Community Crunch 180: Memory Optimizations and Contest Winners!
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- By StudioWildcard
- 60 comments
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Hey Survivors! Welcome to the latest edition of the Community Crunch! 
On: Memory Optimizations!
There are times when gameplay engineers make improvements to game systems that are aimed specifically at increasing performance as we have done in our recent PC patch. These changes are often invisible to the player but are immensely helpful with things such as server lag. Although we try to outline these things in the patch notes, we wanted to take the time today to explain in detail the changes and how they impact the game.
When it comes to the multiplayer experience, the term replication in games is one that is commonly used. Simply put, it's how the server communicates with you, or the client. Replication and server authoritative actions are important in multiplayer games for a multitude of reasons. It's how all the clients (players) all see the same things while playing in-game together. As you can imagine, there are lots of things to replicate with a game like ARK. Not only are the items themselves replicated, but a lot of the variables (like health, position, colors) are also all replicated as well. This results in tons of information being sent every frame from the server to you--the client. This frame is what corresponds to your FPS (Frames Per Second). The constant flow of information being sent back and forth every frame is what uses lots of server resources.
There are times when that information doesn't need to be sent every frame or the information doesn't need to be sent at all. If you've ever heard stasis in relation to ARK it's referring to a technique in which something purposefully isn't communicating with the server - thus saving server performance. Recently we realized that snap points on structures were being replicated for every single structure and they didn't need to be and we've now changed this. Snap points are simply a list of connecting points for any given structure. That information doesn't need to be replicated by every structure because it's defined by the class--where all of the structures inside that class have the same "genetics". This can explain why every individual wall doesn't need to store that information.
A change like this has saved us 2-4 gigabytes of data on our servers (and will save on your server if you choose to run the applicable command line "-structurememopts"), and more memory means a smoother performance! We look forward to bringing you more updates and insight into our optimization efforts, as well as bring these memory optimizations to console in the near future.
Egg Painting Contest Winners!
Thank you to all of the survivors who submitted their beautiful painted ARK eggs for our holiday event this year. We were thrilled to see even more painted eggs than when we ran this competition last year. We had many incredible submissions, all of which can be seen in the combined image above.
Today we're announcing that we've chosen the winners, and here are the three winning eggs!
WrenTea's Eggcellent Adventure Eggs!
MitralMechanoid's Blue Wyvern Egg!
hansolo86's Colorful Mutation Rex!
As always, we love to see your creativity! To our three winners, please reach out to us via our email: arkfans@studiowildcard.com to co-ordinate your prize.
Social Roundup!
The Social Roundup is geared to showing you some of the social activity you might be otherwise missing. Here we will highlight some of the posts that happened on our various social platforms. Topics might range from existing bugs to questions about events or future content.
ON SINGLE PLAYER RESOURCE SPAWNS
ON REAL MONEY TRANSACTIONS
ON EVENT SCHEDULES
ON STARTING GAME DEVELOPMENT
ON BRING BACK THE RAGNAROK MAP
ON CONSOLE MAPS
Game Suggestion Roundup!
Here is a roundup of the current top suggestions, as well as some of our commentary on the topics for this week. We'll comment on ideas that are trending or being upvoted but we are looking at everything internally.
ON PRIMITIVE+ ITEMS BEING INTEGRATED INTO THE MAIN GAME
For those that don't know what Primitive+ is, it's a unique way of experiencing ARK in a mostly primitive environment. No electric or TEK and many modern conveniences have been removed. There are certain items that have been requested to be added to the main game. Our first priority is getting Primitive+ in an enjoyable state on all platforms. From there, we will look and see what the possibilities are for integration.
ON SHOWING THE RANGE OF TROUGHS
Great idea! We'll look to add this at a future point!
ON MAKING GRIFFINS BREEDABLE
Because Wyverns and Griffins are meant to be strong, end-game tames, a change like this might require a rebalance to make sure they don't become too powerful. There are no immediate plans to implement this change but we will keep the community request on the radar.
Sponsored Mod Applications Open!
Hello survivors, last week we announced the new sponsored mod projects and it caused a bit of surprise within the modding community as it became pretty clear that more projects have a greater probability of acceptance than ever before, and now sponsored mod program applications are once again open!
We'll be collecting applications until June 5th, so you still have time to prep your projects and design documents.
You can apply for the sponsorship program here:
https://survivetheark.com/index.php?/modding/apply-for-sponsorship/
Happy modding!
Evolution Event!
Survivors on all platforms will be receiving a special Evolution Event perk this weekend! It will be active from Friday the 10th of May at 1 PM EST until Monday the 13th of May at 3 PM EST. All Official Servers across each platform will be undergoing this evolutionary change which includes:
- 2x Harvesting Rates
- 2x Taming Rates
- 2x EXP Rates
That's it for this post!
As always if you’ve got anything to share you can find us at:
Twitter: twitter.com/survivetheark
Facebook: facebook.com/survivetheark
Reddit: reddit.com/r/playark
Instagram: instagram.com/survivetheark
Twitch: twitch.tv/survivetheark
Steam: steamcommunity.com/app/346110
Youtube: youtube.com/survivetheark
All the best,
Studio Wildcard
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