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
- Spawn AI settings - roam, base configuration, spline roam, zone roam
- Spawn Aggro
- Zone Aggro
- Agent Link Decorator
- NPC
- Lifecycles reworked for pooling/hibernation/artcull
- Hierarchy rework and bug fixes
- EntityPoseDecorator for posing NPCs on spawn
- 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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