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Patch #5

18 Jul

Patch 5

Today's patch focuses on bringing impact properties and Stress Level Zero's grid wall assets to Marrow SDK 1.1.0 along a few other important features for level creation, responding to feedback from Patch #4, and further optimizing build size, overall performance and hitches via consolidating the materials that are used in game. Check out these changes in our updated Test Chambers mod: Test Chambers[mod.io]

Zone Aggro

Zone Aggro enables spawned enemies to be alerted to players in zones. Previously in mod levels enemies would not react to the player firing a gun, now with Zone Aggro they will be alerted.

Surface Data Cards

Surface Data Cards are for defining the Impact Properties of colliders. For example, this determines how a surface reacts to being impacted VFX wise. Additionally, these can recommend a physics material to apply to associated colliders. (NOTE: This is so hot off the press that even we don't have the the entirety of Bonelab’s static geometry surface data card passed until Patch7)

Spawn Force

Spawn Force decorator applies a directional and/or angular velocity force when a CrateSpawner object is spawned.

Spawn Force even works with spawned enemies, please use responsibly

GridWalls

GridWalls, Grid Mats, GlowMats are now available for modders via our asset backlot. These are the same prefabs and materials we use to layout levels.

Player Rig

Player Rig adjustments have been made to further improve the physicality and control. The noticeable change is that the arm's twist now factors in the range of motion and neutral of the wrist. By getting the elbow closer to your real elbow, the hand is able to better represent the desired final pose of the hand. Bonelab's player uniquely doesn't simply use IK to show a body connecting your hands to your head, instead there is a fully physical body with spine, elbow and wrist constraints that art is directly drawn upon. This has been a massive but worthwhile challenge that began in 2020 and will continue for years to come. Under the hood, some members of Lava Gang may discover that a lot of invisible changes have happened to the rig, the code and prefabs have migrated from Bonelab to Marrow, better for future development and accessibility in the SDK.

Also, an unexposed 'Active Ragdoll' may be discovered as a work in progress for a rig that can tumble in 6DOF.

Material Cleanup Pass

All levels gamewide received a material cleanup pass to trim and reduce the number of unnecessary materials and improve visual consistency. This also has an added benefit of reducing some chunk-load hitches as the memory footprint for many areas has been dramatically reduced. The full game size is also reduced slightly by this consolidation.

VFX Cleanup

Impact and particle vfx got a pass across the board in an effort to make visuals more consistent.

SDK - Surface Data Tools

In the SDK is an overlay tool to quickly apply Impact Properties to surfaces in levels, we are hoping this speeds up level updating for Patch5.

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Patch Notes - PATCH 5

MODDING/SDK CHANGES

Zone Aggro - An added default component for zones that will alert enemies in a zone to the player.
Spawn Force - This CrateSpawner decorator is used to apply a velocity and/or angular velocity when the crate object is spawned.
Added SurfaceDataCards - These allow users to set the effects used by Impact Properties.
Impact Properties - Updated to have a more concise set up and use SurfaceDataCards.
Avatar Surface Data - Option to set SurfaceDataCard for avatars.
Mod.io Connect - Mod.io connect url with code filled out automatically copied to copy/paste buffer on Quest. On PC the web page is automatically opened.
Mod Repo Json Change - Side loaded mod repositories no longer require the “types” dictionary to be present in the repository json file.
Better Pallet Editor - The Pallet Editor now dynamically shows which DataCards to create

BUGFIXES

Stream Session fix for chunk scene loading leaking into the next fix a bug where the scene starts before loading screen finishes
Fixed tensor calculations, better mass merge algorithm
Fixed stabslash when joints are broken
Fixed joint accumulation in loading guns
Fixed bullet shell accumulation when reloading
Fixed un-held weapon mag eject bug
Fixed missing audio mixer
Fixed Clippie achievement bug
Fixed Pillar Occlusion issues
Fixed glowstick grip

ADJUSTS

Player Rig - Arm twist now factors in wrist neutral and range of motion.
RigManager - all scripts are now in Marrow instead of Bonelab, invisible but important for the future.
Materials Pass - Materials visually unified; some textures updated or replaced, remaining instances of non-LitMAS shaders replaced. Renamed and organized under more consistent conventions. Usages within levels made more consistent and optimized.
VFX Pass - Some particle systems updated and visually polished. Some decal textures updated, and a new optimized decal projector system was implemented.
VFX Pass - Added import processor to skinned mesh imports to generate posespace data
VFX Pass - Baked Level lighting now affects cubemap reflection contribution
VFX Pass - Minor bug fixes
Grid Walls - Cleanup Pass
Grid Walls - Colliders optimized and made more accurate
Grid Walls - Some minor normal and UV fixes
Grid Walls - Added Goofy planes
Fixture Standardization (WIP)
Physics Material Pass (WIP)

RENDERING

Quest 3 now uses PC transparent materials
Shader Cache Validation - Further optimized the shader cache start up step to skip if it has already been generated for the current build and driver version.

FURTHER OPTIMIZATIONS

Build Size Further Reduced
Material reduction pass reduce some level hitching
Further audio clips set to proper play settings for improved performance
Unnecessary Barcode allocations removed from crate spawning

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Patch #4

6 Jun

Patch 4

18 months of core development brings great performance increases, development optimizations, and a swath of game improvements. Slowly but surely these under-the-hood changes have brought us from experimental ideation to tangible quality advancements for VR physics interaction and bonestyle game development.

Player Rig Improvements

The player rig has significantly progressed to become more physical, more performant, and feel better to control. Particular attention was paid to mantling, interaction with levers and lockers, small pops when interacting, aiming guns, recoil, adding a physical neck, and physical twist bones on the upper arms, lower arms, and thighs.

SDK Updates

Patch 4 comes alongside a large update in the MarrowSDK geared specifically towards Mod Level creation. Place spawnables with ease now using the dynamically loaded Spawner Preview Meshes! No more VOID meshes everywhere. This will even work with Pallets created by other users

Zones

The Zone System has been completely rebuilt, refactored, reworked, retooled for level creation, Marrow Entity tracking, and performance optimization. This enables modders to more seamlessly create high quality levels with more complex player involvement. For additional information please see updated Marrow SDK documentation! https://slz.gg/sdk

Marrow Entities (dynamic physics objects) have their states tracked while inside zones. This enables Marrow to cull/un-cull without hitching.

This gif showcases a zone cutting through other zones and seamless transitions between them. Once exposed in the SDK these tools will enable you to more easily setup interesting and unique level designs.

You can see as the player entity traverses through linked zones, Marrow Entities are brought in/out for greatly improved optimization management.

Spawnables

Spawnable dynamic objects (Marrow Entities) fill the library of items you are now able to utilize in your level creation. By referencing the Bonelab pallet of spawnables in your mod project, you can now place and spawn almost any Bonelab object the same way we can. Since these items are all Marrow Entities, they are tracked and dynamically culled per zone for optimization.

Since we know embarking on a massive easter egg hunt for all spawnable objects is a daunting prospect, a gashapon machine has been added to the endgame menu. This machine functions similarly to the Monomat from BONEWORKS; the ammo you have collected throughout BONELAB’s campaign can be redeemed for unlockable objects you might have missed during your playthrough.

Spawn Gun Usability

The Spawn Gun UI has been reworked to allow better sorting and filtering of downloaded mods. This should make things easier as the list of spawnable items and mods gets even longer!

It is important for us to further improve ways for players and modders to organize their crates and data.

Quality of Life

Box Grips and Barrel grips have had a pass on bug fixing and interaction cleanup. Previously it was possible to run into an issue where grabbing a scaled box grip would cause the hand to grab towards the root or center of the box/barrel, rather than the spot the player intended to grab.

Minor level adjustments have been made throughout the game including missing collider fixes, misassigned physics and impact properties, fixes to zone connection issues, occlusion bakes, and light bakes.

Tons of further optimizations have been made to rendering, loading, asset streaming, interactive set pieces, colliders, occlusion, nav-mesh, textures, sounds, lightmaps, shaders, materials, fog, static batching, memory use, asset file size, etc. etc. etc.

Mountains of bug fixes covering a wide range of issues from logic errors, collider issues, incorrect scales (all leading to physics weirdness), to UI bugs, objects double spawning, double-rigidbody objects becoming broken from spawning, texture mistakes, incorrect references, mysterious super cursed override reference bug, and blown-out lightprobes.

Gashapons are now destructible! Shoot them, smash them, or bash them, destroying them will unlock the spawnable item just as well as popping them normally.

Mod.io subscription downloading

You can now connect to your mod.io account and directly download all subscribed mods. Note: this will only download mods compatible with this MarrowSDK version and above. You can still manually install older mods but they will likely have problems if they haven’t been updated.

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Patch Notes - PATCH 4

Player Rig Improvements

Optimized hand poses and increased range of motion on some poses
Physical neck, upper arm, lower arm, and thigh twists added
Lever, locker, and joystick interaction polished
Shouldering pose added to tighten aiming and lean physics into shots
Interaction while moving polished to remove pops
Player stabilized to withstand greater forces
Teleporting polished
Gun recoil improved
Slow avatars move slightly faster
Mantling greatly improved
Movement while crouching improved
SFX added to hands when they slide on surfaces
Significantly optimized performance
Tons of under the hood preparation for the player rig to be more separable as an NPC

Reworks

Zones - Fully rebuilt using new zone system / tools including zone links, triggers / events, and other zone based components.
Marrow Entities - All Rigidbodies migrated to Marrow Entity system for tracking with new zones as well as internal state persistence / resetting and pooling, joint tracking
Layers - consolidated and optimized, collision matrix optimized, dedicated trigger layers for different use cases. Concept of fixtures added.
Damage Volumes - rebuilt for consistency with health system, NPCs, and object destructibles.
Audio and Mixes - all audio sources migrated to use dynamically pooled and spawned interface, mixer moved to marrow.
Spawnable Props - optimized artwork, restructured hierarchies, added LODs, various tunings, scale fixes.
LODs - static / environment artwork LOD work and adjustments for optimal performance and reducing visual pops.
Particle FX - optimizations and some redesigns.
Affordances - improved throughout most levels including lighting changes, object placement, material swapping, fog volume adjustments, color changes, sightlines, and sound fx improvements.
Electronic puzzles reworked with Voidlogic
GameControl logic reworked
ObjectDestructible and fragments
Trigger events reworked to Zones
Various UX design normalization (example: button sizes)
Encounters - adjusted, reworked, and optimized across most levels.
Encounter Spawner Groups
1. Spawn AI settings - roam, base configuration, spline roam, zone roam
2. Spawn Aggro
3. Zone Aggro
4. Agent Link Decorator
NPC
1. Lifecycles reworked for pooling/hibernation/artcull
2. Hierarchy rework and bug fixes
3. EntityPoseDecorator for posing NPCs on spawn
4. Omnis navigation improved

Bug Fixes

Loot table off by one fix
Respawn teleport points fixed and adjusted
Highlighting tutorials on weapons fixed
Crate reference issues fixed
Occlusion culling fixes
Double spawning objects fixed
UI alignment issues fixed
Collider fixes gamewide
Off-scale object fixes gamewide
Many texture mistakes fixed
Many light probe issues fixed
Box grips bug fix and interaction cleanup
Barrel grips bug fix and interaction cleanup
Leaderboard UI filtering bug fix
Rotational drift while seated fixed
Bunny hopping jump reset fixed

Adjustments

Some levels slightly adjusted for improved UX or optimization
Destructibility added to certain spawnables
Gashapon balls are now destructible
Environment seams reduced
Environment layout adjustments to prevent players getting stuck
Material corrections
Music playback adjusted including placements and timing
Ladders swapped for lifts
Arena gameplay optimization and adjustments
Weapon choice and placements adjusted
Ammo count reconfigured
Missing colliders fixed in various levels
Misassigned physics materials and impact properties
Zone connection issues fixed in various levels
Occlusion bake issues fixed in various levels
Light bake issues fixed in various levels
Damage Volumes now behave consistently
Added Gashapon machine or quicker endgame collecting
Crate Descriptions added

Rendering and Optimizations

Shader prewarming added
Light bakes visually improved and performance optimized across the game
Lightmap based baked reflection occlusion added
Fog visually improved and performance optimized
Static batching improved
Texture streaming cache size increased
Memory use optimizations
Storage use optimizations
Material use optimizations
Audio clip loading optimizations
Optimized poorly optimized meshes (WIP)
Consolidation of used assets per level

Level Specific

Descent - Final area layout adjusted and re-tuned
Hub - QoL changes to special projects area
Longrun - Puzzle section rework
District - sightline geometry overhaul

UI Updates

Spawn Gun UI - reworked organization for handling many installed mods and spawnable items
BodyMall UI - reworked organization for handling many installed avatars.
Mod.io UI - Added interface for binding Mod.io account to automatically download subscription on website

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Anniversary Post

29 Sep, 2023

We’ve been 100% focused on Marrow/Bonelab development, prioritizing it over PR, emails, and a fifth SLZ title, but since today is the one year anniversary it made sense to take an hour to make a post.

Thank you for your enthusiasm for Bonelab, SLZ, and VR in general. Anticipating a content drought, one of our major goals with Bonelab was to make a title that would keep you engaged as we work towards making it possible for Marrow content/titles to be made more efficiently. We’re happy to announce that while playtime, refunds, and active users were great for Boneworks, after one year Bonelab currently has 3x the median playtime, 1/3rd the refunds, and 10x the daily active users of Boneworks. The team is motivated by the overwhelming response, but our VR work is still just getting started.

Our goal is still to get the next update for Bonelab out as a beta this year. We’ll talk about it more in the upcoming months, but here are a few bullets:

This update is very different from what most would expect, but we thought and think it is best for the long term.
The Marrow SDK will receive level authoring focused features.
The focus is on the core tech, optimization, polish, and the Marrow SDK with a few exceptions. Rather than rapid feature release, VR needs a more stable physical foundation for long term growth.
The content team has been rebuilding the existing content invisibly with new systems as they come online.
Our goal (while it won’t be fully realized for many years and many games) is that the Marrow SDK is the same externally and internally.
Tons of work has gone into a long term goal of unifying the player and the humanoid NPC’s, still years from completion, but it’s worth pursuing.
The player can now use a full body animation as input, is more physically complex than ever, and is 38% lighter on a Quest 2 CPU than Patch 3.
The future of VR gaming is bright, but incredibly labor intensive and expensive.

Attached is a WIP clip of a torso track being integrated with locomotion and crouch from 5 months ago (not IOBT).

As always, only purchase Bonelab as it currently is and not based on what it may be.

Back to work,
Brandon and the entire SLZ team

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Steam Awards 2022

22 Dec, 2022

Bonelab has been nominated for VR Game of the Year 2022!

Thank you to everyone in the community for the nomination, now is the time to vote!

See you in the void.

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PATCH #2

20 Nov, 2022

Overview
We’re excited to release our second patch for BONELAB! Since launch the team has primarily been focused on listening to collective feedback to best prioritize quality of life fixes and bugs, but we’ve found some time for some additional secrets and items as well.

Interaction received a tune pass and some bug fixes. Near field tracking and occluded controllers are now handled better resulting in better gun handling and body slot interaction. Shouldering has been improved and will continue to be improved in the future. The player is perpetually a work in progress: Boneworks was year 3, Bonelab is currently in year 6, we have many years to go. Thank you for participating in the journey, the ceiling for VR interaction is so high.

We re-tuned Index grip interactions to take better advantage of grip force for holding objects.

Saving has been improved. The Hub will now persist your inventory from the last campaign level you’ve completed. This will improve the experience of replaying the campaign after you’ve already beat the game.

Keycards are now functional. Each ID badge can unlock a hidden developer room, each with at least one new unlockable object. We hope you enjoy finding what secrets they reveal!

We’ve added new collectable spawnable items, including a M1 Garand with a fixed bayonet. Enjoy using these props to get creative in sandboxes!

The majority of levels have received some tweaks including encounter adjustments, lighting, bug fixing, optimizations and easter eggs. Sprint Bridge received a large rework adding enemy encounters including a helicopter to avoid.

Please take the time to rate and review or update current reviews, your feedback is read by the team and is very helpful!

Patch Notes - PATCH 2

ADDED: Keycard functionality added
ADDED: [REDACTED]s added to [REDACTED]s
ADDED: 1 Unlockable Avatar
ADDED: 2 Unlockable Guns
ADDED: 2 Unlockable Melee weapons
ADDED: 30+ Unlockable Props

FIXED: NPC Skeleton is now unlockable
FIXED: HOME - Fixed objects disappearing and potentially breaking the rig during taxi ride
FIXED: HUB - Fixed crane spawning incorrectly
FIXED: Magazines can no longer be inserted from above the gun.

ADJUSTED: Shouldering plane moved back by 6cm. Long term the plan is to instead gain this additional reach by extending the neck to reduce held objects penetrating the torso, but this is a good short term improvement.
ADJUSTED: Non-stocked guns are now more resilient to being affected by locomotion.
ADJUSTED: Improved handling of controller tracking when out of camera’s view. Now the controller will guess better when only tracked with the IMU.
ADJUSTED: Body remapping tuning improved. Hands should no longer move when open/closed when not in proximity of each other.
ADJUSTED: Save system updated so that hub inventory updates after every level
ADJUSTED: SPRINT BRIDGE 04 - Reworked level and added encounters
ADJUSTED: NPC Ford visual tweaks
ADJUSTED: Memory optimization tweaks
ADJUSTED: Improve interaction on various props
ADJUSTED: Descent - Level tweaks
ADJUSTED: Hub - Level tweaks
ADJUSTED: LongRun- Level tweaks
ADJUSTED: MineDive- Level tweaks
ADJUSTED: StreetPuncher- Level tweaks
ADJUSTED: MoonBase- Level tweaks
ADJUSTED: Pillar - Level tweaks
ADJUSTED: Big Anomaly- Level tweaks
ADJUSTED: Ascent - Level tweaks
ADJUSTED: Big Bone Bowling - Level tweaks
ADJUSTED: Container Yard- Level tweaks
ADJUSTED: District Parkour / Tac Trial - Level tweaks
ADJUSTED: Drop Pit - Level tweaks
ADJUSTED: Dungeon Warrior - Level tweaks
ADJUSTED: Halfway Park - Level tweaks
ADJUSTED: Mirror - Level tweaks
ADJUSTED: Museum Basement - Level tweaks
ADJUSTED: RoofTops - Level tweaks
ADJUSTED: Tuscany - Level tweaks
ADJUSTED: PCVR- Added variable rate shading (VRS). Dramatically improves rendering performance. Only supported on Turing or later NVIDIA GPUs (GTX 1630 and above).
ADJUSTED: PCVR- Added radial density mask as a fallback for cards that do not support VRS. Works similarly to VRS, but less effective.
ADJUSTED: STEAM - Added Reverb G2 Mixed Reality interaction profile
ADJUSTED: STEAM - Index controller gripping action improved by factoring in grip force. (Improved gripping without trigger)
ADJUSTED: STEAM - Improved defaults for unsupported hardware. (More devices fall back to Quest bindings when unknown)
ADJUSTED: STEAM - Improved resilience to 3rd party hand tracking interference.

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Patch #1

20 Oct, 2022

BUG - Fix to stop the ammo pouch and gun fighting over the magazine
BUG - Fixed issue with volumetrics getting garbage data and becoming randomly colored
ADJUST - Bonelab version added to log
ADJUST - Device ID updates when using different controllers
ADJUST - Devtools spawnable if you have them unlocked, no longer requires developer mode
ADJUST - Level selection available through progression
ADJUST - 1911 made default unlock
ADJUST - Added gacha poster instructions
ADJUST - Nimbus gun disables leaderboards

BUG - HUB - Fix for potential progression skip
BUG - HUB - Fixes for potentially stalled progression when going from Hub to Ascent
BUG - MINE DIVE - Various Triggers fixed
BUG - MONOGON MOTORWAY - Trigger tutorial fixed
BUG - LONGRUN - Dynamic railing colliders fixed
BUG - BIG ANOMALY - Invulnerable health fix
BUG - TUSCANY - Fixed complete button

ADJUST - HUB - Crane instruction UI added
ADJUST - HUB - Crane reset button and button labels added
ADJUST - HUB - Various UX and affordances tweeks
ADJUST - HUB - Improved funicular sound effects
ADJUST - HUB - Map is more direct, Lists core keys, and tells player what they should do.
ADJUST - MOON - Avatar Gacha capsule has beacon
ADJUST - MOON - Arrow pointing in gacha direction
ADJUST - MOON - Added jump pads
ADJUST - PILLAR - Checkpoint at middle of level added
ADJUST - PILLAR - More weapons added
ADJUST - PILLAR - Grip added to elevator platform top surface
ADJUST - PILLAR - Boids can no longer forcibly change your avatar
ADJUST - PILLAR - Added visual damage to the boid ball
ADJUST - PILLAR - Reworked upper arena area
ADJUST - STREET PUNCHER - Jukebox headphone made dynamic
ADJUST - DUNGEON WARRIOR - Closed gap in environment
ADJUST - ROOFTOPS - Various small UX improvements
ADJUST - DISTRICT - Zones adjusted to fix enemy pop-in
ADJUST - DISTRICT - Some material and lighting changes

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