packages. We were able to find and extract the textures and bundle them in the map in a way that they are an all-in-one package and do not need any additional files. One of the hurdles to getting the map to load initially was we had to spoof the files that it was looking for. With the exact texture packages, we were able to see the map as the original designers intended minus the texture for the glass which was still missing.

Afterwards some of the folks in level design started playing around with different ideas for the map. Dez, LiquidOtacon, and Spider-Man all collaborated along with chatting with the rest of the team for ideas to spruce it up and make the map feel more lived in. Dez touched up the lighting of the map and added some geometry tweaks. Liquid experimented with the idea of Duke Clones and other ways the map could be expanded upon, and Spider-Man populated the map with some props and Greys like the concept art work had shown. While we had some more creative ideas for the map, we will explore these things further in the project as we really just wanted to give the community something fun and a neat piece of DNF history to explore.

Here are some comparison screenshots to show what we added:

WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THIS MAP?

Earlier I said that this map was a piece of never before seen Duke Nukem Forever history…but that is not entirely true! While we have not seen this area in-game running on the Unreal Engine (or any previous engine) we have seen this area developed through concept art. Paul Richards drew some amazing concept art for Duke Nukem Forever in 1998, including a lot based on Area 51.

These two pieces of concept art undeniably showcases where the inspiration for this map came from.

Here is a quote from Paul from 2000 about his work on creating art for Duke Nukem Forever:

“I have a hand in designing environments, characters, objects and weapons. Alas, that type of work can only last so long, so I pitch in where I can. One day I might be roughing out cinematic storyboards or game box compositions. Later on I could be providing game textures, world models or character dialogue. I'm learning to be more versatile.”

Take a look at the comparisons to see the very stark similarities!

RELEASING THE MAP

To conclude, this map is being released to the community today! There is the original map that we have working and the enhanced map that adds new lighting, props, AI friendlies, interactive objects and more!

All you will need to do is copy and paste these two maps into your “Maps” folder wherever you have the First Slice release downloaded. No other items needed, just these two .dnf map files that come in at just under 1MB for both! Download them here!

The two filenames for the maps are:

• kslab3.dnf (restored version)
• 1998PaulRichardsArea51.dnf (enhanced version)

This was a fun little side project that was fueled by our curiosity and given the small scope of the map something that could be done quickly, it was a small but fun project to do.

We hope you enjoy this amazing piece of Duke Nukem Forever history restored and preserved in its original form along with being enhanced as well!