Bonelab has launched - reviews and impressions

[RuneSR2]

Today's launch trailer:

- and the game does have some nice dynamic shadows:

- and it has the same fake Questified volumetric light like Red Matter 2 - see how my hand is not illuminated even so close to the lamp:

The game is much more demanding the Boneworks. I just finished Boneworks and I could use res 500% and 2xMSAA, all other settings maxed, still got solid 90 fps. With Bonelab, it kinda feels like my oc'ed RTX 3090 is the bare minimum for acceptable image quality, lol.

Devs stated that system requirements were similar for Boneworks and Bonelab, must be the joke of the century 🙂

For Bonelab I'm using SteamVR res 200% and res 1.2 in-game (might equal res 240%). I get solid 90 fps for now with these settings:

MSAAx1 (looks fine with SteamVR res 200%)

SMAA = disabled (does not look better activated)

HBAO = low (does not look better using higher settings)

Shadow res on Ultra

Shadow cascade = 4

Volumetric lights = High (Ultra takes too much performance)

Screen space refections = med

Bloom = high

Lod bias 3.0

Res = 1.2 (probably will multiply with the SteamVR res 200% = 240%. In-game res is easier for fine-tuning as it takes effect immediately. If I change SteamVR res then I need to restart the game before it's applied)

If prefer high res to high msaa, high res clears up the image quality and provides antialiasing, while high MSAA removes jaggies but not the blur from low res. So push res as high as possible, and lower msaa as much as possible. 2c.

Btw, have been playing the game for 90 minutes, not sure I'm very fond of it, Boneworks impressed me much more - but I may need to play Bonelab more. Many are disappointed on Steam, and average rating on Steam just got under 80%. Boneworks has 92% positive rating on Steam based on nearly 30k ratings. 

  

[kojack]

I've been playing with the SDK.

Here's the Med/Sci deck of the Von Braun ship from System Shock 2.

I extracted the level geometry from the original System Shock 2 data files using a program I wrote, imported that into Unity and exported to Bonelab.

Lighting will be an issue, in SS2 the lights are low detail baked textures. I don't want to try to get those working in Unity, so I've just hand placed a couple for testing.

Also AI doesn't like the custom map, and the docs don't cover how to fix it.

[RuneSR2]

I wasn't a big fan of Boneworks, but seems great fans of Boneworks experience many issues with Bonelab:

My issues with Bonelab are more the low-end graphics, and the empty campaign, I didn't mind the controls much - having played tons of VR games, Bonelab does have nice controls. But I enjoy Hitman 3 VR too 😉