Currently, ARK takes up 160GB of data on my hard drive. If I want to ask a friend to try our ARK for the first time with me, I'll have to convince them to sacrifice a humongous portion of their drive just to try it out, sit through 1-3 hours of download time, knowing full well that most of that space is texture maps that will never get utilized. This isn't an easy sell, especially in a competitive environment like Steam.
What if you could install a smaller version of the game with smaller more optimized textures and not sacrifice space, and optionally install Hi-Res textures later if you want them. Most people I know play with textures set to Medium anyway, not Epic. And those that have Epic, would be hard pressed to spot the difference when lowering them slightly.
UE4.5.x is starting to show its age. It's inability to do dynamic tessellation because of a lack of dx12/ogl3/vulkan support means that duplicated objects have a higher performance hit than they would otherwise. I see that WildCard intended to move forward to a modern engine in the past, as these options are available in the PC version settings, but a focus on new content over optimization and bugfixing has left this movement halted. (not to say they haven't done solid bugfixing, they've patched some major issues and I applaud the dev team's hard work) But hardware utilization is particularly poor on systems that have multiple gpus, systems like gaming laptops that have both on-die gpus and dedicated, that could add a huge influx of players if they could just play the game at decent framerates. This would open the game up to lower tier gaming rigs and improve the performance on consoles. Moving to a modern version of UE may not be easy, but it might be worth investing in. The experience of having the game crash while you're in the middle of a dino tame or a high stress versus-encounter leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth and is extremely common. During a transition, you might notice bugs you may never have before had you not had to comb over your code. Shadows popping in and out of existence, shaders being improperly configured. (Why can I see my dinos wings in the ocean reflection shader when I'm flying up high?) Etc.
Thanks for this wonderful game, and I hope to see you all out in ARK. Hopefully in dx12 or Vulkan.
Suggestion
spankyquest
Engine Overhaul and Texture Optimizations
Currently, ARK takes up 160GB of data on my hard drive. If I want to ask a friend to try our ARK for the first time with me, I'll have to convince them to sacrifice a humongous portion of their drive just to try it out, sit through 1-3 hours of download time, knowing full well that most of that space is texture maps that will never get utilized. This isn't an easy sell, especially in a competitive environment like Steam.
What if you could install a smaller version of the game with smaller more optimized textures and not sacrifice space, and optionally install Hi-Res textures later if you want them. Most people I know play with textures set to Medium anyway, not Epic. And those that have Epic, would be hard pressed to spot the difference when lowering them slightly.
UE4.5.x is starting to show its age. It's inability to do dynamic tessellation because of a lack of dx12/ogl3/vulkan support means that duplicated objects have a higher performance hit than they would otherwise. I see that WildCard intended to move forward to a modern engine in the past, as these options are available in the PC version settings, but a focus on new content over optimization and bugfixing has left this movement halted. (not to say they haven't done solid bugfixing, they've patched some major issues and I applaud the dev team's hard work) But hardware utilization is particularly poor on systems that have multiple gpus, systems like gaming laptops that have both on-die gpus and dedicated, that could add a huge influx of players if they could just play the game at decent framerates. This would open the game up to lower tier gaming rigs and improve the performance on consoles. Moving to a modern version of UE may not be easy, but it might be worth investing in. The experience of having the game crash while you're in the middle of a dino tame or a high stress versus-encounter leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth and is extremely common. During a transition, you might notice bugs you may never have before had you not had to comb over your code. Shadows popping in and out of existence, shaders being improperly configured. (Why can I see my dinos wings in the ocean reflection shader when I'm flying up high?) Etc.
Thanks for this wonderful game, and I hope to see you all out in ARK. Hopefully in dx12 or Vulkan.
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