Unreal 5 Update File Compression?

[Ichbin]

I'm doubtful, but does anyone know if this Unreal 5 update may bring a MUCH NEEDED file compression? We, as a community, need to ask about this.

[DirkInSA]

UE4 already has the facility to apply compression to its blue prints. I think that the huge space taken up by ark has a twofold cause. One of which is that there are MANY different game items that appear and act quite differently to each other (from various forms of dinos to inventory items to containers to "decoration" to harvestable resources). The other of which is the sheer size of the area that ark can render. If you add up all of that area across all of the different maps it ends up being enormous. And each map has tried to bring its own unique flavour, so many of the map items are not shared.
So the short answer is that UE5 is in my view unlikely to improve Arks "install footprint".

[Teratus]

I am interested in this subject as well though my technical knowledge is.. well borderline non existent XD

What I do know of UE5 though from various videos etc is that rendering things is significantly better with the nanite technology the engine has that the current UE4 engine ARK runs on does not possess.
UE5 also got improvements to Nanite if I recall to expand beyond just terrain geometry and include foliage and trees as well allowing so much more to be rendered in detail without the heavy performance loss we often get when using LOD models for distant objects.
Basically as I understand it things look better even in the distance and it's easier for the game to handle so long as it's not excessive.

I also heard somewhere that ARK1 needlessly uses excessive polygons for various models in the game which can probably be trimmed down on UE5, possibly through nanite and that could lead to a smaller game size without any loss of overall model quality.
 

But i'm speculating a lot.. as I said I really don't know much about this stuff, even though I find it pretty interesting.

[zero064]

Ha, they can't do that now that we've all shelled out the cash for a dedicated 1TB Ark drive.